Kierkegaard’s private ethic serves as deceptive class moral.

Evidence

The possibility that a person, faultless in terms of private ethics, could act infamously in his objective social function, a function not reducible to inwardness, is a thought that Kierkegaard does not allow to occur. In fact neither this immediacy nor its semblance exist in the framework of common class interests; the rupture of immediacy is identical with that between the classes. Kierkegaard’s ethics of concrete-meaningful life is therefore a poor and deceptive class moral. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 177

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the usual reading of Kierkegaard’s inwardness as politically radical; subsumes the rupture of immediacy under class conflict. Potent revisionist point that turns the existentialist hero into an ideology-bearer.
• XREF: connects to: Kierkegaard’s moral universalism is class-bound bourgeois ideology, not genuine universality. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 178; Justified deception removes any motivation for ethical self-reform — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1437

Broader Connections

• Kierkegaard’s moral universalism is class-bound bourgeois ideology, not genuine universality. #corroborates (0.88) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 178
• Justified deception removes any motivation for ethical self-reform #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1437