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Nonstarters

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

I have been as ardent an amoralist as previously I was an ardent moralist. The common denominator is, of course, that I am ardent – an enthusiast. This can have amusing consequences. For example, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, which was a defense of dispassion as a virtue, one of my advisors drolly expressed his appreciation of how passionately I defended dispassion. [1] But my general enthusiasm can also make a mess of things; and, most relevantly to a/moralism, it can, and does, create both personal and theoretical problems.  On the personal side, my general enthusiasm makes me a divided self. For as much as I am “intellectually” or “theoretically” convinced that moralism is not only based on falsity (namely, the belief in objective values, and in particular, the objective values that usually fall under the rubric of morality , such as rightness and wrongness and goodness and badness) but also has net undesirable consequences (or, as an amoralist, I would say ...
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I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK – and That’s OK

I considered that for the title of my most recent book (which instead became Ethical Health: Managing Our Moral Impulses ), but I found by Googling that it was already “taken.” Now I think it’s a good fit for what I want to write in this little essay (which essentially amplifies a theme from the book), to wit: Despite my aspiring to be an amoralist (and in truth, an amoralist saint), I have come to realize that I will probably always be a moralist at heart. This is a demoralizing thought (ha ha). But it is also key to further progress in the kind of demoralization (in the sense of becoming amoral) to which I aspire, since the main painfulness of realizing I am a moralist is the moralist judgment of this (my being a moralist) as bad . So the realization challenges me to make the meta-leap to a more profound amoralism, by which I stop making moral judgments not only about actions and people but also about doing that , that is, about making moral judgments (and about the people, includ...
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The Impetus for Amoralism Was Moralism

Over the last nearly two decades of my being an amoralist, I have repeatedly referenced a particular event as what I called my anti-epiphany. On Christmas Day, 2007, there was an exact moment (I should have checked my watch!) when the scales fell from my eyes and I realized morality is bunkum. However, amoralism has always had two aspects for me (and in the philosophical literature); for it is not only that morality does not exist (moral nihilism), but also that moralism , which encompasses all the attitudes and behaviors and institutions that arise from believing that morality does exist, is net noxious. [1] Therefore I have become partial to both a meta-ethical thesis, which often goes by the name of moral error theory (We err in believing that morality exists), and a normative ethics, which usually goes by the name of moral abolitionism (We would be better off not believing that morality exists). [2] What I wish to relate now is that this too had its seminal moment, and then cons...
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Integrity Is Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be: An amoralist decides a moral question

or Promise Keeping: An Amoral Moment  I am in a situation where it would be highly advantageous for me to break a promise to a someone. But doing so would put that person at a great disadvantage. Furthermore I care very much about that person, who is a dear friend.  As it happens I am very conscienceous (if I may coin a term). Breaking a promise is flat-out wrong, at least if it was not coerced, which this one was not (at least by commonsense standards; one could always get casuistic, but I won’t), and so I am highly inhibited to do it. Yes, I do also have a strong motivation to break the promise; but that is canceled out by my strong motivation not to let down someone I care about. So that just leaves the wrongness of the act to decide the question.  However I am an amoralist, so wrongness does not really exist for me. Therefore I am stymied.  Further introspection, however, reveals further considerations. I now realize that my moral motivation is a con...
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Closing the Gaps

There are a couple of gaps of reasoning in my general account of desirism, which I have just thought of a way of closing. First let me remind my reader that desirism takes two forms: There are a psychological claim and an ethical recommendation. Thus, what might be called psychological desirism is the claim that moral judgments are caused by desires; or I could put it the other way and say that desires give rise to moral claims. So for example if someone wants or likes world peace, then, I claim, they will be prone to judge as wrong the violation of peace and as bad the perpetrator of such a violation. And, in the same vein, if we judge something or someone wrong or bad, I would assume that the actual cause of the judgment is some desire, whether we know it or not.  The second form of desirism is ethical desirism, or desirism proper, which is the recommendation that we forgo making, or at least ignore, judgments of right and wrong and good and bad (etc.) and focus entirely on the...
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The Scylla and Charybdis of Moralism

Morality as I conceive it involves the existence of and belief in objective truths about right and wrong, good and bad, etc. To disambiguate we can speak of the belief in objective values as moralism and the existence of objective values as morality proper; hence moralism is the belief in morality. The nature of moralism thus defined has two interestingly opposite consequences for the ethical life and society:  1)   On the one hand, moralists tend to hold their beliefs with absolute and unshakeable conviction. (This assertion could be taken as a mere stipulation, so that it is true only analytically, in the way bachelors are unmarried. In this case “moralist” would take on a connotation or even distinct meaning from “moralist” in the stringent and simple sense of one who believes in morality. However, since I believe, as a matter of empirical fact, that moralism in the stringent sense tends to generate moralism in the robust sense, I don’t worry too much about this ambigui...
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Who Is more likely to be a psychopath: the rational moralist or the emotional amoralist?

  In the Afterword to the 2011 Edition of his book The Expanding Circle (Princeton University Press), Peter Singer makes the extraordinary admission that he has seen the light about the problematic nature of objective morality. Nevertheless he ends by cleaving to it, after providing an extremely weak argument, namely that even though a moral reason is not inherently motivating, we will nevertheless, at least in certain circumstance\s, find a moral reason to be compelling, that is, rational. To me this argument sounds almost (?) circular.  But what is even more salient for me is Singer’s conception of the rational as something that is quite distinct from what he calls the “emotional.” “[W]hether a belief gives us reasons to do something is a normative question, and whether it motivates us to do it is a psychological question.” “[I]f we can accept the idea of objective moral truths, we do have an alternative to reliance on everyday moral intuitions that, according to the bes...
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Two Steps

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

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