An Amoral Manifesto
© Joel Marks 2010
Published in two parts (I-III & IV-VI) in Philosophy Now, issues 80 (Aug/Sep 2010) & 81 (Oct/Nov 2010)
I. Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column?
Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my computer writing this column is April 1st, let me assure you that I do not intend this as a joke. For the last couple of years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether! This has certainly come as a shock to me (and also a disappointment, to put it mildly). I think the time has come, therefore, to reveal it to the world, and in particular to you, Dear Reader, who have patiently considered my defenses of a particular sort of moral theory for the last ten years. In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.
How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Philosophical Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ (see Issue 78) are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.
Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort? In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.
Note the analogy to Darwinism. It used to be a standard argument for God’s existence that the obvious and abundant design of the universe, as manifested particularly in the elegant fit of organisms to their environments, indicated the existence of a divine designer. Now we know that biological evolution can account for this fit perfectly without recourse to God. Hence, no Designer, no Design; there is only the appearance of design in nature (excepting such artifacts as beaver dams, bird nests, and architects’ blueprints). Just so, there are no moral commands but only the appearance of them, which can be explained by selection (by the natural environment, culture, family, etc.) of behavior and motives (‘moral intuitions’ or ‘conscience’) that best promote survival of the organism. There need be no recourse to Morality any more than to God to account for these phenomena.
I cannot hope to make all of that convincing to my readers in the short space of a column: hence the book I have written. But even in the book I am not attempting so much to give a rigorous proof as to consider the aftereffects of my counter-conversion (to apply William James’s term for the loss of religious belief to my loss of moral belief). What is it like to live in a world without morality? Is such a life even viable? This is what I had to discover before I could so much as walk out my front door! That is why the first draft of my book was written in an urgent rush, almost without my leaving the house. (Fortunately I am retired and sans famille.) I was reeling – much as, I imagine, a religious believer whose whole life has been based on a fervent belief in the Almighty, would find herself without bearings or even any ground to stand on if suddenly that belief were to vanish, no matter whether by proof of just by poof! Just so, morality has been the essence of my existence, both personally and professionally. Now it is no more.
Does this mean, among other things, that this column will end? I hope not! The book is only the beginning. I must learn how to live life all over again, like a child learning to walk. And just as a child growing up discovers one fascinating thing after another about the ‘new’ world, so the floodgates have been opened for me from a sea of possibilities. For, yes Virginia, there is life after morality, and I would like to report back to you as I experience it.
There is just one thing, though: I might have to change the name of my column. ‘Moral Moments’ now seems problematical, to say the least. ‘Amoral Moments’ would be closer to the mark (and to Marks). One thing that hasn’t changed, however, as you can see, is that my writing is still filled with similes, allusions, mixed metaphors, and bad puns. Fortunately I can now rest assured that in persisting with these I am doing nothing wrong.
II. In the Mode of Morality
I have relinquished the mantel of the moralist since I no longer believe there even is such a thing as morality. How, then, shall one live? One thing to note is that in asking that question I am able to retain the title of ethicist, for ethics is just the inquiry into how to live. This suggests a new name for my column, namely, ‘Ethical and other Episodes’, in which I hope in due course to articulate my answer in full. But I would also like to suggest at the outset of this undertaking that, even though an amoralist, I can still engage in moral argumentation … and in good conscience (so to speak!).
Consider that for the foreseeable future I will be living in a society that continues to pay homage to morality and believe in its reality implicitly. So I am likely to be confronted time and again by a question like, “Do you believe x is wrong?” It would usually be hopeless to attempt to refashion the question into an amoralist mode of speaking; at the very least this would change the subject from the particular issue under discussion, say, vivisection, to an abstract issue in meta-ethics, namely, whether there is such a thing as wrongness. But there is still a way I could answer the question both honestly and effectively. Thus, I could reply, “Vivisection is wrong according to morality as I conceive it.” For that reply is not asserting that vivisection is wrong, only that, according to morality (as I conceive morality) it is wrong. In the abstract this has no more force than if one were to say, “Unicorns are a type of horse (according to the common conception of unicorns).” In other words, there is no implication that unicorns actually exist, nor, all the more, that, say, a person could possibly find one for the purpose of trying to ride her.
Note further that it is possible to argue about these things whose existence is not being asserted. Thus, I could say, “Vivisection is wrong (in my conception of morality) because it involves treating sentient beings merely as means.” This is of course a kind of Kantian justification for my claim. And I would offer it as an argument that I believe to be perfectly sound because (1) it articulates the analysis of morality that I consider to be the correct one, namely, Kant’s categorical imperative (suitably modified to accommodate nonhuman animals), (2) it characterizes vivisection in a way that I consider to be correct, namely, as violating the Kantian imperative, and (3) it logically draws its conclusion therefrom. Again this would be just as if I had argued, “Santa Claus could not possibly be mistaken for Popeye because Santa Claus has a big beard while Popeye is barefaced.”
Thus, I am become like the father in this joke – courtesy of my attorney’s rabbi – about a Jewish boy from a liberal family who attends the neighborhood parochial (Christian) school:
One day Isaac comes home in great puzzlement about what he had been taught in school that day; so he goes to his father and asks him about it.
“Father, I learned that God is a Trinity. But how can there be three Gods?”
“Now get this straight, Son: We’re Jewish. So there is only one God … and we don’t believe in Him!”
Just so, I no longer believe in morality (like God in the joke), but I would still insist that the nature of morality is Kantian (monotheism in the joke) rather than utilitarian (Trinitarianism in the joke).
Now, if I were to employ this technique without elaboration, it could easily be part of a deceptive strategy, since it is likely that people would assume I was defending something outright rather than only hypothetically. A statement like “If anything is wrong, this is” is naturally interpreted as a rhetorical emphasis of just how wrong the speaker considers this to be. But if I, as an amoralist, were to say “If anything is wrong, vivisection is,” I would mean it literally, not rhetorically; that is, the ‘if’ would have real force for me, even suggesting that I do not believe that anything is wrong (since morality does not exist): all the more, that I do not believe that vivisection is wrong. (Of course that does not mean I think vivisection is right or even permissible, since those are moral notions also. I just don’t like vivisection.) So my intention in making the utterance would be at variance with the impression it would leave in my listener’s mind; and knowing this, I would be a deceiver.
However, if I were only trying to persuade a Kantian vivisectionist of the error of her ways, its usage, it seems to me, would pass muster even morally. I would be using reasoning to show my interlocutor that what she was doing violated her own moral/theoretical commitments. My own view of morality itself would be irrelevant; my interlocutor can assume what she likes about my meta-ethics. It would be exactly as if I were talking with a religious believer about the proper treatment of other animals: whether or not the believer knew I was an atheist, it would be perfectly proper for me to try to convince her that there is Biblical support for a benign ‘stewardship’ of other animals – would it not? I need not believe in the concept of stewardship myself, nor in its divine sanction, in order to invoke it undeceivingly when arguing with someone who does. Just so, it seems to me, morality.
Rather aptly, I now realize, I have been led to a sort of Socratic mode of moral argumentation. Socrates was notorious for interrogating his interlocutors rather than asserting and defending theses himself. Similarly, I am suggesting, I will continue to be able to hold forth as a critical moral reasoner, even though I no longer believe in morality, so long as I confine myself to questioning the inferences of others (and gingerly deflect their questions about my own moral commitments by speaking in the mode of morality, as above). It is true that I would thereby fail to be completely forthcoming about my own meta-ethics whenever doing so would be disruptive to the dialogue; but I do not think I would be doing anything that is considered unkosher even when moralists are arguing among themselves. After all, my meta-ethics could be mistaken; maybe there is such a thing as morality. So my ‘suspension of disbelief’ could be conceived as an expression of intellectual humility, and my arguments considered in themselves by the intellectual light of my interlocutor.
The bottom line for me, as both a philosopher and the possessor of a particular personality, is that I do not ‘suffer fools gladly.’ This has always been true of me, but it used to be supplemented by a belief (or assumption) in morality. Now that I have turned the philosophic eye on my own largely unexamined assumption that morality exists, I see that I have been a moral fool. But I retain my belief (or assumption) in Truth as such, as well as my pig-headed allegiance to it. Thus, I shall henceforth apply a skeptical scalpel to the moral arguments of all, unsparing even of the ones I have been sympathetic to as a moralist, since all of them, I now believe, are premised on a bogus metaphysics. For it is intellectual dishonesty or na ïveté that I am most temperamentally disposed to dislike, even as I retain my passionate preferences for certain ‘causes,’ such as animal liberation.
III. Desirism
I have explained how an amoralist, such as I have become, could still continue to argue in the mode of morality. Although this risks being deceptive and hypocritical, it can also be done aboveboard because the amoralist could be appealing to his or her interlocutor’s (or reader’s) moralism. This is analogous to how a native speaker of English might nonetheless, with some knowledge of other languages, be able to point out a grammatical mistake being made by someone speaking in French. Thus for example, if I were conversing with someone who believed that meat-eating is morally good because it promotes the greatest good of the greatest number, I could point out that this utilitarian credo is supposed to apply to all sentient beings and not only to human beings; so that if one tallied up the net pleasure and pain being experienced not only by the human meat-eaters but also by the animals being bred and slaughtered for eating under the current regime of factory farming, one would likely conclude that eating meat does not lead to the greatest good and hence is wrong. Meanwhile, I myself, as an amoralist, believe meat-eating is neither right nor wrong; but I would have done nothing dishonest in convincing my interlocutor that it is wrong, that is, by her lights.
But why would I even care whether I was being honest or not? Isn’t that, again, something an amoralist would be indifferent to? Strictly speaking, yes. But an amoralist still has a compass, a ‘guide to life’, an ethics, or so I would argue; and it can be a match for anybody’s morality. Thus, consider that in purely practical terms, honesty may still be the best policy. A reputation for truth-telling will likely make one a more attractive person to do (literal or figurative) business with, which will enable one to thrive relative to one’s less scrupulous competitors. Thus, ‘survival of the fittest’ could naturally promote honesty as a prevalent trait even in the absence of any moral concern.
There I am, then, honestly discussing particular issues with opponents, and justifying my positions to them by their moral lights. But how do I justify them to myself, since I have no moral lights anymore? For example, on what basis would I myself be a vegetarian? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness. For the vast majority of human beings in the world today, meat-eating is a mere luxury or habit of taste, while at the same time it promotes animal cruelty and slaughter, environmental degradation, global warming, human disease, and even human starvation (the latter due to the highly inefficient conversion of plant protein to animal protein for human consumption). For whatever reason or reasons, or even no reason, these things matter to me. Therefore I am motivated to act on the relevant desires.
But if I were conversing with another amoralist, how would I convince her of the rightness of my desires? Well, of course, I wouldn’t even try, since neither of us believes in right, or wrong. What I could do is take her through the same considerations that have moved me to my position and hope that her heartstrings were tuned in harmony with mine. If the two of us have grown up in the same culture, we will certainly have many desires in common. For example, we may both be averse to animal suffering and cruelty to animals. But even within the same society, there can be large differences in knowledge. I speak from personal experience regarding even my own knowledge, for, to stay with my example, I was blissfully unaware of the horrors of factory farming until only a few years ago. Most people in our society continue to be, even though the practice has been prevalent for the last fifty years. Thus, there is a good chance that I would be able to influence my interlocutor’s carnivorous desire and behavior simply by introducing her to the relevant facts. The absence of a moral context, therefore, need not be harmful to my hitherto-moral project of honestly promoting vegetarianism.
But what if my amoral interlocutor were just as versed in the facts of factory farming as I but still did not care about animal suffering, or simply loved eating meat more than she loved animals? At this point the dialogue might serve no purpose. But that certainly would not mean that I had no further recourse, even honest recourse. For example, I could try to bring around as many other people as possible to my way of seeing (and feeling) things, so that ultimately by sheer force of numbers we might reduce animal suffering and exploitation by our purchasing practices and voting choices. In this effort I could join with others to employ standard methods of ‘marketing,’ such as advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements. These things are not inherently dishonest simply in virtue of being strategic. (And of course if I did not value honesty, additional tactics would become available to me.)
I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.)
A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.
IV. What Amorality Is Not
As a defender of amorality, I am continually challenged by two allegations: egoism and relativism. But both are bogies. Let me explain why.
That an amoralist would be an egoist seems to follow from the idea that morality is precisely a check on our selfish tendencies. Morality’s main reason for being is group cohesion, without which most personal endeavors could not even get off the ground. All of us depend on the viability of our group; hence we must imbibe very strong motives ‘with our mother’s milk’ to favor the group over our personal ego, if only for our personal good in the long run. Furthermore, my own way of speaking about amoral motives suggests an egoism, for I believe that, in the final analysis, we are moved solely by desire. The bottom line is what we want. Is that not egoism pure and simple?
No. The above arguments conflate egoism with other things. The first argument reduces egoism to selfishness. But egoism is much farther-seeing than selfishness. Long-term self-interest is egoism’s goal, and its rational pursuit a component of its charge. A hefty dose of other-concern would plausibly be part of any true egoist’s makeup since his or her own prospects depend on others’. Even so, however, an amoralist is neither necessarily nor essentially egoistic. This is because one’s fundamental desires could be for anything. Just because a desire is one’s own does not mean that what one desires is only one’s own welfare. You could just as deeply desire the welfare of your neighbor as the welfare of yourself, and even more so, such that you would sacrifice yourself for her. Thus, when I say that an amoralist is motivated solely by desire, I do not mean to imply any sort of egoism whatever.
It remains an empirical question whether or to what degree human beings or any particular human being is egoistic. It might even be true that all of us are thoroughgoing egoists. I doubt it, but I cannot prove that is false since we sometimes have hidden motives. But suppose it were true. This would still not put amorality at any moral disadvantage since ‘ought implies can’. That dictum is a presumption of morality’s: there cannot be a moral obligation to do something impossible, like jump to the Moon. Well, if we really were egoists, then it would be impossible for us to be moral. Therefore morality could only be a sham. Amorality, then, would at least have the ‘moral’ advantage of being honest (however inadvertently).
But I do not believe that we are thoroughgoing egoists or even predominately egoists. After all, it is eminently plausible that evolution would have favored those individuals whose desires were largely group-oriented since this would presumably have served various functions that enhanced the odds of their genes’ survival. Thus, even without reflection but simply by instinct, we often behave as the moralist would enjoin us to do. What really is the difference, then, between the amoralist and the moralist? Just that the latter believes in an external source of moral imperatives, while the former recognizes only desires, which have been shaped by the interaction of beings having the characteristics of our ancestors or ourselves with the physical and social exigencies of our respective environments past and present.
Out of the frying pan of egoism, therefore, and into the fire of relativism? For if there are only desires that are responsive to the environment, won’t desires vary according to different environments? Yes indeed. However, there are still two ways to parry this possibility. The first is to point out that human environments, whether natural or cultural, are both like and unlike. So we can count on there being uniformities across all boundaries as well as diversity. And it is surely the same with morality: for while it may be universal that, let us say, one should never torture a child, it is also respectably moral to permit or even require, say, killing human beings in some circumstances (such as to protect a child from being tortured) and to prohibit it in others.
My denial of moral relativism, however, rests mainly on the unintelligibility of the charge. ‘Moral relativism’ seems to me an oxymoron; for morality in its very concept and essence is supposed to be universal and absolute. Thus, even in the example I just gave regarding killing, morality’s defenders would say that a single imperative underlies the differences due to circumstances, namely, “Thou shalt not kill the innocent” or something of that sort. Moral relativism, therefore, is a strawperson to begin with. But it is downright question-begging as an objection to amorality, since it assumes what the position denies, namely, morality. Amorality cannot be guilty of moral relativism any more than your neighbor could be a goblin. That there are differences of desire, however, is a commonplace.
But but but, splutters my reader: Even if we naturally have some pseudo-moral motives, and even if Morality is a myth, doesn’t the very prevalence of that myth suggest that our natural motives aren’t enough to prevent society’s disintegration (or at any rate to enable us to hold our own against those who were suitably deluded)? In other words, isn’t amorality likely maladaptive, diminishing the life prospects of those who adopt it, so that we need to retain the belief in morality, false though it may be? To which I reply: It seems odd to suggest that belief in what is true would be maladaptive. But even if it were in the strict biological sense, such that the human population explosion counted in favor of retaining the moral delusion, let me humbly suggest that a better criterion of value would be the greatest possible satisfaction of our deepest-desires-on-reflection, which might well be compatible with a lower rate of human propagation.
V. What Is Morality?
I claim that morality does not exist. But what is morality? It is not possible to settle any dispute about whether something exists without knowing the nature of the entity in question. Clearly there is a sense in which morality does exist; for example, defined as a code of behavior whose violation is considered to merit punishment (legal, social, or psychological), morality is to be found in every society. So when I assert that morality does not exist, I must have something else in mind. And certainly I do, namely, morality conceived as a universal injunction external to our desires. Thus, for example, even if the code of our society deemed homosexual behavior as such to be morally permissible, and even if you personally wished to engage in it, Morality might pronounce it Wrong. The morality I now reject is therefore a metaphysical one, as opposed to the sociological kind; the latter is a fact of our empirical environment, while the former is a figment of our wishful or fearful imagination.
For all that, metaphysical morality is widely accepted as real. (That is itself an empirical claim about people’s beliefs. I’d be happy to have the hypothesis tested by experimental philosophers. If it turns out not to be a nearly universal belief but is perhaps typical only of some cultures or personality types, then my complaint would be limited to them.) But why not, then, simply propose a reinterpretation of the word ‘morality,’ as well as its attendant terminology, such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, so that it is understood not as a metaphysical absolute, but instead as a code of conduct generally agreed upon by a given society? Why do I feel compelled instead to banish that entire way of speaking?
Let us first get clear about a distinction. What is being proposed (by my objector) is moral relativism, but that comes in different flavors. One of them still retains an absolutist taste: it holds that different societies may have different codes of conduct, but that each code is taken by its adherents to apply universally, even outside their own society. The other form of moral relativism, which is closer to what I have in mind, holds not only that different societies may have different codes of conduct, but also that these codes would be seen as applicable only within the bounds of the given society. Morality would thus be a ‘when in Rome’ type of affair.
However, I am still for the elimination of morality, even though I approve the idea of bounded codes. I wouldn’t want to call them ‘morality’ (or ‘moralities’) because of the heavy baggage that terminology lugs along with it. Precisely because moral talk of the absolutist ilk is so ingrained, I think it unlikely that people could make the switch to a different attitude if they continued to use the same language. New wine in an old bottle, you know. Words bring meaning in their tow and to attempt to supplant one meaning with another is a complicated business. Meanings form countless associations with other words besides the ones they explicitly define, and these become part of the meaning itself, extending it beyond denotation to connotation. Words so prominent as ‘moral’ and ‘wrong’ help constitute the fabric of our whole world. It won’t be possible just to snap one’s fingers and have them mean something else, however much Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty might demur.
I feel that the new understanding of morality as more myth than reality is important enough to warrant the inconvenience of dropping our accustomed ways of speaking and thinking about it and learning new ones. This is for two reasons. First is the value of truth itself. If it is true that metaphysical morality does not exist, then for that reason alone we should believe it. (Strictly speaking, I should say: If it is rational to believe that metaphysical morality does not exist, then for that reason alone we should believe it.) Do note that when I employ ‘should’ and ‘value’ and ‘warrant’ and such here, I am referring to epistemic norms, that is, to standards of knowledge, and not to moral norms. I will grant that, in the end, this may be a matter of subjective value or desire as well, for some people may not care very much about truth (or rationality), or at least not place paramount importance on it, if, say, the alternative were happiness. Think blue pill in The Matrix. So my first argument is addressed only to those who would take the red pill.
My second reason or argument for preferring the elimination of morality to the reinterpretation of morality may appeal to more people: I believe that the resultant world would be more to our liking. That is a big claim, I grant. I think it is testable, but I will leave that to the professionals. As an armchair philosopher trusting mainly to my own intuitions and experiences, I am satisfied at least that I myself would prefer to live in a world where nobody believed in either God or morality but instead habitually engaged in observation, study, conversation, introspection, and reflection. This could be an idealistic streak in myself – wishful thinking – and the cynicism that can be read into Voltaire’s statement be fully justified: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God [and morality – JM], because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.” But I put it to you to assess by your own lights.
VI. Monotheorism or A Kantian Recants
A philosophical moralist, such as I have been, justifies right actions or permissible actions or prohibitions on actions (wrong actions) by reference to a moral theory. For example, it is wrong to lie because lying violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative, a theory which asserts that one ought never to treat any person merely as a means. The whole justification can be laid out in argument form, containing, typically, a statement of the theory, a statement of a definition, a statement of a fact, and an inference to the conclusion, thus:
(1) One ought never to treat any person merely as a means. (theory)
(2) Lying is an act of asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true. (definition)
(3) Asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true is an instance of treating a person merely as a means. (fact)
(Therefore) Lying is wrong. (inference)
Any of the components of an argument could be contested. For example, an objector might deny Premise 3 above by arguing that asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true sometimes involves solicitude for the person being treated in this way – such as sparing someone from painful news – and so is not an instance of treating that person merely as a means. But sooner or later one hopes to find an argument that is sound in every respect – all true premises and a valid inference – in which case one will have proven one’s conclusion or moral claim to be true.
My bread and butter as a so-called applied ethicist has consisted of constructing such arguments in defense of my own views and critiquing the arguments of people who held opposing views. Key to my work as an ethicist, however, has been the theoretical premise, for it addresses the question of what is right or wrong or permissible in the most general terms. It turns out that there are several main theories in the running, which are presumed to generate different answers to at least some particular moral questions. For example, the theory known as utilitarianism, according to which one ought always to do what will maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people, would seem, at first blush anyway, to justify removing the organs of a perfectly healthy person in order to save the lives of five persons who desperately needed transplants; whereas the categorical imperative, also known as Kantianism after its propounder Immanuel Kant, would deny this because that action would involve treating the healthy person merely as a means to the recovery of the five ill persons.
So which ethical theory is the correct one? That is the question that the discipline known as normative ethics seeks to answer. I myself was a consistent defender of Kantianism over utilitarianism and other theories. Here again arguments would be employed, this time to show that one theory was superior to all the others, often by demonstrating that the other theories, but not one’s own favorite, would ‘justify’ absurd conclusions, such as that it is morally permissible or even obligatory to kidnap healthy individuals for the purpose of ‘harvesting’ their organs for transplants.
Thus I spent my professional career, including writing this column, conscientiously defending my preferred theory of Kantianism against all-comers and then defending particular conclusions about all and sundry issues, such as promise-keeping, homosexual marriage, academic cheating, vegetarianism, and so forth, on the basis of Kantianism. All the while, however, I was neglecting (or bracketing in philo-speak) an even more general level of argument and analysis called meta-ethics. Meta-ethics seeks to characterize morality as such; so it differs from the various theories of normative ethics in rather the way a genus differs from species. For example, meta-ethics would point out that morality is inherently prescriptive, while a normative theory would try to spell out the precise content of the moral prescription, such as, “Maximize the good,” or “Never treat anybody merely as a means,” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
But meta-ethics had never ‘grabbed’ me, perhaps because it dealt with issues that I could not begin to take seriously, such as moral relativism. To me it was the most obvious thing in the world that moral issues were matters of objective fact, so I was very concerned only to establish what was right or wrong and not bother about the ‘purely speculative’ matter of whether there even were such a thing as right and wrong in the objective sense. As one of my graduate school professors once put it, “Which is more certain: that it is wrong to torture a baby or that quarks have charm [the latter being a tenet of contemporary physics]?”
I sometimes had to admit to myself, though, in the very back of my mind, that I could not quite make out what sort of things right and wrong were. They didn’t seem to be like protons and planets because physics had nothing to say about them. They also didn’t seem to be like numbers and other such nonphysical realities, whose truths could be discovered by thought alone, since there was nothing comparable among ethicists to the amount of consensus one finds among mathematicians. But the only remaining alternative seemed to be that they were merely psychological phenomena, mere beliefs or ‘intuitions’ pointing to nothing beyond themselves – like the taste of a strawberry or a radish, which is surely in the palate and not in the fruit or the root. For in that case, just as one person could prefer strawberries to radishes and another vice versa, so one person could feel strongly that, say, vivisection is monstrous and another that it is perfectly permissible, and there would be no way to decide between them: hence moral relativism.
But a couple of years ago there occurred an otherwise trivial incident in my life which induced me to confront meta-ethics, whereupon the walls came tumbling down. Indeed, I did not stop with moral relativism but went all the way to moral eliminativism; in other words, as I have explained, I now believe it more apt and more useful simply to say that morality does not exist (other than as a myth). Thus, normative ethics is as pointless a pursuit as theology, inasmuch as both seek to determine the truths about a fictitious entity.
And the diagnosis is similar in the two cases: both suffer from ‘mono.’ What I mean is that in assuming there is Morality or God, they infer that there is a Truth about them: What is the nature of (the one) Morality? What is the nature of (the one) God? But the result is Procrustean since in fact there are distinctive conceptions of morality just as there are distinctive conceptions of God; so there is no place for (moral) monotheorism (or ‘monomoralism’) any more than for monotheism. (In reality, anyway.) All of us harbor Kantian as well as utilitarian as well as egoist etc. intuitions, most likely depending on the type of circumstances we find ourselves in, just as all of us imagine a loving God, a jealous and demanding God, a law-giver, a merciful one, a Father, a Mother, and so on. And, although presumably they perform some function in the evolutionary scheme of things, insofar as we take any of these intuitings and imaginings to signify a reality beyond themselves, we are just day-dreaming.
Thus this Kantian recants. (Whether I shall someday reKant remains to be seen!)
Published in two parts (I-III & IV-VI) in Philosophy Now, issues 80 (Aug/Sep 2010) & 81 (Oct/Nov 2010)
I. Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column?
Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my computer writing this column is April 1st, let me assure you that I do not intend this as a joke. For the last couple of years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether! This has certainly come as a shock to me (and also a disappointment, to put it mildly). I think the time has come, therefore, to reveal it to the world, and in particular to you, Dear Reader, who have patiently considered my defenses of a particular sort of moral theory for the last ten years. In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.
How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Philosophical Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ (see Issue 78) are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.
Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort? In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.
Note the analogy to Darwinism. It used to be a standard argument for God’s existence that the obvious and abundant design of the universe, as manifested particularly in the elegant fit of organisms to their environments, indicated the existence of a divine designer. Now we know that biological evolution can account for this fit perfectly without recourse to God. Hence, no Designer, no Design; there is only the appearance of design in nature (excepting such artifacts as beaver dams, bird nests, and architects’ blueprints). Just so, there are no moral commands but only the appearance of them, which can be explained by selection (by the natural environment, culture, family, etc.) of behavior and motives (‘moral intuitions’ or ‘conscience’) that best promote survival of the organism. There need be no recourse to Morality any more than to God to account for these phenomena.
I cannot hope to make all of that convincing to my readers in the short space of a column: hence the book I have written. But even in the book I am not attempting so much to give a rigorous proof as to consider the aftereffects of my counter-conversion (to apply William James’s term for the loss of religious belief to my loss of moral belief). What is it like to live in a world without morality? Is such a life even viable? This is what I had to discover before I could so much as walk out my front door! That is why the first draft of my book was written in an urgent rush, almost without my leaving the house. (Fortunately I am retired and sans famille.) I was reeling – much as, I imagine, a religious believer whose whole life has been based on a fervent belief in the Almighty, would find herself without bearings or even any ground to stand on if suddenly that belief were to vanish, no matter whether by proof of just by poof! Just so, morality has been the essence of my existence, both personally and professionally. Now it is no more.
Does this mean, among other things, that this column will end? I hope not! The book is only the beginning. I must learn how to live life all over again, like a child learning to walk. And just as a child growing up discovers one fascinating thing after another about the ‘new’ world, so the floodgates have been opened for me from a sea of possibilities. For, yes Virginia, there is life after morality, and I would like to report back to you as I experience it.
There is just one thing, though: I might have to change the name of my column. ‘Moral Moments’ now seems problematical, to say the least. ‘Amoral Moments’ would be closer to the mark (and to Marks). One thing that hasn’t changed, however, as you can see, is that my writing is still filled with similes, allusions, mixed metaphors, and bad puns. Fortunately I can now rest assured that in persisting with these I am doing nothing wrong.
II. In the Mode of Morality
I have relinquished the mantel of the moralist since I no longer believe there even is such a thing as morality. How, then, shall one live? One thing to note is that in asking that question I am able to retain the title of ethicist, for ethics is just the inquiry into how to live. This suggests a new name for my column, namely, ‘Ethical and other Episodes’, in which I hope in due course to articulate my answer in full. But I would also like to suggest at the outset of this undertaking that, even though an amoralist, I can still engage in moral argumentation … and in good conscience (so to speak!).
Consider that for the foreseeable future I will be living in a society that continues to pay homage to morality and believe in its reality implicitly. So I am likely to be confronted time and again by a question like, “Do you believe x is wrong?” It would usually be hopeless to attempt to refashion the question into an amoralist mode of speaking; at the very least this would change the subject from the particular issue under discussion, say, vivisection, to an abstract issue in meta-ethics, namely, whether there is such a thing as wrongness. But there is still a way I could answer the question both honestly and effectively. Thus, I could reply, “Vivisection is wrong according to morality as I conceive it.” For that reply is not asserting that vivisection is wrong, only that, according to morality (as I conceive morality) it is wrong. In the abstract this has no more force than if one were to say, “Unicorns are a type of horse (according to the common conception of unicorns).” In other words, there is no implication that unicorns actually exist, nor, all the more, that, say, a person could possibly find one for the purpose of trying to ride her.
Note further that it is possible to argue about these things whose existence is not being asserted. Thus, I could say, “Vivisection is wrong (in my conception of morality) because it involves treating sentient beings merely as means.” This is of course a kind of Kantian justification for my claim. And I would offer it as an argument that I believe to be perfectly sound because (1) it articulates the analysis of morality that I consider to be the correct one, namely, Kant’s categorical imperative (suitably modified to accommodate nonhuman animals), (2) it characterizes vivisection in a way that I consider to be correct, namely, as violating the Kantian imperative, and (3) it logically draws its conclusion therefrom. Again this would be just as if I had argued, “Santa Claus could not possibly be mistaken for Popeye because Santa Claus has a big beard while Popeye is barefaced.”
Thus, I am become like the father in this joke – courtesy of my attorney’s rabbi – about a Jewish boy from a liberal family who attends the neighborhood parochial (Christian) school:
One day Isaac comes home in great puzzlement about what he had been taught in school that day; so he goes to his father and asks him about it.
“Father, I learned that God is a Trinity. But how can there be three Gods?”
“Now get this straight, Son: We’re Jewish. So there is only one God … and we don’t believe in Him!”
Just so, I no longer believe in morality (like God in the joke), but I would still insist that the nature of morality is Kantian (monotheism in the joke) rather than utilitarian (Trinitarianism in the joke).
Now, if I were to employ this technique without elaboration, it could easily be part of a deceptive strategy, since it is likely that people would assume I was defending something outright rather than only hypothetically. A statement like “If anything is wrong, this is” is naturally interpreted as a rhetorical emphasis of just how wrong the speaker considers this to be. But if I, as an amoralist, were to say “If anything is wrong, vivisection is,” I would mean it literally, not rhetorically; that is, the ‘if’ would have real force for me, even suggesting that I do not believe that anything is wrong (since morality does not exist): all the more, that I do not believe that vivisection is wrong. (Of course that does not mean I think vivisection is right or even permissible, since those are moral notions also. I just don’t like vivisection.) So my intention in making the utterance would be at variance with the impression it would leave in my listener’s mind; and knowing this, I would be a deceiver.
However, if I were only trying to persuade a Kantian vivisectionist of the error of her ways, its usage, it seems to me, would pass muster even morally. I would be using reasoning to show my interlocutor that what she was doing violated her own moral/theoretical commitments. My own view of morality itself would be irrelevant; my interlocutor can assume what she likes about my meta-ethics. It would be exactly as if I were talking with a religious believer about the proper treatment of other animals: whether or not the believer knew I was an atheist, it would be perfectly proper for me to try to convince her that there is Biblical support for a benign ‘stewardship’ of other animals – would it not? I need not believe in the concept of stewardship myself, nor in its divine sanction, in order to invoke it undeceivingly when arguing with someone who does. Just so, it seems to me, morality.
Rather aptly, I now realize, I have been led to a sort of Socratic mode of moral argumentation. Socrates was notorious for interrogating his interlocutors rather than asserting and defending theses himself. Similarly, I am suggesting, I will continue to be able to hold forth as a critical moral reasoner, even though I no longer believe in morality, so long as I confine myself to questioning the inferences of others (and gingerly deflect their questions about my own moral commitments by speaking in the mode of morality, as above). It is true that I would thereby fail to be completely forthcoming about my own meta-ethics whenever doing so would be disruptive to the dialogue; but I do not think I would be doing anything that is considered unkosher even when moralists are arguing among themselves. After all, my meta-ethics could be mistaken; maybe there is such a thing as morality. So my ‘suspension of disbelief’ could be conceived as an expression of intellectual humility, and my arguments considered in themselves by the intellectual light of my interlocutor.
The bottom line for me, as both a philosopher and the possessor of a particular personality, is that I do not ‘suffer fools gladly.’ This has always been true of me, but it used to be supplemented by a belief (or assumption) in morality. Now that I have turned the philosophic eye on my own largely unexamined assumption that morality exists, I see that I have been a moral fool. But I retain my belief (or assumption) in Truth as such, as well as my pig-headed allegiance to it. Thus, I shall henceforth apply a skeptical scalpel to the moral arguments of all, unsparing even of the ones I have been sympathetic to as a moralist, since all of them, I now believe, are premised on a bogus metaphysics. For it is intellectual dishonesty or na ïveté that I am most temperamentally disposed to dislike, even as I retain my passionate preferences for certain ‘causes,’ such as animal liberation.
III. Desirism
I have explained how an amoralist, such as I have become, could still continue to argue in the mode of morality. Although this risks being deceptive and hypocritical, it can also be done aboveboard because the amoralist could be appealing to his or her interlocutor’s (or reader’s) moralism. This is analogous to how a native speaker of English might nonetheless, with some knowledge of other languages, be able to point out a grammatical mistake being made by someone speaking in French. Thus for example, if I were conversing with someone who believed that meat-eating is morally good because it promotes the greatest good of the greatest number, I could point out that this utilitarian credo is supposed to apply to all sentient beings and not only to human beings; so that if one tallied up the net pleasure and pain being experienced not only by the human meat-eaters but also by the animals being bred and slaughtered for eating under the current regime of factory farming, one would likely conclude that eating meat does not lead to the greatest good and hence is wrong. Meanwhile, I myself, as an amoralist, believe meat-eating is neither right nor wrong; but I would have done nothing dishonest in convincing my interlocutor that it is wrong, that is, by her lights.
But why would I even care whether I was being honest or not? Isn’t that, again, something an amoralist would be indifferent to? Strictly speaking, yes. But an amoralist still has a compass, a ‘guide to life’, an ethics, or so I would argue; and it can be a match for anybody’s morality. Thus, consider that in purely practical terms, honesty may still be the best policy. A reputation for truth-telling will likely make one a more attractive person to do (literal or figurative) business with, which will enable one to thrive relative to one’s less scrupulous competitors. Thus, ‘survival of the fittest’ could naturally promote honesty as a prevalent trait even in the absence of any moral concern.
There I am, then, honestly discussing particular issues with opponents, and justifying my positions to them by their moral lights. But how do I justify them to myself, since I have no moral lights anymore? For example, on what basis would I myself be a vegetarian? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness. For the vast majority of human beings in the world today, meat-eating is a mere luxury or habit of taste, while at the same time it promotes animal cruelty and slaughter, environmental degradation, global warming, human disease, and even human starvation (the latter due to the highly inefficient conversion of plant protein to animal protein for human consumption). For whatever reason or reasons, or even no reason, these things matter to me. Therefore I am motivated to act on the relevant desires.
But if I were conversing with another amoralist, how would I convince her of the rightness of my desires? Well, of course, I wouldn’t even try, since neither of us believes in right, or wrong. What I could do is take her through the same considerations that have moved me to my position and hope that her heartstrings were tuned in harmony with mine. If the two of us have grown up in the same culture, we will certainly have many desires in common. For example, we may both be averse to animal suffering and cruelty to animals. But even within the same society, there can be large differences in knowledge. I speak from personal experience regarding even my own knowledge, for, to stay with my example, I was blissfully unaware of the horrors of factory farming until only a few years ago. Most people in our society continue to be, even though the practice has been prevalent for the last fifty years. Thus, there is a good chance that I would be able to influence my interlocutor’s carnivorous desire and behavior simply by introducing her to the relevant facts. The absence of a moral context, therefore, need not be harmful to my hitherto-moral project of honestly promoting vegetarianism.
But what if my amoral interlocutor were just as versed in the facts of factory farming as I but still did not care about animal suffering, or simply loved eating meat more than she loved animals? At this point the dialogue might serve no purpose. But that certainly would not mean that I had no further recourse, even honest recourse. For example, I could try to bring around as many other people as possible to my way of seeing (and feeling) things, so that ultimately by sheer force of numbers we might reduce animal suffering and exploitation by our purchasing practices and voting choices. In this effort I could join with others to employ standard methods of ‘marketing,’ such as advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements. These things are not inherently dishonest simply in virtue of being strategic. (And of course if I did not value honesty, additional tactics would become available to me.)
I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.)
A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.
IV. What Amorality Is Not
As a defender of amorality, I am continually challenged by two allegations: egoism and relativism. But both are bogies. Let me explain why.
That an amoralist would be an egoist seems to follow from the idea that morality is precisely a check on our selfish tendencies. Morality’s main reason for being is group cohesion, without which most personal endeavors could not even get off the ground. All of us depend on the viability of our group; hence we must imbibe very strong motives ‘with our mother’s milk’ to favor the group over our personal ego, if only for our personal good in the long run. Furthermore, my own way of speaking about amoral motives suggests an egoism, for I believe that, in the final analysis, we are moved solely by desire. The bottom line is what we want. Is that not egoism pure and simple?
No. The above arguments conflate egoism with other things. The first argument reduces egoism to selfishness. But egoism is much farther-seeing than selfishness. Long-term self-interest is egoism’s goal, and its rational pursuit a component of its charge. A hefty dose of other-concern would plausibly be part of any true egoist’s makeup since his or her own prospects depend on others’. Even so, however, an amoralist is neither necessarily nor essentially egoistic. This is because one’s fundamental desires could be for anything. Just because a desire is one’s own does not mean that what one desires is only one’s own welfare. You could just as deeply desire the welfare of your neighbor as the welfare of yourself, and even more so, such that you would sacrifice yourself for her. Thus, when I say that an amoralist is motivated solely by desire, I do not mean to imply any sort of egoism whatever.
It remains an empirical question whether or to what degree human beings or any particular human being is egoistic. It might even be true that all of us are thoroughgoing egoists. I doubt it, but I cannot prove that is false since we sometimes have hidden motives. But suppose it were true. This would still not put amorality at any moral disadvantage since ‘ought implies can’. That dictum is a presumption of morality’s: there cannot be a moral obligation to do something impossible, like jump to the Moon. Well, if we really were egoists, then it would be impossible for us to be moral. Therefore morality could only be a sham. Amorality, then, would at least have the ‘moral’ advantage of being honest (however inadvertently).
But I do not believe that we are thoroughgoing egoists or even predominately egoists. After all, it is eminently plausible that evolution would have favored those individuals whose desires were largely group-oriented since this would presumably have served various functions that enhanced the odds of their genes’ survival. Thus, even without reflection but simply by instinct, we often behave as the moralist would enjoin us to do. What really is the difference, then, between the amoralist and the moralist? Just that the latter believes in an external source of moral imperatives, while the former recognizes only desires, which have been shaped by the interaction of beings having the characteristics of our ancestors or ourselves with the physical and social exigencies of our respective environments past and present.
Out of the frying pan of egoism, therefore, and into the fire of relativism? For if there are only desires that are responsive to the environment, won’t desires vary according to different environments? Yes indeed. However, there are still two ways to parry this possibility. The first is to point out that human environments, whether natural or cultural, are both like and unlike. So we can count on there being uniformities across all boundaries as well as diversity. And it is surely the same with morality: for while it may be universal that, let us say, one should never torture a child, it is also respectably moral to permit or even require, say, killing human beings in some circumstances (such as to protect a child from being tortured) and to prohibit it in others.
My denial of moral relativism, however, rests mainly on the unintelligibility of the charge. ‘Moral relativism’ seems to me an oxymoron; for morality in its very concept and essence is supposed to be universal and absolute. Thus, even in the example I just gave regarding killing, morality’s defenders would say that a single imperative underlies the differences due to circumstances, namely, “Thou shalt not kill the innocent” or something of that sort. Moral relativism, therefore, is a strawperson to begin with. But it is downright question-begging as an objection to amorality, since it assumes what the position denies, namely, morality. Amorality cannot be guilty of moral relativism any more than your neighbor could be a goblin. That there are differences of desire, however, is a commonplace.
But but but, splutters my reader: Even if we naturally have some pseudo-moral motives, and even if Morality is a myth, doesn’t the very prevalence of that myth suggest that our natural motives aren’t enough to prevent society’s disintegration (or at any rate to enable us to hold our own against those who were suitably deluded)? In other words, isn’t amorality likely maladaptive, diminishing the life prospects of those who adopt it, so that we need to retain the belief in morality, false though it may be? To which I reply: It seems odd to suggest that belief in what is true would be maladaptive. But even if it were in the strict biological sense, such that the human population explosion counted in favor of retaining the moral delusion, let me humbly suggest that a better criterion of value would be the greatest possible satisfaction of our deepest-desires-on-reflection, which might well be compatible with a lower rate of human propagation.
V. What Is Morality?
I claim that morality does not exist. But what is morality? It is not possible to settle any dispute about whether something exists without knowing the nature of the entity in question. Clearly there is a sense in which morality does exist; for example, defined as a code of behavior whose violation is considered to merit punishment (legal, social, or psychological), morality is to be found in every society. So when I assert that morality does not exist, I must have something else in mind. And certainly I do, namely, morality conceived as a universal injunction external to our desires. Thus, for example, even if the code of our society deemed homosexual behavior as such to be morally permissible, and even if you personally wished to engage in it, Morality might pronounce it Wrong. The morality I now reject is therefore a metaphysical one, as opposed to the sociological kind; the latter is a fact of our empirical environment, while the former is a figment of our wishful or fearful imagination.
For all that, metaphysical morality is widely accepted as real. (That is itself an empirical claim about people’s beliefs. I’d be happy to have the hypothesis tested by experimental philosophers. If it turns out not to be a nearly universal belief but is perhaps typical only of some cultures or personality types, then my complaint would be limited to them.) But why not, then, simply propose a reinterpretation of the word ‘morality,’ as well as its attendant terminology, such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, so that it is understood not as a metaphysical absolute, but instead as a code of conduct generally agreed upon by a given society? Why do I feel compelled instead to banish that entire way of speaking?
Let us first get clear about a distinction. What is being proposed (by my objector) is moral relativism, but that comes in different flavors. One of them still retains an absolutist taste: it holds that different societies may have different codes of conduct, but that each code is taken by its adherents to apply universally, even outside their own society. The other form of moral relativism, which is closer to what I have in mind, holds not only that different societies may have different codes of conduct, but also that these codes would be seen as applicable only within the bounds of the given society. Morality would thus be a ‘when in Rome’ type of affair.
However, I am still for the elimination of morality, even though I approve the idea of bounded codes. I wouldn’t want to call them ‘morality’ (or ‘moralities’) because of the heavy baggage that terminology lugs along with it. Precisely because moral talk of the absolutist ilk is so ingrained, I think it unlikely that people could make the switch to a different attitude if they continued to use the same language. New wine in an old bottle, you know. Words bring meaning in their tow and to attempt to supplant one meaning with another is a complicated business. Meanings form countless associations with other words besides the ones they explicitly define, and these become part of the meaning itself, extending it beyond denotation to connotation. Words so prominent as ‘moral’ and ‘wrong’ help constitute the fabric of our whole world. It won’t be possible just to snap one’s fingers and have them mean something else, however much Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty might demur.
I feel that the new understanding of morality as more myth than reality is important enough to warrant the inconvenience of dropping our accustomed ways of speaking and thinking about it and learning new ones. This is for two reasons. First is the value of truth itself. If it is true that metaphysical morality does not exist, then for that reason alone we should believe it. (Strictly speaking, I should say: If it is rational to believe that metaphysical morality does not exist, then for that reason alone we should believe it.) Do note that when I employ ‘should’ and ‘value’ and ‘warrant’ and such here, I am referring to epistemic norms, that is, to standards of knowledge, and not to moral norms. I will grant that, in the end, this may be a matter of subjective value or desire as well, for some people may not care very much about truth (or rationality), or at least not place paramount importance on it, if, say, the alternative were happiness. Think blue pill in The Matrix. So my first argument is addressed only to those who would take the red pill.
My second reason or argument for preferring the elimination of morality to the reinterpretation of morality may appeal to more people: I believe that the resultant world would be more to our liking. That is a big claim, I grant. I think it is testable, but I will leave that to the professionals. As an armchair philosopher trusting mainly to my own intuitions and experiences, I am satisfied at least that I myself would prefer to live in a world where nobody believed in either God or morality but instead habitually engaged in observation, study, conversation, introspection, and reflection. This could be an idealistic streak in myself – wishful thinking – and the cynicism that can be read into Voltaire’s statement be fully justified: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God [and morality – JM], because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.” But I put it to you to assess by your own lights.
VI. Monotheorism or A Kantian Recants
A philosophical moralist, such as I have been, justifies right actions or permissible actions or prohibitions on actions (wrong actions) by reference to a moral theory. For example, it is wrong to lie because lying violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative, a theory which asserts that one ought never to treat any person merely as a means. The whole justification can be laid out in argument form, containing, typically, a statement of the theory, a statement of a definition, a statement of a fact, and an inference to the conclusion, thus:
(1) One ought never to treat any person merely as a means. (theory)
(2) Lying is an act of asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true. (definition)
(3) Asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true is an instance of treating a person merely as a means. (fact)
(Therefore) Lying is wrong. (inference)
Any of the components of an argument could be contested. For example, an objector might deny Premise 3 above by arguing that asserting something that you believe to be false for the purpose of misleading somebody else to believe it is true sometimes involves solicitude for the person being treated in this way – such as sparing someone from painful news – and so is not an instance of treating that person merely as a means. But sooner or later one hopes to find an argument that is sound in every respect – all true premises and a valid inference – in which case one will have proven one’s conclusion or moral claim to be true.
My bread and butter as a so-called applied ethicist has consisted of constructing such arguments in defense of my own views and critiquing the arguments of people who held opposing views. Key to my work as an ethicist, however, has been the theoretical premise, for it addresses the question of what is right or wrong or permissible in the most general terms. It turns out that there are several main theories in the running, which are presumed to generate different answers to at least some particular moral questions. For example, the theory known as utilitarianism, according to which one ought always to do what will maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people, would seem, at first blush anyway, to justify removing the organs of a perfectly healthy person in order to save the lives of five persons who desperately needed transplants; whereas the categorical imperative, also known as Kantianism after its propounder Immanuel Kant, would deny this because that action would involve treating the healthy person merely as a means to the recovery of the five ill persons.
So which ethical theory is the correct one? That is the question that the discipline known as normative ethics seeks to answer. I myself was a consistent defender of Kantianism over utilitarianism and other theories. Here again arguments would be employed, this time to show that one theory was superior to all the others, often by demonstrating that the other theories, but not one’s own favorite, would ‘justify’ absurd conclusions, such as that it is morally permissible or even obligatory to kidnap healthy individuals for the purpose of ‘harvesting’ their organs for transplants.
Thus I spent my professional career, including writing this column, conscientiously defending my preferred theory of Kantianism against all-comers and then defending particular conclusions about all and sundry issues, such as promise-keeping, homosexual marriage, academic cheating, vegetarianism, and so forth, on the basis of Kantianism. All the while, however, I was neglecting (or bracketing in philo-speak) an even more general level of argument and analysis called meta-ethics. Meta-ethics seeks to characterize morality as such; so it differs from the various theories of normative ethics in rather the way a genus differs from species. For example, meta-ethics would point out that morality is inherently prescriptive, while a normative theory would try to spell out the precise content of the moral prescription, such as, “Maximize the good,” or “Never treat anybody merely as a means,” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
But meta-ethics had never ‘grabbed’ me, perhaps because it dealt with issues that I could not begin to take seriously, such as moral relativism. To me it was the most obvious thing in the world that moral issues were matters of objective fact, so I was very concerned only to establish what was right or wrong and not bother about the ‘purely speculative’ matter of whether there even were such a thing as right and wrong in the objective sense. As one of my graduate school professors once put it, “Which is more certain: that it is wrong to torture a baby or that quarks have charm [the latter being a tenet of contemporary physics]?”
I sometimes had to admit to myself, though, in the very back of my mind, that I could not quite make out what sort of things right and wrong were. They didn’t seem to be like protons and planets because physics had nothing to say about them. They also didn’t seem to be like numbers and other such nonphysical realities, whose truths could be discovered by thought alone, since there was nothing comparable among ethicists to the amount of consensus one finds among mathematicians. But the only remaining alternative seemed to be that they were merely psychological phenomena, mere beliefs or ‘intuitions’ pointing to nothing beyond themselves – like the taste of a strawberry or a radish, which is surely in the palate and not in the fruit or the root. For in that case, just as one person could prefer strawberries to radishes and another vice versa, so one person could feel strongly that, say, vivisection is monstrous and another that it is perfectly permissible, and there would be no way to decide between them: hence moral relativism.
But a couple of years ago there occurred an otherwise trivial incident in my life which induced me to confront meta-ethics, whereupon the walls came tumbling down. Indeed, I did not stop with moral relativism but went all the way to moral eliminativism; in other words, as I have explained, I now believe it more apt and more useful simply to say that morality does not exist (other than as a myth). Thus, normative ethics is as pointless a pursuit as theology, inasmuch as both seek to determine the truths about a fictitious entity.
And the diagnosis is similar in the two cases: both suffer from ‘mono.’ What I mean is that in assuming there is Morality or God, they infer that there is a Truth about them: What is the nature of (the one) Morality? What is the nature of (the one) God? But the result is Procrustean since in fact there are distinctive conceptions of morality just as there are distinctive conceptions of God; so there is no place for (moral) monotheorism (or ‘monomoralism’) any more than for monotheism. (In reality, anyway.) All of us harbor Kantian as well as utilitarian as well as egoist etc. intuitions, most likely depending on the type of circumstances we find ourselves in, just as all of us imagine a loving God, a jealous and demanding God, a law-giver, a merciful one, a Father, a Mother, and so on. And, although presumably they perform some function in the evolutionary scheme of things, insofar as we take any of these intuitings and imaginings to signify a reality beyond themselves, we are just day-dreaming.
Thus this Kantian recants. (Whether I shall someday reKant remains to be seen!)