The question Marx set out to answer in Capital is ‘Why is labor represented by the value of its product and labor-time by the magnitude of that value?’ If Marx had succeeded in writing the work he planned to do on ethics, I believe the question which would have occupied most of his attention is ‘Why are approval and condemnation represented in our society as value judgements?’ Marx's critique of the capitalist economy is essentially an explanation of how existing forms of production, distribution, exchange and consumption arose, and how they are dependent on one another and on the character of human activity and achievement in areas far removed from the economy proper. Any critique of ethics would likewise have concentrated on showing how the distinctive forms of our ethical life, such as treating approval and disapproval as value judgements, are internally related to the whole social fabric out of which they arose. Why is this aspect of reality organized in this manner, into these forms?

Such an approach is already apparent in some of Marx's brief comments on this subject. He says, for example, that in bourgeois ethics speaking and loving lose their characteristic significance and ‘are interpreted as expressions and manifestations of a third artificially introduced Relation, the Relation of utility’. According to Marx, ‘something is demanded of the individual's power or capacity to do anything which is a foreign product, a Relation determined by social conditions – and this is the utility Relation’.