Intolerance

When a person shows intolerance toward another person’s behavior, there is always the question of where their intolerance fits on the subjective/objective scale. Is the intolerance due mainly to the response of the first person, or to the intolerabilty of the second person? For an amoralist it is not clear what an objective intolerability would even amount to, thus shifting the emphasis to the intolerance side. I suspect this is the case.

So for example, suppose Josie likes to keep the television on all the time and her roommate Gretel would much rather have peace and quiet. To an amoralist, and  particularly of the desirist stripe, the situation is straightforward – two people have conflicting desires -- and calls for a practical solution. Perhaps Josie would agree to use a wireless headset, or both would agree to have the TV in Josie’s bedroom rather than in the living room, etc. My main point is that there is really no intolerance present at all.

However, if one or both are moralists, the problem can never be solved. This is because in addition to the conflicting desires there is the attitude (by the moralist) that the other person is doing something wrong or bad. This is intolerance. Note that Josie is not doing some objectively intolerable. The problem is only that Gretel finds Josie’s behavior intolerable. Furthermore, even if Josie adopts one of the solutions suggestions above, Gretel may continue to bear resentment for the ensuing inconvenience, for example, if she has to ask Josie’s permission every time she wants to watch something on the television that is now in Josie’s room, or that she has to watch TV in the uncomfortable chair there rather than on the comfy couch in the living room. Meanwhile Josie too, if also a moralist, will now have grounds for resenting similar inconveniences to herself.

This example, therefore, illustrates how the banefulness of moralism comes about. Moralism creates painful and noxious attitudes out of thin air by attaching to a desire the belief that what is desired is somehow right or good. This moral add-on then creates a kind of mental roadblock to viewing the situation for what it actually is, namely, a matter of desire. Morality creates new facts that are in fact fictions, such as that a desire that conflicts with one’s own is wrong or bad, or that the person whose desire it is is somehow in the wrong or bad. But these attributions, I surmise, are purely fictitious instruments for the purpose of enhancing the status of one’s own desire in an effort (however unconscious) to increase its likelihood of being satisfied.

            Are there no instances of the objectively intolerable? or, more broadly, of the objectively wrong or bad? What if instead of the annoyance of continual television (or of having to wear a headset, etc.) the situation is theft or rape or torture or murder and so on? An amoralist is committed to the claim even in these cases: The wrongness or badness resides in the attitude of the judge, not in what is being judged. However, the saving grace is that there remain plenty of very real grounds for opposing such behaviors, namely, various nonmoral desires and beliefs and perceptions such as that something is painful and pain is aversive, and feeling empathy and compassion, and on and on.

Of course there will also be people whose desires and beliefs and feelings are opposed to those of the informed and logical and caring person. But the presence of moralism will hardly ameliorate the situation since the false beliefs or unsound reasoning or malignant intentions etc. of such people will simply infect their moral views, thereby only increasing the noxious influence of the originating desires and beliefs and feelings.

True, this increased noxiousness could be countered by an increased righteousness on the part of the informed, logical, caring person who was also a moralist. However, I submit, this only leads to an attitudinal arms race, whose result is ever more venomous and mutual hatred and, ultimately, violence. That is the main banefulness of moralism: the exacerbation of conflicting desires into ever more intransigent and fierce passions, culminating in literal warriors fighting mutually destructive wars that, in truth, never end because they never address the originating problem in its actual nature as a conflict of desires or beliefs or perceptions simpliciter.

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