ABSTRACT
Friedrich Engels wrote more fully and perhaps more adequately about morality than did Karl Marx, though, indeed, many of the Engels’ disparagers would deny the latter part of that claim. Engels’ views on morality and moral philosophy can be usefully related to his appropriation of a reaction to the Enlightenment. Engels makes it very clear that he regards this as both a progressive move and an important bit of bourgeois ideological mystification. However, unlike Marx and Engels, these utopian socialists did not, in articulating their theories and ideals, put themselves forward as “representatives of the interests of the proletariat”; like “the philosophers of the Enlightenment, they aimed at the emancipation not of a definite class but of all humanity”. Engels rejects any moral absolutism with ultimate changeless moral truths and principles. Moralities and moral theories function as moral ideologies in class societies.
