ABSTRACT
science is ethically neutral. It enlarges, beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, the scope and possibility of human action, both moral and immoral; but except in technical questions, where the end is already given it can never by itself tell us what we ought to do. Those who seek moral guidance from science tend to assume that the only alternative to their view is an obscurantist ethics which supposes that a good man, alike in his moral judgements and his moral actions, need take no account of science whatsoever. Dialectical materialism sets up to be scientific. As a typical product of the nineteenth century it takes a materialistic view of nature, but it professes to study nature by a dialectical method derived originally from Hegel. The dialectical materialism of Karl Marx proposes in the name of science to root out our bourgeois morality as well as our bourgeois religion; and we cannot afford to ignore its challenge.
