Yes and No: The Full Force of Recommending Desirism

I have all along stated that I merely recommend desirism as an ethics. Differently put, desirism is itself a recommendation, specifically to rationalize one’s desires prior to acting. Desirism is intended to supplant moralism, by which I mean the belief in objective value(s) (including not only right and wrong, which comprise morality in its pared down sense, but also good and bad and even truth and falsity[1]). The reason I have only recommended desirism is that to speak of it as somehow required would turn desirism into a moralism. For a hallmark of morality is that it consists of commands or injunctions: obligations and prohibitions (as well as permissions). But that is the very feature that makes me prefer desirism as an alternative, for I find commands of this sort to be both absurd and noxious. They are absurd because these commands issue from no commander (in the Godless universe I believe in), and they are noxious because a regime of this sort lends itself to fear and guilt and/or to arrogance, intransigence, and (hence) conflict among those who believe in it.

            Nevertheless the mere recommending of desirism itself has been somewhat pro forma on my part. That is to say: I haven’t really had my heart in it, since I am so convinced that desirism is superior to moralism; but I felt it necessary if I were to avoid inconsistency and lapsing into moralism. Now, however, I suddenly feel a way of taking recommending to heart,[2] as follows.

The appeal of desirism to me has been its utility, which is to say, I have found it very useful for purposes or goals I care about.[3] These purposes have been largely personal ones, having to do with interpersonal relationships and with a pervasive feeling of “guilt.” Desirism has aided me concretely in improving the former and diminishing the latter, both of which achievements I like. It then seemed a natural “move” to generalize my experience to everyone else, since I now saw most of the world’s problems as having some kind of moralism at their base.

My new revelation is that I have (of course) been seeing the world through desirism-colored glasses. But in fact moralism has its uses too – that is to say, good uses … that is to say (since “good” is a moralist word I’d prefer to avoid), uses for things that I like. Now it so happens that I prefer desirism because it has been so helpful to me personally; but I am really in no position to judge whether a desirist world would fare better than a moralist one. (Maybe nobody is or ever will be.) Ergo: I can only recommend desirism … and, in keeping with my general rational prescription, explain why (which I have done in many books and articles and columns and blog posts and videos etc.).

More generally I am now combining my amoralist (desirist) ethics with my analetheist metaphilosophy. The former is the turning away from right and wrong (and good and bad) and the latter is the turning away from truth and falsity. (I often use “amoralism” in a broad sense to encompass both.) The practical upshot of analetheism is that all yes-or-no (or true-or-false) questions can be rationally answered “yes and no” (or “yes and yes” to the contradictories). And so in the case of “Is desirism superior to moralism?” I am bound, to maintain consistency, to answer, “Yes and no. It depends. Yes on the basis of such-and-such considerations. No on the basis of thus-and-so considerations.”

            Then I would conclude: “I myself prefer yes because I find myself, after a great deal of thought and experience and discussion etc., more moved by the former than by the latter considerations. Therefore I recommend desirism to you (that is, for your consideration).”


[1] Anything might be considered an objective value, which is simply the objectification of anything that someone might value subjectively. Thus, for example, if you love walking for its own sake, and you are a moralist in the broad sense I am talking about, then you will believe that the property or properties that make walking intrinsically valuable to you have objective or inherent value. (Something could also be valued for its utility, that is, extrinsically or instrumentally rather than or in addition to intrinsically. Thus walking could be valued for its own sake but also for promoting health. Also, then, utility is itself a value.  And it looks like something may therefore be objectively valuable for a subjective end; however, that is not “valuable” in the sense that concerns me since what is useful for some end might still be intrinsically aversive to oneself or another, for example, having to see the dentist for a root canal.) I choose to highlight right and wrong and good and bad and truth and falsity simply because they are the values having the widest scope of application for most analytic ethicists. But, for example, an aesthete could consider beauty and ugliness to have an equally wide scope; and so on. Indeed, my desirism privileges the value of rationality (as a property possessed by something deemed rational and as a property of the person doing the deeming).

[2] Here I am simply putting two and two together, since the ingredients of my revelation have all been known to me beforehand. Thus I am doing philosophy as Wittgenstein characterized it: “assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edition, 1958, item #127).

[3] The original inspiration for my amoralism was purely theoretical: I suddenly became convinced that morality is a myth, like God. But far from making me happier, it threw me into crisis; for the moral point of view had been essential to my existence, and now I was thoroughly at a loss as to how to proceed with anything at all. Fortunately I was also in a perfect position to ponder the problem without interruption for a period of time, and I then came up with desirism as the happy solution.

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