Posts

Nonstarters

Since 2007 I have been a philosophical amoralist, by which I mean that I no longer believe there are such things as moral right and wrong or good and bad or free will and responsibility or worth and desert and so forth – in a word, there are no objective values. In the place of morality I have proposed an ethics I call desirism, according to which I recommend making our decisions and acting on the basis of our rationally vetted desires. I presume that we already decide and act, and feel for that matter, on the basis of our desires, that being a fact of psychology or an analytic truth (or both); desirism just adds my personal recommendation and preference that we do so only after as much relevant rational research and reflection as is feasible in the circumstances. There is nothing particularly novel about that recommendation. What is novel is what I exclude from the process of making ethical decisions or acting. I suggest omitting the step where we are attempting to figure out what is
Read more

Two Steps

Desirism consists of two basic steps, which can be articulated variously. For instance:  1.       Interrogate your moral beliefs. 2.       Interrogate your nonmoral desires. What I am getting at by this formulation is that in the beginning we are filled with various moral beliefs, which, according to desirism, are bogus, superfluous, and noxious. Therefore the first step is to deconstruct them into what I claim are their actual source, which is something we (nonmorally) desire. For example, if you believe that people ought not to eat meat, my claim is that this is your way of embellishing your desire that people not eat meat (or more generally, your compassionate desire that other animals be let alone). (The function, largely unaware, of this embellishing is to raise your desire in stature so as to increase its chances of being satisfied.) Just so also, if you believe that people ought to be free to eat meat as they please, then I would strongly suspect the true source of this be
Read more

My Ethics

Since becoming an amoralist I have dismissed normative ethics as a fool’s errand. This is because I conceived normative ethics to be in the business of investigating what is morally right and wrong, etc., and my amoralism is premised on the nonexistence of such things. One could certainly engage in anthropological or sociological studies of what people hold to be right or wrong; but this would be no different from studying what beliefs people have about gods or God. But normative ethics would be as silly as theology in investigating something that simply does not exist.  However I now think I stumbled over my own feet in rushing to rid the world of morality by eliminating normative ethics. [1] Normative ethics need no more be about morality than meta-ethics need be. My meta-ethical view is that there are no categorical imperatives governing our choices, but this still leaves plenty of room for choices. And so normative ethics could be the inquiry into one’s choices. But it is still
Read more

Eating of the Tree: The phenomenology of the moral moment

I would like to compile a set of examples of experiences that convey the moral problem , by which I mean the irresistibility of believing in moral truth when (1) in fact there is no (such thing as) moral truth and (2) the belief that there is causes serious problems in human and group (on up to international) relations. These examples will also suggest an amoral solution to the moral problem.  Here is one such example:  The dogs are barking. Day in and day out, day and night, two white dogs owned by a neighbor down the street bark and bark and bark. All the rest of us on the block are annoyed, some seriously (especially on summer evenings when you are trying to get to sleep with the windows open), and several have asked that the dogs be kept indoors or else trained; but the neighbor has ignored us. Some of us have then complained to the dog warden, who has visited and even remonstrated with the neighbor more than once; but ultimately to no avail. I suppose the treatment of the dogs i
Read more

Compassion and Revenge

I have argued that amorality can hold its own against morality by means of rationality and compassion. A person who cultivates both capacities would have the best tools available for benefiting oneself and the world, and indeed, in part by dispensing with (the belief in) morality. It is true that being moral can or maybe even must involve a heaping portion of rationality, and of course a moralist can also be compassionate. However, my claim is that the belief in morality, being itself irrational, is hardly a natural home for thinking rationally or deploying it to maximum effect. In this respect I see an affinity to the belief in God, which similarly facilitates irrational thinking even in areas outside its purview, creationism being the poster child of this tendency. But how could compassion be conceived as a friend of amorality over morality? Isn’t compassion an inherently moral emotion?              I don’t think so. Let me illustrate why by contrast to an emotion like the desire
Read more

Normative Ethics Reclaimed

One “casuality” of amorality as I conceive it has been normative ethics. I came to view it as akin to theology in being about nothing real. Normative ethics is usually conceived as the investigation of what is right or wrong or good or bad or the best way to live, etc. It is distinguished from meta-ethics, which investigates the meanings of these terms rather than their concrete content. For example, a meta-ethical theory might hold that the right thing to do is what we are unconditionally obligated to do, that is, not for any further reason; but then there could be distinct candidates for rightness in general terms, such as never treating anyone merely as a means or maximizing the good. Those latter would be examples of normative ethical theories. Since amorality is the denial of there being any such things as right and wrong etc. … that they are mythical, exactly on par with the categories of sinfulness and blessedness in the absence of God … normative ethics would seem to have no
Read more

A Middle Way of Moralism?

I have opposed amoralism to moralism. Amoralism is a twofold thesis consisting of moral anti-realism and moral abolitionism. Moral anti-realism holds that there is no such thing as morality, that is, objective right and wrong or objective value more generally. Moral abolitionism holds that we would be better off if we accepted moral anti-realism and acted accordingly; that is, the resultant world be more to our collective liking. Thus amoralism seeks the elimination of the belief in morality, both as false and as noxious motivation.  And yet banishing morality from the realm of the real strikes many as dangerous, or perhaps simply impossible. We human beings appear to have built into us a range of moralist attitudes, which have a powerful hold on us and have also served us well through the ages. Amoralism presumes that we could somehow override morality’s hold and argues further that the result would be net positive. I, an amoralist, admit that both claims are counterintuitive, diff
Read more

Why not Fallibilism? (Part 3 of “Can one be moral without the negative parts?”)

My metaethical position is that we would be better off (that is, the world would be more to the liking of most of us) if we ceased believing in morality and ceased acting as if we did believe in it (provided we also cultivated reason and compassion). The kingpin of this “abolitionist” thesis is that morality is understood to be something categorical and objective, that is, moral beliefs about what is right and wrong and good and bad and deserved and blameworthy and so forth are true or false in the same way as factual beliefs about trees and squirrels and planets and atoms and so on. In other words, moral beliefs do not depend for their truth on whether you are happy about their being true. You ought not to torture babies , and physical objects on Earth (and ignoring air resistance etc.) fall at a rate of 32 feet per second per second are both true even if you enjoy torturing babies or you really did not want to be thrown out of the 10 th story window. The argument for moral abolitio
Read more

Why not Moral Relativism? (Part 2 of “Can one be moral without the negative parts?”)

I have argued that it is both possible and desirable [1] to eliminate morality (or moralism, which is the embrace of morality) from our speaking and thinking and feeling. But some people who have thought about these issues and who are themselves dissatisfied with various aspects of morality as it is often practiced, nevertheless feel that something valuable (perhaps even essential) would be lost if we simply dispensed with morality, and argue that it is possible to reconceive morality (and some would even argue that this is the standard conception) in such a way that its noxious components are ameliorated.              I can certainly appreciate the force of this aspiration, having been an arch moralist for most of my life (and truth be told, retain these impulses despite 16 years to the day [2] of trying to rid myself of them). When I consider, to take but one of countless examples, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I am filled with the conviction of its evil. Is it really sufficient
Read more

Can one be moral without the negative parts? (Part 1)

This could well be the main question for a self-proclaimed amoralist like myself. My argument has been that the belief in morality motivates attitudes and behaviors that work against the kind of world I would like to live in … or at least make the world significantly less to my liking or more to my disliking than would an amoral world having the features I have characterized as desirism. [1] But of course my entire line of argument presumes a particular characterization of morality. The rest of the argument consists of empirical claims about how the belief in such a morality would affect individuals and society. But even the characterization involves empirical claims or hunches about how the word “morality” is used and intended or meant. Could it be that the features I find benign in desirism are or could be found in morality, or a particular sort of morality? Clearly the answer is “yes” in the very weak sense that any word can be used to mean anything. But the serious question has,
Read more

Beyond Amorality

Desirism is a form of amoralism, but goes beyond it in certain ways. I first proposed desirism as a way to make amorality a viable ethics and alternative to morality. For it is one thing to show how morality or moralism [1] is baneful, quite another to show that we may safely dispense with it. It could be that morality, like any human institution, has its bad parts and its good parts, but is nevertheless good on balance, or even if bad on balance, is unavoidable. Life itself is both good and bad, but the alternative – death -- may simply be off the table as a “policy recommendation,” not to mention a requirement of ethics. So morality could be a necessary evil, or not even an evil, but just not an unalloyed good.              My purpose in crafting desirism has therefore been to demonstrate that one (and society) can indeed “abolish” morality and still not only function but do better than if one had retained morality. I think this effort has been largely successful, although there h
Read more