The Incredible Oughtness of Desire

Excerpted from “Unrequited moralism” in Chapter 1 of Reason and Ethics by Joel Marks (Routledge, 2021), p. 30.

The world seems puzzling to a moralist. I am not referring to the sometime difficulty of figuring out what is the right thing to do, etc. Rather I refer to the failure of the universe to make things turn out morally right. For it is not only people whom we expect to do the right thing – especially other people, since it is almost axiomatic that we ourselves are always in the right – but the world itself (of which, to be sure, people are a part). 

The essence of the moral (and more generally of what is called the normative) is the sense that things ought to be a certain way. This sets morals apart from the factual, which is the realm of what is. Thus, it is not only that my friend did berate me (fact) but should not have (morals), but also that a little girl was struck down by a terrible disease (fact), but ought not to have been. We do speak in this way even in the latter sort of case. And sometimes, in such extremity, people will attribute actual agency to the overtly inanimate world; for example, the Devil must have been responsible for this evil occurrence. 

The moral sense of ought brings with it a certain expectation, which, as already noted, is twofold: We both anticipate that things will turn out as they ought, and think it morally requisite that they do. I will add a third element: We want things to turn out as we believe they ought to. Indeed, we believe things ought to turn out as we want them to. Hence (by an illogical psycho-logic) we think they will. Thus, when they don’t, we are disappointed in addition to being morally put out and surprised. We are sad and also want to blame someone; so if our worldview does not include the Devil, then we are left with God to hold accountable. But since God is Good, bewilderment prevails. Why was my child allowed to suffer and die? Why am I berated by the person to whom I have only been good? Indeed, I am always good; I am a good person. So: Why can’t I have everything I want? Morality works in mysterious ways.

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

Eating of the Tree: The phenomenology of the moral moment

I would like to compile a set of examples of experiences that convey the moral problem , by which I mean the irresistibility of believing in moral truth when (1) in fact there is no (such thing as) moral truth and (2) the belief that there is causes serious problems in human and group (on up to international) relations. These examples will also suggest an amoral solution to the moral problem.  Here is one such example:  The dogs are barking. Day in and day out, day and night, two white dogs owned by a neighbor down the street bark and bark and bark. All the rest of us on the block are annoyed, some seriously (especially on summer evenings when you are trying to get to sleep with the windows open), and several have asked that the dogs be kept indoors or else trained; but the neighbor has ignored us. Some of us have then complained to the dog warden, who has visited and even remonstrated with the neighbor more than once; but ultimately to no avail. I suppose the treatment of t...
Read more