The Spread
I have been inveighing against morality for a decade and more. My constant readers know the reasons I have given: a basketful. But two main ones stand out: Morality strengthens desires and preferences and thereby leads to more and fiercer conflicts, and morality makes us liable to guilt feelings, which are painful.[1] There is also a third reason lurking beneath these two, which is that morality is a set of false beliefs. The implication, then, is that the two noxious conditions – conflict and guilt feelings – have no intrinsic justification: They arise from delusion. There might still be an extrinsic justification, of course: Perhaps dispelling the delusion would be costly, or might even be impossible. I have spilt most of my ink countering those suggestions. My observations of the world including personal experience lend support to the possibility of dealing with the moral delusion in the same way as visual illusions, which is to say that while the illusion may be more or less ineradicable, it need not be intractable, since we have the capacity to recognize it as illusion and in this way transcend it. In other words, an illusion is not necessarily delusory. Descartes wrote of our having the general capacity to disabuse ourselves of illusions in his Meditations. Going even further, the perception psychologist J.J. Gibson spoke of the natural primacy of accurate perception over illusion through everyday active observing. But morality may indeed require a special and ongoing effort to keep it at bay, more along the lines of the protagonist’s struggle with schizophrenia in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
And indeed I myself can attest to the difficulty of cleaving to amorality in my everyday dealings with the world. Rather than an illusion like the “bent” pencil halfway in a glass of water, which one can easily ignore, knowing full well the pencil is straight, I often find the illusion of morality to be like the vertigo I have sometimes felt, even when lying down on a bed, so that I clutch the mattress for dear life lest I be thrown off into the air. Just as I cannot help but hold on, so, when suddenly overtaken by something I spontaneously perceive as morally wrong or bad, I cannot help but be “taken in” entirely, and react with outrage or hatred. My conscious espousal of amoralism does now give me the ability to “back off” fairly quickly (just as my vertigo wears off in a couple of minutes). But the damage may already have been done, to the point where even a heartfelt apology will be insufficient ever to bring us back to the status quo ante. (Compare getting into a bad car accident due to an onslaught of vertigo.)
It also doesn’t “help” that an amoralist apology does not have the same meaning as a moralist apology. It only means I am sad that (1) another person is in some kind of pain, (2) I may suffer some consequences I won’t like, and (3) I played an active role in bringing these things about; but not that (4) I did anything morally wrong, or (5) what I did manifests something morally wrong with or bad about me. Of course I could pretend to feel the two last, or allow it to be misunderstood that I do. There may be no useful purpose served to me or to the other person by my attempting to effect a quick study and conversion to amoralism by the apologee.[2]
There is another cause for the difficulty of dispelling the delusion of morality (and all of the above is but prefatory to my addressing this, the main topic of this essay): Morality is ubiquitous. And I don’t just mean that we are confronted on all sides by issues that seem to be of a moral nature. That is true (at least if one is a thoughtful moralist). But more than that … or an unexplored aspect of that … is that morality seeps into other categories of experience. By a category of experience I have in mind, for example, aesthetics, which might naturally be thought a different category from ethics or morality. Thus, whether a sunset, or a painting of a sunset, is beautiful is not a moral issue but an aesthetic one, we might suppose. Of course there can be moral issues lurking about, such as whether Leni Riefenstahl had a moral obligation to refrain from glorifying Naziism with stunning filmmaking. But the assigning of aesthetic values does usually seem to be a different animal from assigning moral ones: The film may be undeniably powerful as an aesthetic creation and at the same time unquestionably evil in intent or influence. (Of course both judgments could be relative even if there were such a thing as beauty or morality.) My claim, however, is that behaviors that are aesthetic, and others naturally assigned to other categories, such as the prudential, the humorous, the intelligent, the rational, and the sane, may also fall under the rubric of the moral.
To help bring out my meaning I will relate the episode that sparked this line of thinking in me. I was visiting a friend and helping her clear out her kitchen cupboard. One item was a jar of tahini, which I myself had brought to her apartment on a previous occasion to cater to my vegan diet in her omnivorous household. This particular tahini turned out to be too oily for my use as a spread, so we both agreed to discard it. There being no recycling in her neighborhood she put the jar in a grocery store plastic bag she was using in lieu of a trash bin. I noticed at the time that she laid the jar horizontally at the bottom, which struck me as somehow odd but I could not put my mental finger on why.
Some while later we were in the living room when she decided to get a cup of tea from the kitchen. I heard a loud groan. “What is it?” I called as I approached the kitchen. “It leaked! It’s all over the floor!” Yes, a truly nightmarish scenario: The tahini oil was spread over much of the kitchen floor. I immediately felt guilty. Why? Well, the obvious cause of the leak was my failure to close the jar tightly after I had last used it. I say obvious, although not necessarily true. I am pretty careful about things in general. In fact I take note when someone else screws on a lid carelessly. So I did think it odd that I would have been guilty of this particular oversight. And yet, who else would have used the tahini? Not my friend. But another possibility is that the lid does not tighten securely. There are certainly jars like that, or that loosen over time. Furthermore, there would have been no leaking if my friend had not laid down the jar horizontally, or for that matter re-used a plastic bag as a trash bag before checking to see if it had a hole in it. All in all, however, in the midst of this “theoretical” uncertainty, I could see that, as I say, the obvious cause was my having been careless.
Yet my friend did not accuse me of anything. In fact she made note of her own role in what had happened: “It was my fault for not checking to see if the lid was screwed on tight before I put the jar in the bag.” But my sense of guilt was further reflected in how I was perceiving her reaction. After all, she could be like the Jewish mother saying, “Don’t worry about not visiting me on the holiday; I’ll just sit here all alone,” meaning, “You’re a rotten son.” My friend could have been saying, “I’m at fault for forgetting what an irresponsible person you are.” On reflection it seems more likely that I was misreading rather than mindreading, and being paranoid, or grossly insecure, and that the real moralist here was me, not her. My friend may have been angry only at herself, with no subtext. Or she might have been miffed with me, but nothing so extreme as to question my very worth. It could be only myself who was being so harshly judgmental, of both myself and her. Holding oneself, and then others, to exacting standards is part and parcel of moralism.
But my concern now is only the phenomenology, whose truth I certainly do know from introspection. The pain I felt was real, even if it was entirely self-imposed. In fact I was raking myself over the coals. For it was not just that I had (possibly) been responsible for causing my friend some grief (and she shooed me away from helping her clean up); it was that my very self had been shown to be inadequate in some fundamental way. I was contemptible (or even beneath contempt if that is different and not just an extra moral exclamation point) – a person no one (including myself) could love or respect. And even though my inadequacy may have been some kind of je ne sais quoi (for I find moralist notions virtually unintelligible on analysis), my pain was intelligible in terms of the concrete consequences my being judged inadequate might have, such as my friend, and perhaps anyone, not wanting to have much to do with me.[3] A definite pall was thus cast over the rest of my visit, which affected not only feeling but also behavior (mine, and hers in response, and how I interpreted hers, etc.; not to mention hers likewise if my mindreading had been accurate). My point is that the whole self, and the self’s worth, is on the line when a wrong act has (or may have) been committed.
But my main point is that, although the pang I was experiencing surely felt like moral guilt, what I had done (if I did it) was not something immoral but at worst careless. There was no evil intent, whether I was responsible for what happened or not. Of course on a utilitarian accounting, the particular intent is not necessarily relevant (so long as there is some intent; otherwise it would not be an action but only a behavior, which would thereby escape moral purview): A careless act would be wrong if it led to non-optimal consequences among the available options, as surely this did (if I had in fact been careless), or if careless acts in general did. And from a virtue theory point of view, carelessness might be viewed as a vice. So there is still plenty of room for morality to wriggle into this episode. Still, there is the suggestion that a moralist response can spread like spilt oil beyond the strictly moral. So I will call this phenomenon the Spread.
Of particular note is prudential (un)worthiness. A person who, say, seems incompetent to take care of themself may be considered worthless to someone else or to themself. But they would not thereby be immoral in the sense of harming someone else intentionally (all the less for having a base motive). It’s true that they could become a burden to others who had to take care of them. For that matter someone’s incompetence could have a direct bearing on another’s welfare, as when a person is forever at a loss to render assistance and might even harm others in the attempt. Beyond a certain point any of these scenarios could elicit a judgment of worthlessness from others or oneself. (Not always, to be sure. It might be said of a person that they were good, and hence had worth, because, even though thoroughly incompetent, they kept trying so hard to take care of themself or help others. They “meant well.” Whether patience eventually wore out would depend on the person making the judgment, not the agent in question.)
I eventually realized that this line of thought could be generalized. I had experienced vividly that guilt could arise from feeling foolish as well as from a prick of conscience. But then I began to take notice that the same effect can arise from feeling ignorant, or stupid, or a philistine, etc. ad inf. Furthermore I observed that the disdain I am accustomed to feel toward other people whom I consider morally in the wrong, can apply as well to people who exhibit these other traits, even unto not finding the same things humorous that I do, or not liking the same films or books or artworks, or being ill or addicted in ways I am not. And what could be more morally tinged than saying of someone: “They [or you] are insane”?
Thus, there is very little difference, phenomenologically speaking, between, say, my (unreflective feeling) view of people who believe in creationism and my view of people who won’t wear masks during the pandemic. The former I see as ignorant or illogical, and the latter I see as selfish. But both I see as contemptible. And while there may be the common denominator that I see both as ignorant or illogical, the feeling I have toward them is of the moralist sort. They ought to be more informed, more intelligent, more rational…and then to the other sorts of cases: less helpless, have a better (= my) sense of humor, more refined (= my) artistic taste, etc. And these are judgments not only on the nature of their action (or inaction, or belief, or desire, or taste, or sanity, or opinion, or), but on their very self: The action (or whatever) is wrong or bad, and the person is (“therefore”) contemptible. And so they elicit my disdain: the wrinkling of my nose as if in the presence of a bad smell. (And analogously and complementarily, just as a person is bad for performing bad or wrong actions, a person is a philistine for liking bad paintings or awful music, etc. The nose wrinkles in the presence of the person or the painting.)
Thus I am really making a claim that has two kinds of significance. The claim is that moral judgmentalism can spread to other and indeed all categories of experience. It is not only matters that are strictly categorized as moral – such as intentionally hurting others or being disrespectful -- that can be judged as morally right or wrong or good or bad, with all their attendant phenomena of guilt and blame and responsibility and obligation and desert and freewill and so forth, but also aesthetic taste, knowledge, intelligence, sense of humor, prudence, health, sanity, and on and on. The first sort of significance is that the bane of moralism is thereby shown to be all-pervasive in one’s soul and in human relations, suggesting that liberation from it would be an even greater boon than might have been supposed. But the second significance is somewhat countervailing – and what brought me to this topic -- namely, that the psychological reality of the Spread makes it that much more difficult to eliminate moralism.
An amoralist avoids thinking and speaking in moralist terms. Well, some types of amoralists accommodate moralist ways of speaking and even thinking and feeling, for example, so-called fictionalists.[4] But in the sequel I have in mind amoralists like myself who are thoroughgoing “abolitionists” and not only believe that morality is a myth but also wish that everyone would share this belief overtly. For example, instead of thinking or saying, “Fred did something wrong” or “I did something wrong,” the amoralist (this being the moral abolitionist of the specific type I have postulated, the so-called desirist, who acts on the basis of their considered desires or preferences) thinks or says, “I don’t like what Fred did” and “I wish I hadn’t done that.” In other words, the amoralist describes their own feelings rather than judging someone, whether another person or themself.
I used to think, however, that an amoralist could apply nonmoralist terms freely … at least in an amoralist society. So for example, it would be perfectly in keeping with one’s amoral outlook to say of (or even to) someone, “You have poor artistic taste,” or “You lack a sense of humor,” or even “You are stupid” or “You are fat” with the same nonjudgmentalism as saying, “You weigh 245 pounds.” I found this wonderfully liberating, for normally we might refrain from speaking truthfully or forthrightly because of fear of offending with moral connotation.
But now that I have come to recognize the Spread, I realize how ridiculous this assumption was. There are two ways to think about why. One is that the moral stain spreads to all normative realms, which would certainly include aesthetics, humor, and so on. So one could still be judging like a moralist when one makes these attributions. The other way to think about this is that moralism can spread to anything one likes or does not like, even beyond any normative realm. So for example it might be supposed that attributing an IQ of 65 to someone is a purely factual or descriptive matter; and even calling them unintelligent might be conceived as, strictly speaking, purely descriptive, even though the word, and certainly “stupid” or “retarded,” has a normative connotation, and even an insulting use as wholly normative. But now I realize that any attribution whatever can be moralistic if one happens to like or dislike a person’s having the property being attributed, or even (as in the painting example) a thing’s having it.
Does this mean that an amoralist would refrain from making assertions of any kind? I have discovered by experiment that it is relatively easy to avoid making moralist assertions in the narrow sense of morality. But is it easy or even possible – not to mention, desirable -- to avoid making any assertions at all? Well, yes, I now think. I would recommend exactly the same techniques as with narrow amoralism. So for example, instead of “You have poor artistic taste” (or “Mantovani’s music is insipid”), the amoralist could say, “You and I have different artistic taste” (or “I am bored by Mantovani’s music”).
In the end, however – although, again, just as with narrow moralism – it is attitude that matters. Constraining language is only a means to this end, but neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for achieving it. So, for example, it may simply be impractical to stop making attributions of IQ, or bodily weight, and so on, and even the kind of subjective substitution I recommend (e.g., “I am bored by Mantovani’s music”) can be moralist; so the onus will be on the attributor to refrain from attaching moral significance to it.
Once again, the attitude to be avoided consists in objectifying the subjective, thereby strengthening resistance to change (“It’s not just my feeling; it’s a fact!”), thereby making conflict more likely and intense. But note that in the case of a nonnormative attribution, such as body weight, there can be a double attribution. First is the attribution of the weight, say, 245 pounds (to a person of a particular height, etc.). I now prefer to see even this sort of attribution eliminated in favor of “It looks like the scale shows 245.” As I have acknowledged, however, this is often impractical. But even so I advocate eliminating the piggy-back attitude, “You are fat” or “You are overweight” in favor of “I think you may want to lose some weight to lessen your chance of health problems down the road.”
At this point a moralist (or a fictionalist etc.) might ask: Why, then, do I recommend that we strive to eliminate or minimize narrowly moralist attributions? Isn’t it just as useful to retain many moral attributions as to retain many nonmoral and certainly many nonnormative attributions? So while it is certainly helpful as a rule to refrain from “thick” language that too readily elicits objectivist feelings, such as “You are a liar!” (or “You are a fatso!”), it is also helpful to retain the attitude of condemnation or disdain for, say, cruelty to animals, even though the reality of the situation is only that you are strongly averse to anyone’s treating animals with indifference to their pain and suffering (just as you may wish, on altruistic or even personal aesthetic grounds, that people not have huge bellies). Just as when attributing IQ or body weight, we can strive to remain mindful of the subjectivity of any attitude we might have toward the particular moral attribution. So why be a moral abolitionist?
My answer is that, however it came to be, (narrowly) moral attributions seem to be the locus from which the noxious attitude of objectification spreads. For example, people seem to have little problem with professing their preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream without feeling the urgent need to objectify their preference as a fact about the superior taste of chocolate ice cream or of their superiority of taste (in a different sense) for preferring it. And even when we do assert a nonnormative fact, such as that Pluto is a planet or the sky is blue, we generally recognize that we are fallible, even in cases where we feel certain. But when it comes to moral attributions, the rule or norm is rather that we know what we are talking about when we assign blame to another and we take umbrage at being contradicted, and we are in a perpetual state of anxious fear (of some je ne sais quoi) and hence denial that we ourselves might be blameworthy of something.
The Spread is the extension of this attitude and anxiety to realms beyond the strictly moral, such that, in the extreme case, any property of any kind that elicits our liking or dislike can become thick, possessing not only its descriptive essence (e.g., weighs more than the statistical norm) but also a moralist patina (e.g., is a fatso). My recommendation is therefore that we go on a no-fat diet by not buying the moral oil in the first place, lest it thicken all of our concepts by spilling and spreading into every nook and cranny of our psychic and social life.
[1]
I have also suggested that the latter may be the underlying basis of the
former, since the intrinsic or extrinsic unpleasantness of “being found”
guilty, by oneself or others, may be what motivates the intransigence of our
self-righteousness and the uncompromisingness of our condemnation of others.
See “The Psychic Basis of Morality.”
[2] Cf. Lutz (2014) on substitutionism.
[3]
There is a character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel White Guard who is such
a klutz that he is really dangerous to have around. But as politically correct
folk caution us, it is one thing to think of a person as having the trait of
clumsiness, and quite another to think of the person as a klutz. I am
suggesting that morality, or at least moralism, is precisely the assignment of the
latter sort of judgment (though the judgment is even more extreme, for the
person with the trait of clumsiness is considered therefore somehow wholly and
fundamentally inadequate, not just with regard to bodily coordination and handling
things). More on this in the sequel.
[4] See e.g. Joyce (2001)
Joyce, Richard. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge University Press.
Lutz, Matt. 2014. “The 'Now What' Problem for error theory.” Philosophical Studies 171 (2): 351-71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24704134