by Joel
Marks
A
very sad thing about relationships is that they not uncommonly degenerate into
continual bickering. Furthermore, try as they may, a couple will find
themselves unable to stop, even as they perceive the accumulating damage done.
The real problem, I now believe, is that each person feels justified to complain about the other. So no matter how much they
may want to end the arguing because of its bad consequences, they will always
be swimming against the tide if an inner voice keeps counseling that the other
person is doing something wrong. In
such cases it is clear that the desire to chastise
and punish for wrongdoing is stronger than the desire for domestic harmony.
The way out of this, I submit, is
to have a certain attitude, and that attitude, or at least one such attitude,
would be what I have been calling amorality. An amoralist (of the sort I have
in mind) would not judge people or their character traits or their actions to
be good or bad or right or wrong (in the moral sense of these terms, for of
course someone could still be wrong
that the earth is flat, etc.). Indeed, an amoralist would not judge a moralist to be in the wrong for being a moralist (although, again,
someone might be a moralist for a wrong, i.e., false, reason, such as believing that certain actions lead to
eternal damnation). Nor does an amoralist believe in objective values, such as
the goodness of health or the badness of pain, however much we might desire or be averse to these things.
So consider
how this works out in a particular case. My current living arrangement is a
solitary one, which has given me total control of the indoor temperature. In
the New England winter, with the right combination of layers of clothing in the
daytime and blankets and quilt at night, alternation of fireplace and furnace,
timed thermostat settings, open and closed ducts and doors, etc., I can enjoy
both personal comfort and low heating bills. But suppose a partner were to
enter the scene: Would she not throw a spanner in the works (and mutatis
mutandis for my moving in with her)? The chances are slim that a newcomer would
either share the elaborate set of preferences in place or readily adapt to them
(especially so for folks in my age cohort, since we tend to be set in our
ways). Suppose, in particular, that she had a strong preference for a warm
indoor environment, whereas mine is closer to the brisk. What now?
One
“solution” is continual bickering, which seems to be a surprisingly common component
of close relationships. But I suggest that the root cause is not the difference of preferences per se
but is rather a shared moralism. For each party would typically
believe not only that he or she had a given preference (for warmer or cooler), but also that his or her preference was morally right. Thus, I might say to my
partner that she should not be so
“delicate”; but she could reply with her own disapproval, thus: “A home should be a refuge from the out-of-doors
and not an extension of it. We are not wild animals!” So then I might up the
moral ante by adducing external consequences: “But keeping the temperature down
is indicative of good environmental stewardship, which would help not only to
sustain finite resources but also to prevent future wars.” But she would be
ready with a retort: “Our biggest problem now is unemployment, and a booming
energy sector would help ameliorate that.” I might then point out that lower
heating bills would enable us to donate more money to charities, while my
partner could reply that charities are what you give to after you have
satisfied your own basic needs, one of which is shelter from the elements. “But
look,” I’d respond in exasperation, “when inside you can just put on a sweater.”
“Or you,” she’d return, “could strip down to your shorts, for all I care!”
Round and round we go. Nobody could
“win” this, unless eternal bickering counts as winning ... which it probably
does for some couples, and that would therefore be OK by amoralist lights. But
for myself (and I hope my partner) I’d prefer almost anything to bickering.
Here is how I diagnose the general
problem. When another person has a preference or desire that conflicts with
one’s own, especially when we have things “just so” to our own liking, we tend to experience the other’s as an imposition or an intrusion. This is because we attribute a very special kind of
quality to the other person: free will. We naturally assume that a human being
is unlike a stone in that the former can act of her own volition. We therefore
further assume that a person can be responsive not only to the way things are,
such as the local pull of gravity, to which a stone is also responsive, but
also to the way things ought to be, to which a stone is insensitive. And
by an amazing coincidence (wink wink nudge nudge), what we ourselves desire
coincides with how they ought to be, and what the other person desires does
not. Therefore we expect the stone to ignore our wishes but another person to
conform to them because what we wish is right. Indeed, even a sympathetic or
“chivalrous” accommodation to the other is ruled out, since it would make
oneself complicit in wrong-doing.
It turns out, then, that although
morality is commonly touted to be the nemesis and antidote to selfish desire,
in actual practice morality aids and abets it. For the most natural deployment
of morality is as a check on somebody else’s behavior rather than on one’s own.
And the explanation of this turnabout is that morality has no absolute basis
that could act as a universal
constraint. Thus, if it really were Writ On High that one shalt not, then it would be wrong not only for thine “enemy” to
do it but also for thyself; yet hardly anybody accepts this. We ourselves are
the universal exception (to coin an oxymoron) to every moral rule. And even in
the one-in-a-million case of a bad conscience, the pull of morality is
typically so weak that the prohibited act may go forward anyway.
So I have urged an alternative
conception of ethics. According to this, there is only the way things are and
there is no ought-to-be, and what sets us apart from stones is only that we
have desires. In other words, instead of a presumed moral fact that the
situation ought to be such-and-so, there is only the psychological fact that we would like it to be such-and-so. The latter is an empirical matter, just
like the local pull of gravity. Thus, if my partner opposed my setting the
thermostat low, this would be in the same metaphysical ballpark as a bunch of
stones tumbling down a mountainside and heading my way. In both cases I would
face a fact which threatened the satisfaction of my own desire, in the one case
to keep things cool, in the other case to avoid being pummeled.
But in neither case would there be a question of whether the person or the
rock was morally wrong to be so
preferring or behaving. The only
question would be how to deal with a practical situation. There is no “easy
win” over the person by declaring her to be violating some presumed objective
moral principle. Her opposed desire is just as implacable as the landslide
(which is to say, as implacable as my own
desire, which I can no more change by an act of will than halt a landslide).
The only operative objective principles are laws of nature, whether they be
physical or psychological. When the question is what temperature to keep in the
home, a person who is no longer living alone would need to add to his or her
list of considerations the needs and desires and beliefs (whether true or
false) of another person. What is overlooked in the singling out of a newcomer
as intruder is that it has never been a case of things being “just
the way I like them” – some personal Golden Age before the arrival of the
benighted other – but was always under a
set of constraints, such as the type of heating system in the house, the
layout of rooms, one’s financial resources, etc. The newcomer’s desires simply
add to this set. To see her or him as a moral
agent is implicitly, and ignorantly, and to everyone’s disservice, to deny this.
Realizing these things has been, for me at
least, a source of great relief; for I am no longer fighting unnecessary
battles in a purely mythical realm of oughts.
My partner wants it hot; I want it cold. How do we work this out? That is the
question, not “Who’s right?” It’s a joint project for true partners, not a
unilateral initiative against an adversary. Thus, instead of attempting to instill moral
guilt in the other (almost always a doomed effort), each of us could moderate
our language and tone of voice – for example, not “You should wear a
sweater!” but “Wouldn’t wearing a sweater do the trick?” Furthermore, some of
the reasons we have given for our respective positions are probably bogus to
begin with; would I really be invoking the environment and she unemployment if
we did not first have preferences on other grounds? I don’t mean that we are
not also concerned about those other things; only that they are decidedly
secondary to the matter at hand, and addressing them won’t resolve it.
Of course I would still be free to try to
persuade my partner of any error in her thinking (and she in mine), or she to
coax me into greater empathy for her discomfort (and I for mine), and so forth.
But I (and, I hope, she as well) would now be dealing with reality and not
invoking a mythical god of morality to make the rough ways smooth. What we need to figure out is how best to
accommodate our respective considered preferences. “Would it work to place a
space heater in the room where you spend most of your time during the day, but
otherwise leave the house thermostat set low?” We would also have the whole
picture before us, which is to say in this case, not just the matter of
temperature, but also our relations with each other. Maybe I would decide in
the end to suffer the heat in order to warm up her affections ... or just
because I love her. Or we might part after all on grounds of irreconcilable
differences. It’s all one big system and not a set of commandments. That’s what
I mean by amorality.
© Prof. Joel Marks 2013
Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the
University of New Haven and a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University. This
essay is excerpted from his book It’s Just a Feeling and appeared in adapted form in Philosophy Now magazine (Issue No. 96, May/June, 2013, pp. 52-53). He wishes to
acknowledge the insightful editorial suggestions of Vera Huffman and Allan
Saltzman