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 the right thing to do, etc. … as if there were an objectively true and univocal or universal answer. That I contend is a myth, and, in the main, a noxious one. In other words, my philosophy advises (to paraphrase the game of Monopoly): “Go directly to action. Do not pass morality.” We don’t have to figure out what is the right thing to do, and then work up the motivation to do it. We only have to figure out what we really want, all things considered, and then we will, other things equal, do it. I now care about facts and feelings, not mythical objective values. I am not attempting to justify or prove anything, but only influence or persuade (albeit by means of an honest deployment of the relevant acts).

A thousand questions or criticisms will occur to the analytically inclined thinker, and I have addressed them in several books and articles. In the short space of this blog I would simply like to keep providing examples of what I see as the advantages of desirism over morality. In most of my other writing, the examples I have offered emerged from my personal experience. But I am also a cliptomaniac and all the while have been collecting items from the daily newspaper. I have hundreds of them. Seldom have I had the time, however, to analyze them in writing. But I can no longer refrain from posting my thoughts about the occasional zinger. Hence this blog. But I may never catch up with the backlog.

Some of the entries herein will be more theoretically informed and analytically detailed than others, but the emphasis in this blog will be on immediate responses to timely events. Accordingly most of these will not have been published elsewhere and may be in rather rough form, which I would ultimately wish to refine. The complete list of my more polished publications on the subject in books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and other blogs can be found HERE.

BTW: The title of this post, "Nonstarters," refers to the initial moralist efforts to resolve practical problems in some of the examples to follow. Those examples then contain my alternative suggestion for carrying out a truly ethical -- that is, nonmoral or amoral -- inquiry that will also generate action.

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