R.G.peffer's Reconstruction Of Marx's Moral Theory

Marx's moral theory has been a controversial issue for several decades. The long-standing debates on its existence and substance have never stopped at home and abroad. During recent years, the expansion of Analytical Marxism initiated an upsurge of the researches on Marxism, with Marx's moral theory as one of their main research topics.As a representative of contemporary Analytical Marxism school, Rodney G. Peffer put forward his own illumination of Marx's moral theory. In the monograph Marxism, morality and social justice, Peffer provided a systematic exposition of Marx's moral theory by demonstrating comprehensive moral views of each period in the development of Marxist, and illustrated the whole transitional process of this theory along with the philosophical and social backgrounds behind it. Peffer then proposed three basic moral values-freedom, human community and self-realization, which implemented a reasonable reconstruction of Marx's implied moral theory.Peffer's summarization and theorization of Marx's lifelong moral views is undoubtedly of academic significance and of enlightening value. In methodology, he utilized logical and linguistic analysis to conduct a new illumination of classic Marxist theory. His meticulous attitudes toward text-reading and effective statistical methods contributed to his accurate observation and analysis, and also shed lights on the following researches. However, Peffer's reconstruction of Marx's moral theory is flawed in aspects, for example, his problematic trichotomy of basic moral values. And the inadequacy of researches and discussions on the feasible methods also makes Peffer's theory contain some more or less utopian elements. All of these needs to be critical considered and improved in the further researches, only by which the contemporary significance of Marx's basic standpoints, views and methods could be further explored and then push Marx's moral theory forward into deeper areas.