Sarah Banks’ opening contribution to this collection is appealing in part because of her expansive category of ethics. Indeed, by contrast with the dominant tendency within academia she even acknowledges that Marx's views on the subject deserve a hearing. If there is a weakness with her article it is perhaps that she doesn't develop this insight far enough. In particular I think that had she thought more about Marx's concept of alienation she might be more critical of the idea that resistance to austerity can be based upon the core values of social work. As we shall see, it is not that this idea is without legs; it is rather that it needs to be handled carefully.

Marx's ethics is often misconstrued because it involves a profound challenge to the clear delineation between science and ethics that is taken as axiomatic within post-Kantian moral theory. Capital (Marx, 1975) is simultaneously scientific, ethical and political in scope, and this reflects Marx's view that because we interpret the world from concrete, socially determined standpoints it is impossible to unpick what we know of it from our ethically saturated forms of practice within it. From this perspective, modern moral theory's attempt to separate factual and value statements is not simply wrong, more profoundly it represents a naturalisation of the socially determined standpoint of the individual within civil society. The power of the nihilist critique of morality stems from Nietzsche's recognition that we do interpret the world from particular perspectives, but because he too naturalises the standpoint of egoistic individualism his critique of morality is best understood less as a radical alternative to the moral standpoint than as the flipside of the same error: by naturalising egoistic individualism neither approach is able to see beyond an emotivist context within which morality has been reduced to individual opinion. This is why Alasdair MacIntyre bemoans the modern moral condition as a simulacrum of classical ethics.

MacIntyre's alternative practice-based ethics shares some similarities with Banks’ comments on the ethics of social work. According to MacIntyre, a practice is any complex form of human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realised as practitioners strive to excel at it.