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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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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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The Sting of Free Will

 Introspecting or examining myself phenomenologically (which is usually where I get my inspirations), it seems to me that if I find myself in disagreement with someone, whether it be morally, factually, aesthetically, you name it, I  want  them to agree with me. This, by the usual moralist alchemy or psycho-logic, then transmutes into my thinking they  ought  to share my opinion or taste or preference or whatever; and so they are  wrong  not to. This also implies that I see them as  willfully  disagreeing with me, since moral ascriptions presume free will. And this is what gives feelings of others being immoral, or irrational, or ignorant, or philistines, etc., their  sting.  That's why I see  all  responses to disagreement, that is, of  any  category, as of a moralistic piece.
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To Redefine or to Dereify? That is the question

A kind of issue that arises again and again in philosophy is whether it makes more sense, or would have better consequences, to revise a concept or else to deny its instantiation. An example of the former is the way the notion of what a planet is has altered drastically through the ages. At one time it referred simply to the wanderers in the heavens (its literal meaning), that is, those celestial entities that moved relative to the “fixed” stars. This included not only objects that we still call planets but also the Sun and the Moon. Then Aristotle proposed that they were holes in a celestial sphere that allowed light from the empyrean to shine through. Now we conceive them as large spheres orbiting a star, and even our own Earth is numbered among them.   An example of the latter is the ether, which was once thought to be a substance that filled space and provided the medium through which light waves traveled, just as water provides this service for ocean waves and air for soun...
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What Is the Question? What Is the Answer? The Relation between Meta-ethics and Normative Ethics or On the Good Life

Gertrude Stein is famously said to have asked Alice Toklas, “What is the answer?” and upon hearing only silence then asked, “In that case, what is the question?” It occurs to me now that the distinction between meta-ethics and normative ethics could be put in similar terms, as follows. Meta-ethics is in the business of figuring out what question to ask about ethics; normative ethics is then the business of offering an answer (or answers) to that question.  Here is how this division of labor comes into play with my ethics of desirism. I propose that the proper question to ask about ethics is How shall I (or we) live? or What shall I (or we) do? and not the moralistic How ought one (everyone) live? or What ought one (everyone in such-and-circumstances) do? In other words, ethics is about how to live but not about morals (understood as categorical and commanding). I have called this proposal desirism because the import of the “shall” is to ascertain how to achieve what we ...
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Intrinsic Desire, Utility, and Reason, or The Meaning of Life Simply Explained

For someone to say they are going to explain the meaning of life is like trying to answer the prosecutor’s question, “Why did you commit the theft?” when there has been no theft. “What is the meaning of life?” presumes that life has a meaning. But it doesn’t. It would be more precise, then, to speak of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of life, that is, why life seems to have a meaning. Yet a third option is to offer an alternative meaning of “meaning” as something subjective. In that case I can indeed offer an explanation, that is, of why life has, or can have, subjective meaning. And that is what I intend to do, and simply, in this essay. We are all filled with desires. These desires provide whatever meaning life has for us. If we desired nothing, life would indeed have no meaning, neither objective nor subjective. But if I am set upon having something, or keeping something I have, or getting rid of something, then meaning appears. And if there is some overarching desire (or...
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Key Issues for the Amoralist

My practical argument for ethical desirism contains these two premises (or, more accurately, this is my explanation of why desirism appeals to me and why  I recommend it to others, since I am not trying to prove or require anything):  1) Moralism (the belief in objective morality or values or norms generally, possibly including truth itself) does a lot of damage (to the self, to others, to society, to nonhumans) and, more precisely, is net noxious relative to desirism (= amoralism + reflection).  2) There are ways for a desirist (and desirist world) to achieve the practical ends a desirist deems worth keeping and without the damages inflicted by moralism (or mere, unreflecting amoralism).  Objection: I think the chief bogeyman when one considers those two claims is that without the objective imprimatur of morality, one’s opponents, whom a moralist would deem evil-doers, will have the practical upper hand. There are two ways that might seem to be so:  ...
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Confession

I want a world in which no one morally judges anyone (themself or others). Put aside all the empirical hand-waving about how the world would be better (more to our collective considered liking). Who the hell knows or ever will? The real engine of my embrace of amoralism and especially moral abolitionism is a set of personal reactions I have to moralism.  1) One reaction is to people being moralistic. I find this  intrinsically  distasteful. Like a bad smell. Its offensive features are its arrogance or egotism, its inevitable double standard, and the like (not to mention that it's based on a false belief, but I really  won't  dwell on that, since, like the empirical argument, it's not the main engine).  2) Another reaction is to being morally judged by another. I really hate the idea that someone else sees me as doing something wrong or as morally bad.  3) Another reaction is to feeling morally guilty or somehow morally inadequate. This is also re...
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