The Enthusiast

I have been as ardent an amoralist as previously I was an ardent moralist. The common denominator is, of course, that I am ardent – an enthusiast. This can have amusing consequences. For example, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, which was a defense of dispassion as a virtue, one of my advisors drolly expressed his appreciation of how passionately I defended dispassion.[1] But my general enthusiasm can also make a mess of things; and, most relevantly to a/moralism, it can, and does, create both personal and theoretical problems. 

On the personal side, my general enthusiasm makes me a divided self. For as much as I am “intellectually” or “theoretically” convinced that moralism is not only based on falsity (namely, the belief in objective values, and in particular, the objective values that usually fall under the rubric of morality, such as rightness and wrongness and goodness and badness) but also has net undesirable consequences (or, as an amoralist, I would say undesired consequences, that is, consequences that I myself, and I believe most of us, would not like if we thought carefully about what they are), I remain very much a moralist in my actual reactions to things. And I attribute this lingering moralism not merely to its habitual, perhaps even inborn nature, which in itself need not make it more than a minor nuisance (and might even have some helpful features), but to its exaggeration by my natural enthusiasm, so that it becomes a serious stumbling block to being able personally to walk the talk of my avowedly preferred amoralism. 

On the theoretical side the problem is even deeper (which too can have practical consequences). For I tend to adduce as evidence for the theory, my personal experience of moralism and the harm it does. But this harm could be due entirely or primarily to my personal enthusiasm rather than to the actual consequences of being a moralist as such. Furthermore, and more insidiously, insofar as other evidence I adduce is based on my observations of other people’s moralism, my own excessive feelings could be exaggerating how awful the consequences of their being moralistic are, or even how moralistic they actually are, if they are being moralistic at all. 

One way I try to ward off this ad hominem critique is to argue that, even if my responses belong a couple of standard deviations from the mean, they nevertheless are shared by enough people to make them a serious problem. Even a handful of highly moralistic, and therefore, as I have argued elsewhere, angry people can wreck the planet. Short of that, the daily activities of most of us involve either being strongly moralistic or being the “victim” of someone who is, and thereby being harmed (by self or other).[2] 

Still, one might think that a stronger case for amoralism, or for deciding the issue one way or the other, could be built by adducing scientific evidence. Two prominent researchers in this area are Thomas Pölzler and Stephen Morris. But – no surprise to skeptical me – their conclusions are at odds. Morris has compiled a book’s worth of impressive empirical data, plus equally impressive argumentation, to buttress the case that moralism is harmful indeed.[3] Pölzler has provided an intensive critique of the relevant empirical work, showing it to be highly faulty, and insofar as he is able to draw a (tentative) conclusion from it at all, the verdict is that people by and large are not moralistic in the way I myself have presumed they are … not even in the dispassionate sense (of making moral judgments that they themselves consider to be objective).[4]

My own meta-conclusion is that the matter therefore remains, and will forever remain, inconclusive, and so it is ripe for being conceived as philosophical in nature. And on that basis, I retain the right to investigate and pronounce on it in my personal way so long as I make very clear the limitations of this method, which is what I take myself to be doing in this very essay. 

But to put it bluntly, the issue I have raised is whether my entire amoralist project (which has resulted in eight books with more in the offing) has been based on mistaking a personal problem for a general human problem. It is as if I were a madman, attempting to warn the world of an impending invasion by bug-eyed monsters. Maybe there are no bug-eyed monsters but only me having an inordinate fear of gnats. And so what I have really been embarked on has been a form of self therapy rather than ethics; and it is a distortion to apply the former to the latter. 

Less dramatically and more plausibly put, the mistake could be conflating moralism in the sense of believing in right and wrong with moralism in the sense of taking it too far. It does so happen than “moralism” in its normal usage connotes, even denotes being too adamant in one’s, ahem, moralism. And so my perpetually going full-bore moralistic, due to my enthusiasm’s taking everything to the limit, means that I never experience (both in myself and my perception of others) simple moralism but always exaggerated moralism. But, the objection would then be, ridding ourselves of simple moralism in order to rid ourselves of exaggerated moralism would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. A more realistic comparison would be banning peanuts because some people have a severe allergic reaction to eating them … or, an example that has been turned into a formal objection in the philosophical literature,[5] proscribing rationality because sometimes people reason poorly or deceptively and with awful consequences. That would be absurd (so the argument goes[6]). 

To repeat: I see no definitive resolution of this question. But this does not disturb me unduly[7] since, no doubt in part due to being worn down by the wild pendulum swings continually induced by my general enthusiasm, I have adopted a metaphilosophy or methodology of Yes and No. This advocates an attitude toward dialectic of accepting to begin with that there will be no theoretical resolution of any issue but only a perennial offering of arguments pro and con. This is meant to counter the temptation of intransigent ideologies, which is the same risk an exaggerated moralism presents. (Hence I sometimes think of this methodology as an extended form of amoralism.) And I consider it a happy state of affairs because it still allows for practical resolutions, given that individuals and groups will, as a matter of psychological fact, be swayed by one argument or another. So while it does not promise, and indeed guarantees that there will not be, general agreement, it also lessens the overall intensity of disagreements. Hence: more tolerance, less conflict. The best of both worlds. 

So, regarding the issue I have raised about my amoralist project possibly being nothing but a figment of my general enthusiasm: Yes, there are reasons for thinking it is (such as the usefulness of morality as such), and No, there are reasons for thinking it isn’t (such as error theory[8] and the disutility of moralism[9]). I can even see my enthusiasm itself serving as a counter consideration to the thesis that it has undercut the amoralist project, because the self flagellation in this essay might itself be an instance of how I go overboard with any idea that captures my attention; so I end up also having a confessional nature, which causes me to berate my own ideas with the same over-the-top intensity with which I defend or promote them. 

Moreover, even if the diagnosis were correct, that my condition is more correctly conceived as an ailment than an ethics, is it not the case that sometimes the best medicine is also the best lifestyle for everyone? Example: The vegan diet sometimes recommended for people with heart disease might be the healthiest diet for everyone, since it is not only healing but also preventative. Just so: Amoralism might be needed for recovery or management of an extreme moralism, but it could also be a prophylactic against a tendency of any moralism to get out of hand. 

Better, then, to view philosophical argumentation simply as the offering of considerations on one side or another of an issue. And even here I would now advocate a middle way, since I do not seek a stalemate as the alternative to fierce conflict but rather the development of more thoughtful “biases” and greater respect for one’s “opponents.” Again: the best of both worlds. 

I therefore conclude this essay with the following testimonies: (1) I myself, for the sorts of reasons described at length in my many books and articles on the subject, remain very much committed to amoralism, but (2) I am also becoming ever more intrigued by the possibility that I might eventually come full circle back to the thesis of the doctoral dissertation I defended so passionately 43 years ago, namely, that dispassion is a virtue, and so moralism would not be the culprit I’ve made it out to be but only moralism when taken to an extreme.[10]


[1] This was Steve McGrade, who passed away recently; and so I dedicate this essay to his memory, with gratitude for his acuteness and support above and beyond.

[2] When both parties are strongly moralistic, there can of course be even worse consequences for themselves and others. (I picture Israelis and Palestinians.)

[3] Moral Damages: The Case for Abolishing Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

[4] A Philosophical Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism. Routledge (2023).

[5] Known as Companions in Guilt.

[6] I have spilled much ink trying to refute it or at least remove its sting; see for example my Reason and Ethics (Routledge, 2021), Ch. 5.

[7] So you see? I am already making some progress in not exaggerating everything.

[8] The classic text here is J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977).

[9] The classic text here is Ian Hinckfuss’s The Moral Society: Its Structure and Effects. (Australian National University, 1987).

[10] Yet even the dispassion thesis would need to be subsumed under the Yes and No methodology, lest it become an intransigent (and hence also conflictual) ideology of its own, since even a virtue is probably best taken not to be ironclad but instead a reliable tendency, a weighting of one’s responses. After all, in the case even of a moderate moralism, one might come upon instances where an extreme reaction makes sense. Compare: Strong adherence to a vegetarian diet does not mean starving if only meat is available. On the third paw: If the proper comparison is to alcoholism, then even a single “exception” may be too much.

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