Negotiating the Moral Roadblock

Moralism gets in the way …causes delays in dealing with a problem … postpones or precludes enjoyment … sidetracks meaningful, helpful discussion… in a word, is the opposite of practical, which ethics must be in essence. 

Obviously the moralist does not accept this characterization…at least of her own moralism. The point I want to make in this essay is that the desirist has to get over his own moralism in order to have any chance of convincing a moralist to recognize and relinquish hers. 

Thus, I would like to have a heart to heart with my friend about what I see to be her misunderstanding of something I had said. However, her moralism stands in the way of this ever happening. And in two ways. First, her response to the misunderstanding was extreme. This was due to her moralism. (Indeed, there might even be a third moralist element here, in that the misunderstanding itself may have been due to a moralist proneness to hear the worst: a moralist hearing aid, as it were.) Second (and following thereupon), it would be embarrassing for her to apologize because to do so would be to admit that she had done something morally wrong (precisely because her reaction had been extreme; so we're not simply talking about her having been mistaken about something, which might be conceived as a nonmoral and purely cognitive mistake). 

    So I simply could not expect to get a straight answer from her if I asked her to ponder if her misunderstanding of what I said really made any sense. (Nor, probably, could she expect to get a straight answer from herself.) Not so long as she felt compelled to justify herself rather than simply explain herself. That is the real problem of moralism. Just so if I were to express my opinion that the main reason we are having difficulties is not the ‘issues’ themselves but rather her refusal to see all of them as interaction effects, calling for mutual cooperation in resolving them, as opposed to her moralist take on them, which is zero-sum: One of us must be wrong. And since that damn well won’t be her, it must be me. 

But this creates a triple problem for me:

 

1. I don’t believe I could be wrong because I don’t believe in right and wrong to begin with.

2. Insofar as I do hold moral opinions, I do not think I am wrong.

3. I don’t think the problem can be solved by only one of us changing. This is precisely the problem with moralism: It is a roadblock to an effective solution by two parties because it presumes that only one party is responsible … which of course leads only to further conflict rather than solving the problem at hand.

Now the key irony (and potential meta-roadblock) is that, of course, I am now insisting that she “alone” is responsible for the impasse, precisely by her moralism. This sounds like my amoralism is moralistic. So the subtle but crucial key to becoming an effective (and genuine) amoralist is to avoid this meta-trap. Therefore it is I – and I alone!! – who must come up with an effective way to persuade her to give up her moralism. And this involves my having to give up yet another moralism of thinking it “unfair” that I alone should need to shoulder this responsibility. No, it is not my responsibility; it is simply what I must do if the problem is to be solved. I am under no obligation to (try to) do it. It’s just a matter of what I want, and how much I want it (plus luck). 

Note: “Mariupol mon amour” offers a more detailed treatment of the same point.

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