The Empirical Question(s)

I have been advocating an extreme form of amoralism, according to which morality is a myth and most of us, on reflection, would favor everyone’s acknowledging that to the fullest. These are distinct claims. The first is what might be called a metaphysical claim, for it is about what exists and what does not exist, morality being one of the things that I claim does not exist. In this respect morality is like God, or at least a certain conception of God, who or which also does not exist. Says who? Well, my main argument in both cases is that the best explanation of the world has no need and even no room for either morality or God.

But what is this “best explanation,” and who says it’s the best one? Well, in rough terms, it’s the explanation provided by physics and Darwinism – by science, you might say; the scientific worldview – and I am the one who “says” it’s the best explanation we have of why the world is the way it is. And who am I? What gives me the authority to decide this? Well, I do not really claim authority; I think it’s just a personal preference of mine that science trumps various others forms of purported knowledge of how the world works, although that “just” is not intended to rule out my ability to give reasons for my preference. And in fact another of my preferences is that everyone be prepared to provide public reasons for their preferences (i.e., that everyone be rational in this sense), where “public” implies that these reasons are open to scrutiny by others and even further scrutiny by oneself.

            Yet another issue implicit in the above is whether I’ve got the right concepts of morality and God; for one conception of either might lead us to conclude that it is not instantiated in reality, whereas a different one might not. My conception of morality (putting God aside for the time being) is that it is a set of objective values presumed to have decisive authority over human attitudes and behavior. Here the criterion of the “right” concept is empirical: I take my understanding of this concept to conform to the prevailing conception in my society, perhaps even among humanity as a whole.[1] In this I may simply be mistaken, as Thomas Pölzler, for one, thinks I am.[2] However, even if I am mistaken about the prevalence of the conception in question, I can still retreat to the position that I am talking about a conception that has some prevalence, and even that even this possibly minority degree of prevalence has a great influence on the world. This I think even Pölzler would allow.

            The question would then be: Is this influence benign, malign, or middling? That is where my second claim comes in, namely, that most of us, on reflection, would favor everyone’s acknowledging the nonexistence of morality (that is, in the sense I have singled out) to the fullest. This too is an empirical claim. And it is the empirical case for this claim that has most preoccupied me in my general amoralist project. Specifically, I am forever adducing instances of everyday life (ranging from personal relationships to international politics – analogous to Newton’s’ adducing the behavior of apples and planets) where it seems to me that things would go more to everyone’s considered liking if the parties involved had sincere and publicly visible amoral attitudes.

            For example, my sense is that two roommates who have different degrees of cold sensitivity would be far more likely to be able decide how to set the thermostat amicably if neither of them played the moral card that their preference was the right one. Similarly, my sense is that if both Ukrainians and Russians lacked moral certainty about their respective desires, and instead simply acknowledged these desires, it is far less likely that there would have been war between them.

            Note that I am not denying for one moment that there will be some occasions on which moral attitudes could prove useful, even for achieving goals I myself would favor on reflection. For example, might not there be cases of murderers, or potential murderers, who finally threw over their murderous intentions due precisely to some imperative of conscience that those intentions were morally wrong or bad? I take it as obvious that there could be and even certainly have been such cases. Similarly for being motivated to do something deemed both noble and difficult, like Raskolnikov’s turning himself in to the police. But my argument is that, on the whole or in the main, such motives are counterproductive to the kind of world most of us would, on reflection, prefer to live in.

            But keep in mind, again, that this empirical claim is premised on the conception of morality as something objective.[3] Suppose Pölzler is correct that morality is far from universally deemed objective. Then might it not be possible to have the best of both worlds by retaining moralism in society? Here “moralism” means simply the belief in morality. For then we would have the inhibiting and motivating power of conscience at our disposal, and yet not have to sustain a Noble Lie that objective values exist.

            But to me it seems empirically implausible that morality would retain its force in the absence of its objective conception. Indeed, it is not even clear to me what the alternative and presumed prevailing conception of morality would be. Pölzler, I think, concludes only that people have a hodgepodge of conceptions, and perhaps some of them are inchoate (to put it nicely – I might say “incoherent.” I picture people invoking morality as mindlessly as some of them invoke “Jesus” or “God,” with no clear idea at all of what they are talking about, such that Jesus’s existence is taken to support torturing and killing people, for instance … just as objective morality’s often is).

            Furthermore, suppose that a nonobjective conception of morality could retain its force. Then, I put it to the defender of moralism of this sort, why not also defend or at countenance a similar sort of God? I think this challenge has some force simply because most of the moralism defenders of this sort happen also to be atheists. But I strongly suspect that these “secular moralists” would find it empirically implausible that belief in such a God could serve the same “benign” purposes that are presumably served by belief in the mythical God.[4] Then why think it is any different with morality?

            What is most salient to me is that the very term “moralism” has a pejorative meaning in everyday discourse. Thus, it means not only a belief in right and wrong but an overbearing wielding of that belief. And this has been part of my argument all along for dispensing with moralism even in the simple sense of believing in right and wrong, namely, that, as a matter of empirical fact, moralism of the simple sort leads inexorably to moralism of the pejorative sort.

And I suspect that part of what makes “moralism” pejorative is precisely the idea that morality is objective. So that even if Pölzler is correct that most people’s moralism is nonobjective, my argument would be that this moralism makes one liable to objective moralism (and that is when the trouble begins). It’s sort of like the argument against legalizing marijuana that it’s a gateway drug. Apparently that claim is false in the case of weed. But my claim is that the analogue is true for moralism: The belief in right and wrong is a gateway belief to belief in objective value (and of all kinds) … and the latter, like “harder” drugs, is something that has all sorts of noxious consequences (that is, in nonobjective terms, leads to outcomes most of us would, on reflection, be averse to).

[1] Note that there is also a conception of “objective” implicit in this conception of morality. Mitchell Silver for one takes issue with the one I am assuming. (See his Rationalist Pragmatism.) I have never been able to make sense of his as remotely plausible, but I could just be dense. I think he would return the compliment-with-qualification.

[2] See his A Philosophical Perspective on Moral Objectivism.

[3] Which is, again, in turn premised on a particular conception of the objective or of objective value.

[4] Cf. Mitchell Silver’s A Plausible God.

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