In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethical thought has tended to justify ethics and morality in terms other than religious and to find a different rationale for morality, seeing ethical questions as involving the relationship between the individual and society, whether that society have a religious or secular orientation. For Marx, morality was related to political and social ideology and to Marx's view of the engine powering the social order--economics. For Nietzsche, the traditional morality of his time was itself immoral and would lead to the decline of western civilization, and he proposed a countermovement based on true values which he proposed,,though he also believed that only the select and superior few would be the free spirits who would be able to accept this doctrine and make use of it. Jean-Paul Sartre is an existentialist, part of a movement that finds that the attempt to understand humanity through rational categories will fail and who instead consider human beings as radically free, seen as a condition of human existence. Human beings face a range of possibilities at any given moment, and human beings are also fully responsible for their own actions.
Marx denied the possibility of meaningful morality in his earlier writings, but he changed over time so that he came to support a form of moral relativism so that value judgments may differ form one society to the next because morality serves the interests of a particular social class at a particular time. This means that morality could be defined differently by different classes in the same society.
Marx had a conception of human history based on dialectical materialism, which includes the sense that the determining factors in the development, relations, and institutions of mankind are not mystical or ideological but economic. Human actions are rooted in men's labor activities. Human beings have to secure a livelihood, and to accomplish this they or...