Models and Pragmatism: A perfectly reasonable objection to amoralism

The amoralist is taking some things too seriously. Morality, like everything else in human knowledge or belief, is just a model. Our mind is always in theoretical mode when it cognizes something, as opposed to simply experiencing something. Maybe it never purely experiences anything either. Maybe even when we experience a sharp pain we are conceptualizing what we feel as pain. Gestalt images make this point, since the very same configuration can look like an old woman or a young girl, a bunny or a duck; so something over and above the “pure experience” shapes what we see – some idea, some concept. 

So reality is whatever there is, but we only know reality through our concepts, our theories of what exists. That is what is meant by a “model” (which, of course, is itself a concept). And when it comes to something as complex and abstract as morality, then surely we must realize it is a model. But this is why it is extreme to deny morality’s existence altogether, when it was understood not to be reality in the first place. 

 So the real question is not morality’s existence but morality’s utility. The former is a nonstarter. The latter is a straightforward empirical issue. More specifically: Is it useful for human beings to assign moral values to things? On such grounds morality could be defended as helpful and even indispensable to human well being. The amoralist could argue the contrary.  

The “lesson” here is exactly in line with Buddhism. The Buddha advised not getting caught up in metaphysical speculations when there are far more pressing concerns, beginning with suffering. His parable of the wounded man captures the idea perfectly. 

 So perhaps too I had misidentified the issue as whether the belief in morality is useful or baneful.[1] I thought that by sidestepping the question of whether the belief is true I was being a pragmatist about morality. But even to speak of a belief as useful is to foreground belief, when in fact the point now is that belief is irrelevant. What we really care about is not whether we “believe in morality” – what that would even mean can be supremely puzzling – but whether the practice of making moral attributions is useful (or baneful).  

Sure, an analytic philosopher could make mincemeat out of what we are asserting or what we are even meaning on those occasions. But so what? A philosopher can do that with any concept whatsoever. What is the cash value of that? Perhaps, then the philosopher is the one with the beam in their eye, pointing out the motes in everyone else’s. Note, then, that at one and the same time that I am critiquing amoralism, I am indicting analytic philosophy. Pragmatism is a different way of doing philosophy. It's an empirical investigation into the usefulness of various human practices ... not an analytical investigation of the meaning and truth of beliefs.

[1] Presumably this would also apply to a/theism

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