Dispelling the Illusion of Motivational Inadequacy in Ethics

Sometimes when explaining my desirist ethics I say something like, “And, yes, if I desired something strongly enough, I might even kill someone.” But this invites the retort, “So everybody can go around killing anyone they want just because they feel like it?” Usually I reply that I have in mind things like killing Hitler, but this will hardly satisfy the objector, who can reply in turn that Hitler might very well have the same feeling about me. This I readily concede because I feel it is perfectly in keeping with the relativity of desires and hence the relativity of ethics (i.e., rational desire). I also point out that a statement like “everybody can go around killing anyone they want” has always been true, even of moralists. But, obviously, this still leaves an unsettling feeling about desirism. Somehow the “can” of ethics is supposed to be different from the “can” of empirical fact. Yes of course anyone “can” kill anyone they want, but they can not do so morally; the latter “can” is equivalent to “morally may” or “morally permissibly” and not merely “has the physical capacity to.” 

            I have now thought of a different way to account for what is going on here, namely as a diagnosis of the unsettling feeling rather than a further explication of my desirist thesis. In other words, I don’t think the problem lies with desirism so much as with the moralist response to it. I submit that the reason it sounds so shocking to claim, as the desirist does, that (under certain circumstances) ethics places Hitler’s desire to kill me and my desire to kill Hitler on a par is that the moralism in all of us presumes, and indeed creates, a distinction between what is the case and what ought to be the case, and so by contrast to what ought to be the case, what is the case seems inadequate to guide our behavior. 

            Thus, the moralist argues that killing someone who is raping your daughter is, under certain circumstances, permissible and perhaps even obligatory, because the raping is a grievous wrong. The desirist can only argue (or, strictly speaking, only explain) that the reason she killed the rapist is that she so strongly wanted to protect her daughter. But, replies the moralist, perhaps the rapist equally strongly desired to rape her. To the moralist this is an unacceptable stalemate of motivations, whereas morality provides an unequivocal imprimatur in favor of the killing of the rapist. But this moralist response cannot even get off the ground if one views morality’s injunctions to be as fictitious as God’s commandments. And my special point now is that, absent the moral illusion, the strong disliking of the raping would no longer seem inadequate as an ethical guide. The very concept of desiring or liking would be much richer and seem more adequate without the empty contrast to a non-existent alternative. 

            I also suspect that part of the appeal of the moral illusion is that it seems to add some kind of power and protection over and above whatever empirical response one may be able and motivated to make to an unwanted situation. Thus, if it’s all just about desires, then the rapist and the mother, or Hitler and I, may all be stymied, or the “good guys” may even “lose” due to an imbalance of power. But by declaring that the rapist and Hitler are doing something wrong one now has, in effect, God on one’s side to carry the day in favor of the right … if not “here” and now than in the hereafter. 

But this is fantasy. The desirist denies that the moralist “may” and “must” and “cannot” have any purchase on reality, and so their invocation amounts to nothing more than an incantation. (And you can usually be sure that the rapist and Hitler are calling on their own god of morality to boot.)  The only way to stop the rapist or Hitler is to gird one’s motivational loins to do so. There will be no cavalry of morality riding over the hill to the rescue.

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