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, difficult to defend, and quite possibly false. Yet I also feel strongly attracted to amoralism, indeed ever more so, after going-on-two decades of reflecting on it and attempting to live in accordance with its theses.
Might there, then, be a middle way between moralism and amoralism, which would accord due consideration to the insights of both? Two possibilities come to mind.
One is the fallibilist fix. Instead of baldly asserting that, say, x is wrong, the fallibilist says or at any rate means, “I believe that x is wrong.” The implication is that one could be mistaken. The fallibilist takes this to be the best of both worlds, since on one hand the real existence of wrongness (and hence morality) is maintained, while on the other hand, one concedes one’s lack of omniscience. So one’s confidence in the reality of morality is mixed with humility, which is an attractive feature that would seem to undercut the amoralist’s argument that moralism is arrogant and stubborn and thereby engenders stagnation and conflict.
The fallibilist approach is an epistemic fix to the noxious implications of moralism. The other “middle way” takes a conceptual approach. Instead of baldly asserting that x is wrong or even more humbly expressing one’s belief that x is wrong, one says (or means) something like, “To my way of thinking, x is wrong.” Here the implication is that x is wrong as one uses the term ‘wrong’. The qualification has to do with the meaning of the moral term ‘wrong’ rather than with one’s epistemic situation relative to moral reality.
Qua amoralist, I have problems with both of these proposed fixes to morality. The fallibilist approach strikes me as full-blown moralism masquerading as a modification. Anyone who asserts “x is wrong” is already implicitly expressing their belief that x is wrong. Assertion is not a performative, like “I thee wed,” whereby the mere pronouncing of the words makes it so. Assertion is in its essence the assertion of a belief; it’s just that we don’t need to preface every assertion with “I believe that” because it is understood (however much we tend to forget or be unaware of this). So the practical suggestion of the fallibilist may simply be that we remind ourselves or make more salient this basic linguistic fact by actually uttering the phrase “I believe that” when making our assertions, and especially our moral ones. (We already do that when intending to express some degree of doubt: “I believe that whales are mammals, but I’m not sure.” The suggestion now is that we fully acknowledge the presence of doubt that ought to attend our every assertion.)
Now, is this an objection to fallibilism, or actually a vindication of moralism? For if fallibility is already built into moralism, doesn’t that imply that we need not eliminate the belief in morality in order to counteract its noxiousness but only correct our misunderstanding of it, or, more generally, of what it means to have a belief or to assert something? After all, one can be just as assertive about nonmoral facts as moral facts, and this can be just as off-putting and dangerous as the assertion of some moral facts; but no one is suggesting that we stop believing in (nonmoral) facts, are they?[1]
My reply is simply to question whether such a “correction” is feasible. Take any heartfelt moral assertion, such as “The Holocaust was a monstrous evil.” Is it plausible to suppose that a person who sincerely asserts that would be willing to entertain one shadow of a doubt of the truth of their belief? I don’t think so. (I want to say here too, although this is not a moral assertion but an epistemic one: “I know it isn’t.”) And so, while technically correct, fallibilism is not a practical solution to the problems of moralism as a functioning ethics. It leaves intact all the noxious consequences of embracing what is, in the end, a fiction. For it is a sad fact (or so it seems to me, with a sincere awareness of my fallibility) that even the most heinous acts, if conceived in those terms, quite commonly elicit responses that can themselves become heinous in short order. To my mind (and that you and I could differ about this bears out my position, I think) Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, is a case in point. According to a report on NPR, “Palestinian children are suffering extreme hunger in Gaza. But a recent poll finds 68% of Jewish Israelis oppose humanitarian aid.”
Note an irony here. Morality is commonly recommended as an antidote to strong urges and passions that would steer us astray. But it seems to me that the opposite is at least as likely, namely, that it is morality that leads us astray. For morality is marvelously adaptable; and this I attribute to its fictitiousness, since we can make something that does not exist into any image we please. And the image we most please is our own, so that morality will often as not, and more so I suspect than without it, direct us to do exactly what we want to do. But by dressing up our desires in moral garb they take on an exalted status that is not their due, and in this way the mischief occurs.
Thus it is that moral conviction can move us to behave with the utmost cruelty and selfishness and blindness to the obvious. Whereas if we removed the moral mantle, we would be left with simply our desires, which, while still possibly strong, would no longer possess the moral feature of supposed absoluteness that further inhibits awareness of other factors and hence moderation, compromise, etc. That, then, is my argument against moralism, and now even in its fallibilist form.
Now consider the conceptual alternative. Here there is a very interesting turnabout. For the conceptual moralist need not assume the faux humility of the fallibilist. A conceptualist can assert outright that “The Holocaust was a monstrous evil” and “The Hamas attack of October 7 was a monstrous evil” and, indeed, “The Israeli response to the Hamas attack is a monstrous evil.” The qualification is “as I understand evil.” This, it might even be argued, is a more genuine humility, since it recognizes that all words have multiple meanings. And yet, seemingly ironically, it allows a more confident assertion. The best of both worlds?
I don’t think so. I do embrace the multiplicity of meanings (even of the meaning of “meaning”), just as I embrace the fallibility of human knowledge. But to ground morality on either strikes me as problematic. My problem with the conceptual approach parallels my problem with the fallibilist approach. For just as we are not always willing to doubt our moral beliefs, so, I maintain, we often have very strong attachments to the meanings of our moral terms. Imagine, then, that someone were to say, “Well, I don’t think the Holocaust was a monstrous evil in my sense of the term ‘evil’.” Would the person who asserts that the Holocaust was evil “on my understanding of the term ‘evil’” really be prepared to countenance that there is any acceptable usage of “evil” that would not apply to the Holocaust? Isn’t it more likely that this person will feel that evil is evil, and it’s not a matter of interpretation?
I can attest to my own clinging to meaning in this manner. In addition to the Holocaust example, which you might find far-fetched (that is, that someone might deny that the Holocaust was evil), I offer the example of “Animal experimentation is inhumane.” That is something I believe. But most institutions that experiment on animals will tell you in no uncertain terms that what they do is humane. I have studied this issue in detail, and I am confident that the meaning that is attached to “humane” in the animal experimentation context is bogus. This is not because animal experimenters and their support staff are evil; in fact many of them love animals and do their utmost to minimize the hardship to the animals in their care. Nevertheless the explicit procedures performed on many animals, as well as their lifetime of captivity and isolation, are not anything that would be described as humane by someone outside of the animal experimentation context. On the contrary, it would be seen as cruel and, as I say, inhumane. So I object to the appropriation of this term, and would not rest content with the experimenters’ qualification that they only mean it in a certain sense.[2]
I am not yet giving up on seeking a middle way between moralism and amoralism. (See for example “What Happened?”) But for the reason given I don’t see either fallibilism or conceptualism as a “save” for moralism.
[1] As
a matter of, ahem, fact, I have seized this bull by the horns and
maintain that, indeed, we would be better off recognizing the questionable
reality of all the things we believe, moral or nonmoral. I understand
that the moralist – and in this case the fallibilist – will feel I have thereby
argued myself into a corner: By embracing such an extreme skepticism I have
been caught up in the contradiction of denying even my own denial, and since
any premise that leads to a contradiction must be false, I have thus shown my
own thesis of amoralism to be false. I think I am able to answer this
objection; see for example “Reality.”
For now, however, I will take a less obscure tack.
[2]
Marvelous to relate, I actually convinced one major institution to stop using
the word. See Chapter 9 of my Reason and Ethics (Routledge, 2021).