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 desires that give rise to them. I have offered two main advantages of this recommendation: (1) It rids us of judgments that cause unnecessary mischief, such as by seeding conflicts about imaginary issues, and (2) By exposing the real engines of our moralism, namely our desires (and likings), it allows us to scrutinize them (via thinking, studying, dialoguing, seeking out experience, etc.) for possible reform (we might say “rationally,” but since I think rationality suffers from the same sorts of ills as morality [see the postscript], I would settle for “thoughtfully” or “reflectively” instead). 

So what are the two gaps? Let me put them in the form of puzzles. First is: If desires are the cause of our moral judgments, then how could moral judgments cause problems of their own? Put differently, if desires give moral judgments their oomph, their motivating power, then how could dispensing with moral judgments help defuse conflicts? This puzzle, however, is already solved by (2) above: Yes indeed the desires are the source of the problems, but moral judgments exacerbate the situation in two ways. First is by diverting our attention from those desires and thereby leaving them immune from critical scrutiny or even awareness. (Eric Campbell has made this point beautifully in his 2014 article “Breakdown of Moral Judgment.”) Second is by transmuting the subjective and hence relative phenomenon of desire into the objective and absolute phantasm of morality.

That second claim leads to the second puzzle. For there is no valid inference from conceiving something, in this case a moral judgment, as true, to holding that judgment with fierce and unshakeable conviction. But it is only the latter which causes the mischief of which I speak. So why, for instance, couldn’t a moralist have her moral beliefs but still be a perfectly reasonable person, who reflects on her reasons for those beliefs and is more than willing to hear out her opponents and even sometimes change her beliefs as a result? (Thank you to Mitchell Silver for this suggestion.) Why is there any need to go the extra mile (or a bridge too far, the moralist would argue) and rid oneself of moral beliefs altogether? And surely that move brings problems in its wake, just as the move from desire to moral judgment does according to the amoralist. 

My answer is this. By ascribing moral significance to our desires, which is to say attributing objectivity to them, we open up an avenue for an additional psychological element as well, namely, ego investment. Granted, something’s being one’s desire already involves ego investment, since, of course, any desire is one’s own. However, this is a relatively benign kind of ego investment, since a desire can be for anything whatever and does not necessarily not to mention primarily have to do with one’s own self-interestedness. Thus, a person who is wholly invested in helping others for their sake and with no eye to personally benefiting from doing so is surely personally invested in the enterprise, but not in a way that would be dubbed egoist, not to mention selfish. 

Contrast that to the kind of ego investment that moral judgments can engender. Once one grants that there is a realm of reality where things and people can be objectively right or good or wrong or bad, then whenever one has a belief about any of those things or people, one is thereby made liable to being wrong oneself, albeit in a nonmoral way. One might be making a mistaken judgment about some matter of fact. This, I submit, is a position that people generally find unattractive. Therefore we have a psychological tendency to resist being found wrong in this sense. And that is the source of the tenacity and subsequent mischief that moralism adds to the already existing strength of our desires. There is now in addition the strong (meta-)desire not to be, or to be found, mistaken about a belief. (This is another take on Ronnie de Sousa’s notion of double counting.) 

Hence, by no longer even being in the business of judging, of forming (or at least paying attention to) beliefs about right and wrong and good and bad, we eliminate an indefinitely large set of strong desires (not to be found mistaken about moral judgments 1, 2, 3 …), which desires, as I’ve noted, have the double disadvantage of keeping us from scrutinizing our base-line desires and of causing mischief of their own. 

P.S. Yes, Companions in Guilt does tell us that analogous problems would arise for any kind of judgment, not just moral judgments; but it would be absurd to abstain from any and all judgments; therefore we have no reason to abstain from moral judgments if this is the main argument for doing so. My response has been to bite this bullet and recommend, in a totally general form of desirism, that we stop thinking in terms of true and false (and rational and irrational and beautiful and ugly and prudent and imprudent and funny and lame and on and on) and instead simply reflect on our attitudes, whether they be beliefs or desires or likes or feelings or what have you, thereby vetting them and exposing them to possible reform or refinement or firming up prior to our making decisions or acting on them or recommending them. In a word, then, I am calling for us to live “examined lives,” as Socrates might have put it. Perhaps instead of “desirism” it would therefore be more helpful to call this “examinism” or “reflectivism,” but “desirism” reflects the idea’s roots in the story of morality I have told above.