Duhring claimed to base his method on the same principles as mathematics, in which, within the limits previously discussed, we can determine truth and error. But, what, then, when we consider morals, of good and evil? If, as has been discussed, there are, particularly in respect of social science, no absolute or eternal truths, even less can there be any such determination of good and evil, which are subjective descriptions.
“The conceptions of good and evil have varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have often been in direct contradiction to each other.” (p 116-7)
It might be argued, however, that good and evil are opposites, and one cannot be the other. There must be some code upon which society operates, and this is Duhring's position. However, even a look at any society shows that no such single code exists. There are competing codes of what constitutes good and evil, as, for example, consideration of abortion and euthanasia shows.
“What morality is preached to us today? There is first Christian-feudal morality, inherited from past centuries of faith; and this again is divided, essentially, into a Catholic and a Protestant morality, each of which in turn has no lack of subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and Orthodox-Protestant to the lax and “enlightened” morality. Beside the Christian-feudal morality we find the modern-bourgeois morality and again beside the latter the proletarian morality of the future, so that in the most advanced European countries alone the past, present and future provide three great groups of ethical theories which are in force simultaneously and side by side. Which, then, is the true one?” (p 117)
The Categorical Imperative of Kant, is the morality of the petty-bourgeois, at a time when the popular mass had not differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians. The utilitarianism of Bentham reflected the ideology of the individual bourgeois, i.e. of private capital, whereas the morality of John Stuart Mill already reflects the metamorphosis into socialised capital and social-democracy, an attempt to present the interests of capital and labour as synonymous Where Bentham's utilitarianism is manifest in his design of the Panopticon for prisons, for the moralists of social-democracy it is manifest in the idea of prison and social reforms.
Which of these three systems of morality, reflecting the class interests of the three great classes in society is true, then, in terms of being absolute or the final one? None of them.
“... but certainly that morality contains the maximum elements promising permanence which, in the present, represents the overthrow of the present, represents the future, and that is proletarian morality.” (p 117)
However, even that proletarian morality cannot be viewed as absolute, or eternal, for all the reasons that Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme. A proletarian morality implies the existence of a proletariat, a slave class, still bearing all the scars of class society that has existed for millennia. It also, inevitably reflects the fact that this class must act, even after it overthrows capitalism, to secure its position against counter-revolution. As Marx sets out, the overthrow of capitalism does not imply its immediate replacement by communism.
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