An Amoralist Interpretation of Buddhism

My newfound embrace of amoralism has seemed to create a tension with my long-time embrace of Buddhism[1]; for the particular form of amoralism I have developed relies on desire,[2] whereas Buddhism counsels us to forswear desire.[3] Thus, I advise avoiding judgments of moral right and wrong and instead expressing what you desire after you have reflected on whatever is the matter at hand, say, somebody kicking a dog for fun. In both cases you might want the person to stop kicking the dog, and even for the same reason, namely, that the action is causing unnecessary pain to the dog; but the inferences will be different, thus: 

The moral case: 

I see someone kicking a dog for fun.

I believe that causing unnecessary pain to a sentient being is wrong.

Therefore I judge that the person should stop kicking the dog. 

The amoral case: 

I see someone kicking a dog for fun.

I don’t want any sentient being to suffer unnecessary pain.

Therefore I want the person to stop kicking the dog. 

Elsewhere I have made my case at length that the second scenario has definite advantages over the first.[4] In this essay I want to strengthen the case by reconciling my preference for the second scenario with the apparently opposed Buddhist recommendation. And I propose to do so by helping Buddhism deal with some problems of its own. 

So how would a Buddhist approach the kicking-the-dog example? Buddhism diagnoses the central human ill as suffering due to desiring. For example, one might have supposed that a person suffers from getting sick; but Buddhism instructs that, while getting sick may cause inconveniences and hardships and even pain, it would result in suffering only if one desired not to be sick…or desired something else that the sickness precluded, such as going on a picnic. Therefore Buddhism prescribes the elimination of desire as the key to the good life. 

But this bald statement of the doctrine lends itself to three major objections. The most obvious one is that the prescription throws the baby out with the bath water, since while desire may be a necessary component of suffering, it is equally or by the same reasoning a necessary component of happiness. After all, would being healthy make one feel good if one had no desire to be healthy? It’s hard to see why it would if feeling sick sans the desire not to be sick would not make one feel bad. 

A second objection is that the Buddhist prescription appears to be utterly immoral or selfish in that it would seem to advise not permitting oneself to become upset about a person kicking a dog for fun or anything else that might perturb one’s equanimity, this therefore being the highest value it enshrines. 

 Finally, Buddhism appears to be paradoxical in that it counsels us to desire to give up desiring.[5] 

So, yesterday, I was walking down a woodland path when suddenly[6] I became Enlightened. For all of my adult life, so far as I now recall, I have suffered, that is, existentially. To all outward, and even to a large extent inward, appearance, my life has been excellent. And yet I have carried within me a deep, deep dissatisfaction, which I would commonly articulate as, “I wish I had never been born.” There was a time when I seriously considered suicide, but that has faded; and there does not seem to be any diminution of my normal passions and pleasures. My condition would therefore be diagnosed, as I was once told by a (philosophical) psychologist, as despair and not depression; and so you might even say it was a philosophical rather than a psychological disease. 

Now I must admit that my despair is not quite so contentless as the above description might suggest. It has centered on not having a “partner,” which has been my predominant if intermittent condition. So Buddhism would seem to advise: Cease to desire to have a partner. But having had a partner and experienced the greatest worldly bliss I could imagine, it has been hard to work up the desire not to have the desire for (more of) what had then been satisfied. And even if I could, would I not then be falling prey to the paradox of desire, which would cause me to suffer its unfulfillment (to desire nothing) … until I gave it up too? And if I did then achieve that blessed, nirvanic state, what would be the payoff? – that I felt nothing? Would it (so to speak?) feel good simply not to feel bad? 

So what happened on the woodland path? In an (as it seemed, arbitrary) instant I sensed that everything was OK. I realized that what I lacked (or wanted in the other sense – or both senses -- of that chameleonic[7] word) was not a problem, or not The Problem I had my whole life long taken it to be. Thus, it seemed I had reached the state of desirelessness, and not only for a partner, but for anything and everything. But now note the exquisite equivocation. For I still did (and do) want to have a partner; but in some sense I have ceased to feel it a lack. In other words, I am still whole without this partner. So I want (sense 1) but do not want (sense 2) a partner. 

More dominoes fell, and now ones of a moralist stripe, which is key to the main point I want to make in this essay. First, I realized that my desire had lost its sense of entitlement. In other words, the world or life does not “owe” me a partner (or anything else). I am not deserving of a partner (or even of life). 

Second, I myself have no obligation to have a partner (or anything else). I am, therefore, not a bad person for not having one; there is nothing morally wrong with me. Nor am I inadequate or unworthy in some similarly categorical way -- culpably stupid, ignorant, naïve, incompetent, timid, crazy, what have you. 

            So the “lesson” here is that Buddhism is not asking us to cease to desire in the straightforward sense of wanting things (which might even be psychologically impossible) but rather in the sense of wanting things with a moral imperative. This at one and the same time resolves all three objections to Buddhism and demonstrates Buddhism’s compatibility with desirism. Indeed, desirism may simply be Buddhism! 

Beyond Buddhism? 

But note that desirism may seem to go beyond Buddhism if Buddhism is understood simply as a remedy for suffering. Buddhism is often summarized in Four Noble Truths, which are: 

1.      Life is suffering.

2.      The cause of suffering is desire.

3.      The cure for suffering is (therefore) the elimination of desire.

4.      Desire can be eliminated by a specified (“eight-fold”) means—the Buddhist path. 

Even under the saving interpretation  I offered above, according to which desire is taken to refer  specifically to moralized desire, the ultimate goal and justification, or motivation, for plying the Buddhist path would seem to be, according to the schema, the elimination of one’s personal suffering, with the true identity of suffering, as opposed to “mere” pain, now understood to be the feeling (or belief) of moral guilt or personal inadequacy. 

            But I want to suggest that the benefits exceed that. Specifically, the ethics I want to promote champions reason and compassion and not only “de-moralization.”[8] And it seems to me that as one pares away the moral crust from one’s desires, one gives both reason and compassion more opportunity to blossom.[9] Morality constricts them with its adamancy that one’s own desire is good and any opposing desire bad. 

            I am sure that Buddhism in some form or other also allows for this broader understanding of its benefits and purpose. So it may still be the case that desirism and Buddhism are equivalent in their practical upshot.


[1] I have already dealt with (and resolved to my satisfaction) tensions with Kantianism and animal ethics.

[2] As well as belief.

[3] Accordingly I dubbed my theory “desirism,” but more recently I have soured on this term for reasons explained elsewhere.

[4] For example, wanting something is more directly tied to being motivated than is judging something right or wrong.

[5] I proposed resolutions of these problems in my doctoral dissertation, but I now prefer the one I will offer in this essay.

[6] There is additional backstory to what I am about to relate, but it may be of only biographical interest.

[7] Or polysemous, to use a technical term.

[8] Call it “desirism” or something else, since it too goes beyond its standard formulation, which is cultivating nonmoral desires.

[9] I am aware of empirical research suggesting that reasoning enhances selfishness: The more one thinks about whether to help someone or uphold some principle at personal expense, pausing one’s spontaneous response, the more one is likely to consider the costs and benefits to oneself. But this would apply to moral reasoning as well as amoral reasoning, would it not? One is also entitled to be skeptical of the experimental design of any research on morals (see Thomas Pölzler’s Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences).

Popular posts from this blog

Closing the Gaps

Who Is more likely to be a psychopath: the rational moralist or the emotional amoralist?

Eating of the Tree: The phenomenology of the moral moment