Glad or Sad but not Mad

Sometimes it seems as if a desirist would be pretty similar to a moralist in most respects. After all, both could have the same nonmoral desires, such as that human fetuses not be aborted, or women not be legally restricted from having abortions, or human beings be free to eat whatever they want, or human beings eat only plants, etc. ad inf. The only difference is that the desirist would deny that any of these are matters of objective right or wrong, good or bad. What practical difference would this make? I (and others) have argued at length that, overall, intransigence and conflict would be reduced. In this essay I would like to focus on another, and quite stark, difference: The desirist’s emotional life would be reduced … and, thereby, enhanced.

            Specifically: The (ideal) desirist would never get angry. For the desirist there is desire, and desire can take on either of two emotional states: satisfied or frustrated. If a desire is satisfied, then a person is happy to that extent. If a desire is frustrated, a person is unhappy to that extent. Glad and sad – that’s it. Mad is nowhere in the repertoire. That is because to be “mad” (angry) involves believing that someone has done something wrong or is bad. But a perfect desirist will never believe that. No more than they would believe that God (or Santa Claus) will punish or reward someone.

            So, say, if a desirist saw someone performing a cruel act out of sheer sadism, their response – assuming the desirist strongly desired that such an act not occur – would be grief, not anger or hatred or indignation or outrage or contempt. Furthermore, their motivation would be entirely directed toward stopping the cruelty, or preventing future cruelty, without being partly squandered on expressions of outrage or acts of retribution. (That is also my answer to the objection that the removal of anger will inhibit effective action: It would only inhibit pointless  or counterproductive or diversionary action -- actions that only create new problems in the long run, such as retribution for the retribution.)

            I wish everyone was like that. I dream of being such a person!

            An objector could say: The example is tendentious. It contains the crucial hypothetical “assuming the desirist strongly desired that such an act not occur.” But, as acknowledged at the outset, a desirist might have no such desire, or even have a strong desire to inflict cruelty for its own sake. Similarly, a bystander might want to watch this, or at best be indifferent to it.

            My reply is that ethics cannot transcend human nature, i.e.,  our human desires. Desirism asks only that we rationalize our desires to a practicable degree so that we are sure they “really are” our desires. But then, whatever desires remain, so they shall be; there is no God or categorical imperative having authoritative oversight. But that is OK, because, I maintain as an empirical hypothesis, humanity’s rational desires will conform to what would normally seem right or good to reflective moralists in a given context. So for example, no rational society would want to encourage sadistic cruelty. 

See also “World without Beauty.”

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