Posts

Nonstarters

Since 2007 I have been a philosophical amoralist, by which I mean that I no longer believe there are such things as moral right and wrong or good and bad or free will and responsibility or worth and desert and so forth – in a word, there are no objective values. In the place of morality I have proposed an ethics I call desirism, according to which I recommend making our decisions and acting on the basis of our rationally vetted desires. I presume that we already decide and act, and feel for that matter, on the basis of our desires, that being a fact of psychology or an analytic truth (or both); desirism just adds my personal recommendation and preference that we do so only after as much relevant rational research and reflection as is feasible in the circumstances. There is nothing particularly novel about that recommendation. What is novel is what I exclude from the process of making ethical decisions or acting. I suggest omitting the step where we are attempting to figure out what is ...
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Metaethics without Question Begging: an excursus in metametaethics

Meta-ethics seeks to answer the question: What is ethics? I myself take ethics to be the inquiry into how to live. But, consistently, I believe, with other so-called moral error theorists, I argue that this inquiry cannot be simply presumed to be asking “How ought we to live?” That way of phrasing the question seems to me to imply that the answer must be some kind of moralism. [1] But this begs the question, since moralism is precisely what I, as a thoroughgoing amoralist, reject. I hold that morality, as normally conceived, is an illusion; indeed, this is a subset of the larger illusion that there are objective values. Furthermore, as a moral abolitionist, I believe that this illusion is largely baneful to the world most of us, on reflection, would desire. Therefore I recommend eliminating or suppressing the belief in morality, or, in a word, vanquishing moralism. So instead of “How ought we to live?” I am offering an answer to what I consider to be the proper question for ethics t...
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I’m Happy I’m Sad

I am an amoralist, by which I mean that I do not believe in objective values like moral good and bad and right and wrong. All of those are subjective feelings disguised as objective judgments. Thus for example, if someone declares that it is wrong to eat meat, my analysis is that that person really does not want anyone to eat or otherwise harm animals, and their dislike is felt so intensely that they feel they must be perceiving some real feature of the practice, namely, its wrongness. But that feature is a phantasm, I am now convinced, analogous to the spinning of the room we’re in when we experience vertigo. The room isn’t spinning; it is we who are having a subjective experience of dizziness. Just so, the moralistic vegetarian may be feeling real empathy and compassion for animals at their very real pain and suffering and confinement and slaughter, which feeling, either spontaneously or due to instruction, transmutes into a judgment or perception of wrongness and evil.  And th...
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Bayesian Rationality

I love rationality. But what is it? I have attempted to characterize it on numerous occasions, and indeed question whether it is an “it” to begin with. I view all concepts as polysemous, meaning that they have several meanings. So of course that applies to rationality too. Nevertheless there are some broad divisions that add helpful specificity to an otherwise vague or ambiguous concept without reducing it to ideological purity.  So as regards rationality, to begin with there is deduction versus induction. Deduction establishes standards for proving things to be true. The way it does this is by stipulating rules of logic, which guarantee that if the premises of one’s argument are true, then one’s conclusion will also be true. Note, however, that this characterization is hypothetical. It does not establish that the premises of any argument are true. And so, rationality in the form of deduction can never prove anything, that is, if proof is taken to mean that a conclusion is tr...
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The Telltale Moralist

One can know the theory of amoralism backwards and forwards, and even embrace it, and still fail to see the moralism in oneself. Of course there is nothing new about this kind of self-blindness. “Know thyself” remains an aspiration for everyone. [1] Let me therefore offer some signs of moralism to be on the alert for.  Perhaps the most obvious indicator is emotionality, simply because, almost by definition, it is a salient phenomenon. Not all emotions are moralist, but moralism will commonly be emotional. Thus for example if you find yourself forcefully displaying a feeling of dislike or aversion, this may be telling you that you have gone beyond merely [2] holding a negative attitude toward something or someone and are judging them morally wrong or bad besides. [3] Negative moralism tends to predominate over positive moralism, and is the bigger troublemaker; and its emotional form will typically be some form of anger. [4] Displays of emotion have well-known qualities, such a...
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Approach and Avoidance: Emotions and Morals

I maintain that the archetypical moral emotion is anger, and in fact that anger is impossible with moralism. My argument, such as it is, is based on two informal observations: (1) People who believe in objective right and wrong tend to feel and exhibit one or another form of anger (contempt, indignation, outrage, etc.) when forming a moral judgment or even just disagreeing with someone (about anything whatever), and (2) Under analytic inspection any instance of anger will reveal a judgment that someone has done something morally wrong. So my recommendation, as a moral abolitionist, that we all forsake moral judgment would thereby nip anger in the bud. And that is an outcome I happen to like (for reasons that are time-honored).  There are familiar objections to this recommendation, which I have addressed on multiple occasions. But right now I simply want to contrast this conception of morals and anger to the ethics and feeling life I favor. A life without morals would not be a lif...
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Change of Focus for Effective Advocacy

(a follow-up to The Stranger )  It is not uncommon to wish someone else would behave or think or feel differently from the way they do (or we think they do). Nor is it uncommon to make efforts to change them accordingly, whether by logical persuasion or emotional persuasion or hidden means or legal or physical compulsion. But as a subjectivist, I have come to understand that a first, and sometimes even the only, step is to change oneself. I do not want to go so far as a Stoic, who would have us ignore that someone is twisting our arm and simply focus on not letting it affect us, or a Buddhist, who would advise that the whole problem is believing oneself even exists. My suggestion is simply that the kind of reaction that someone else’s behavior or whatever (and even here, strictly speaking it is our own perception or interpretation thereof) arouses within us might be the first target to focus on when deciding how to respond.  There are at least two ways this makes sense. O...
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On Objectivity: A Sylvan Scenario

As a normative nihilist, I believe that all values are subjective, including moral values. I also believe that it is useful to believe this. [1] However, getting the hang of nihilism in practice is no mean feat. I have written a great deal about the difficulties and how to deal with them, most explicitly in my most recent monograph, Ethical Health (Routledge, 2025). This essay is a further exploration of that theme. A curious feature of subjectivity is that it clothes itself in objectivity. If you are hiking with a companion in the woods in winter and are suddenly overcome by the scene, it is natural to exclaim, “This is so beautiful!” But this seemingly innocent expression is fraught with social peril. For suppose your companion says, “I don’t think so.” This comment has three aspects that could irritate you. One is that it confronts you with a judgment that may strike you as false, even absurd. Second is that it may seem to be challenging your (in this case aesthetic) judgment. ...
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