What’s the Point?

As an amoralist I claim that we can, and would be well served to, dispense with morality, and instead get our desires in order. (See for example “The ‘More’ in Morality.”) So for example (as related in my book Hard Atheism) when a friend asked me why I was a vegan, I stated my simple reason thus: “The production of food from animals causes untold suffering and death, and we do not need food from animals, either for nutrition or even gustatory pleasure; so, moved by compassion, I avoid eating any animals or animal products and wish everyone else would too.” Or even more succinctly: “Animal agriculture is cruel; we don’t need it; I don’t like cruelty. Ergo I try to eat only plants.”)

            The salient point for me is that I was thereby able to avoid making out that I was acting from conscience and a moral imperative, with the implication that my friend was morally deficient (wrong, even bad, etc.) for being a dedicated omnivore. My amoralist (or as I call it, desirist) M.O. is simply to consider the relevant facts of a matter and then … feel. In relating my reason to others, therefore, I have only to recite the facts and describe the feelings they engender in me (these also being facts). No objective value need rear its fictitious head. There are only (“objective”) facts about the world and my (“subjective”) feelings. This all strikes me as not only truer to reality but also more likely to be productively efficacious, in that it avoids needless insulting imputations and emotional reactions to them.

            However, over time it has become apparent to me that things are not this simple. Consider again the example. Was my interlocutor really less put out, and hence more likely to hear me out and be influenced by what I had to say, because I was, in effect, imputing insensitivity to him rather than immorality? Does someone mind less being thought cruel, or indifferent to cruelty, than being thought morally guilty of something?

            Further complications: First of all, I am not sure that I was not imputing a moral (that is to say, immoral) quality to my friend. I know for sure that I retain my moralist attitude, however much I may resist it intellectually. For all I know it is even hard-wired into all of us. So it is likely “there” even though I intend it not to be. Similarly, and even more so, my friend is likely to take the implication of cruelty as a moral imputation. After all, like most people, he is (not only an omnivore but also) a moralist. The very concept of amoralism may be beyond the ken for him, or else something that is itself immoral in his eyes. So he is not likely to be able to tease out the strictly descriptive category of cruelty from the moral encasement of reprehensibility.

            So is amoralism really a practically superior strategy for facilitating the resolution of disagreements? The assumption that it beats moralism in this regard has been one of my main arguments in its favor.

            Here I sit, as Thanksgiving approaches, wondering whether I am really welcome at the table. Does the host or the guests really want someone in their midst on what is supposed to be a festive occasion to, as it were, hang over them like a sultry vulture, someone making them feel guilty …? Has adopting an amoralist stance really changed the atmosphere at all? 

Indeed, I ask myself what the hell I would be doing there if I am really so pained by the slaughter on prominent display. Do I really want to be suppressing my compassion for the sake of contributing to the festive air? It would be one thing if I were, say, trying to move beyond a purely personal grief for the recent loss of a loved one. But does it make sense to want to move beyond compassion for the suffering of others?

I ask these questions in a completely open-ended way. I don’t expect hard and fast answers (for this, or anything). The answer (I believe) is always “yes and no.” 

However, in the present case I do have a rejoinder. Is the situation I have described really a problem? After all, don’t I want to influence people to give up meat eating? It cannot be that I leave them indifferent, can it? What good would that do? So I would want my friend not to like feeling that he is being cruel, or needlessly contributing to cruelty. I am only trying to avoid making him feel guilty about that, since not only does that refer to a fiction but it is prone to inspire resistance. So I want him to feel bad about the cruelty, not about himself. That is the key. 

A further question

Suppose my rejoinder makes sense. Even so an even more critical question remains: whether the focus on moralism as such makes sense in light of all the pressing substantive questions of the day. Amoralists tend to believe it does. Here again facts are relevant, in particular: Is moralism per se contributing more net grief to the world and human (or animal) prospects than the matters that people tend to get moralistic about? There are really two questions here: Would the disagreements people have, even without moralism, generate as much grief? That was the question discussed above. The second question, which I want to focus on now, is whether the world’s welfare depends more on pursuing various courses of action rather than on how we go about trying to make sure these courses of action are pursued.

For example: Let us suppose that human civilization will almost assuredly collapse within the century if more serious steps to curb climate change are not undertaken. Is it credible that getting people to deal with this issue as amoralists is more important that climate change itself? or – perhaps more to the point -- is an amoralist regime itself an essential component of combatting climate change successfully? Amoralists often seem to be claiming or assuming “yes.” Pretty much all the world’s worst ills can be put at the feet of moralism. (Hinckfuss is a great source for this kind of view.)

Of course umpteen factors have led to our current fix (and need of a fix). For at least 40 years the warnings have been coming from scientists, but vested interests, scientific illiteracy, plain inertia, (etc.,) have gotten in the way. It is the most recent iteration that has brought moralism seemingly to the fore, since the political ascension of Donald Trump has polarized this issue (as so many others) in the U.S., the world’s chief contributor to climate change and the world’s most powerful persuader, to the point of true religion on both sides: Only the devil incarnate could want us to believe in / reject climate change. Certainly my sentiments match the second opinion. But the polarization itself, which is in effect a mutual moralism, is precisely what has foiled a sufficiently robust response to the crisis – or so it seems to a hard-core amoralist like me.

But maybe the moralism issue is irrelevant. Maybe it’s simply got to be all hands on deck, no matter whether moralists or amoralists, working to halt climate change. And if humans happen to be incorrigibly moralist (or for that matter, religious), then the amoralist just has to hold her nose and join moral appeals for dealing with climate change.

Now, the amoralist can certainly live with that conclusion … up to a point. After all, an amoralist would not consider it morally wrong to deceive (as much as she simply may not like deception, and be acutely aware of its downsides). In fact what is perhaps the most widespread form of amoralism in the contemporary analytic literature supports a fictionalism about morality, for just this sort of reason: Taking morality seriously can be very useful, perhaps even essential.

But, for better or worse, I am a so-called moral abolitionist, who holds that it would be even more useful (and perhaps essential) to rid human society of all moralistic tendencies. Unfortunately this is an empirical question that nobody expects ever to get a definitive answer to (the reasons are legion), and above I have presented reasons to wonder whether it is plausible that human beings would be able to relinquish moralism enough even to put the proposition to a test. (For, in my example, perhaps neither the omnivore nor I could ever truly accept cruelty as a purely descriptive category that did not elicit my condemnation or my friend’s guilt or resentment.) And even if we could, would it make a difference, that is, enough of a difference, and in the desired direction? I have suggested how it might (in my “rejoinder” above), but … who knows to what degree to settle the further question?