The Impetus for Amoralism Was Moralism

Over the last nearly two decades of my being an amoralist, I have repeatedly referenced a particular event as what I called my anti-epiphany. On Christmas Day, 2007, there was an exact moment (I should have checked my watch!) when the scales fell from my eyes and I realized morality is bunkum. However, amoralism has always had two aspects for me (and in the philosophical literature); for it is not only that morality does not exist (moral nihilism), but also that moralism, which encompasses all the attitudes and behaviors and institutions that arise from believing that morality does exist, is net noxious.[1] Therefore I have become partial to both a meta-ethical thesis, which often goes by the name of moral error theory (We err in believing that morality exists), and a normative ethics, which usually goes by the name of moral abolitionism (We would be better off not believing that morality exists).[2] What I wish to relate now is that this too had its seminal moment, and then consider an implication of that. 

As I think back, and as a matter of autobiographical fact rather than argumentative force, the foundation of my becoming a fervent moral abolitionist was laid when a long-time friend nixed my musings on whom I might bring with me to his son’s Bar Mitzvah.[3] To me this was a total shock: How could he be inviting me to this event, which would involve the time and expense to travel a long distance and stay overnight at a hotel, while denying me the pleasure of having company for it, including a dance partner at the party afterward? It was so absurd that I hardly had emotional room left to be outraged. 

But outraged I surely was. It struck me as so mean, in both the monetary and inconsiderate senses; for he justified it by both the expense to him of the caterer and the fact that I was at the time “unattached.” My wanting to bring a close female friend who happened not to be my girlfriend did not lift me to the level of entitlement to warrant his having to pay for an extra place at the dinner and dance reception. Couldn’t I just find someone else at the affair to talk to and dance with? And what’s so onerous about driving a long distance or having breakfast the next morning etc. alone? 

I don’t know how you feel about all of this, Dear Reader, but to this day, over a quarter-century later, I’m still boiling.[4] It is just so obvious to me that my friend was acting wrongly. And what has sustained the intensity of my feeling is that, whenever the painful subject happens to come up again, my friend will not yield on what to me is the essential point. For while eventually conceding that he ought to have given greater consideration to my feelings, he apparently retains the belief that my feelings were unnecessary, and indeed that I ought not to have felt the way I did.[5] In other words, it was I and not he who was essentially in the wrong in some way.[6] 

The connection to moral abolitionism? I interpret my friend’s attitude as moralist: He felt that he was in the right to consign me to single status for social purposes, and that I was wrong to feel it mattered whether I had a special friend to enjoy the experience with. Not only the meanness (in the double sense) but the sheer double standard of it all was galling; for he was happily married and yet pronouncing on the unimportance of my attending alone. I do grant that he himself probably is indifferent to whether he has a companion along for a social event. But, again, it strikes me as pure moralism to “impose” this standard of feelings on everyone else. Indeed, I myself would have no such problem today, and no matter whether single or in a relationship; but at the time I was still licking my wounds from a recent divorce. So I found, and find, his insensitivity stunning. 

Thus the origin of my animus toward moralism. But, aside from whatever intrinsic interest there may be in knowing the origin story, what I think is the really important point is that my reaction to the way I was treated was itself pure moralism. It is precisely the blatant wrongness of what my friend said or did that so exercised me. So my subsequent amoralism was itself built on a foundation of moralism: I thought moralism was morally wrong! 

In fact I have realized this paradox from the beginning of my theorizing on the subject (though only this morning did I put two and two together and see the Bar Mitzvah episode in this light). So I have always strived to de-moralize my preference for amoralism, and in particular moral abolitionism. But one would have grounds to suspect that I don’t do a very good job of that. For one thing I remain very obviously liable to moralist reactions in general. For another it is a telling bit of evidence for my moralism at the theoretical level in particular that I have also always consistently noted that I care more about moral abolitionism than about moral nihilism. That is, I so disfavor moralism that, even if morality did exist, I would favor acting and feeling as if it didn’t. 

This suggests the mirror image of the most popular answers to the What now? question that the moral error theory has spawned, such as moral fictionalism, which advocates our pretending that morality exists, and moral conservationism, which advocates somehow still believing it (even though in a cool moment we don’t). What I am hinting at is therefore an amoral fictionalism or an amoral conservationism: Let us pretend or even believe that morality doesn’t exist, even if we know it does. I have also called this moral deism, by analogy to Epicurean deism, according to which the gods do exist but, for our own good, we should live our lives completely indifferently to that fact. Mutatis mutandis for what I would advocate if morality actually did exist: That would have nothing to do with how we could attain to the best life and society. 

But, just as I don’t support moral fictionalism etc., I would have similar grounds for opposing their amoral counterparts. In the main the objection is that the cognitive dissonance would prove impractical in a pinch. Also (this a personal reason), I am temperamentally averse to any form of deception. And, perhaps most essentially, I do believe strongly that morality is a myth and there are no objective values. So there is no need to get fictional or deceptive about it. Moral abolitionism simply asks us to live in accordance with the plain truth. 

I therefore view my moralism about amoralism to be more of a nuisance than anything else. It is a very difficult, perhaps impossible, nuisance to get rid of. But my point is that, even if I were to rid myself of it, I believe there would still be good grounds to advocate amoralism. In fact I think the advocacy would become more effective, since a chief reason I don’t like moralism is that it makes a mess of things. Thus, the less I went around chastising (or even just secretly despising) people for being moralists, the more open would people be to what I have to say (and especially model in my behavior) and hence the more likely they would come to look upon amoralism as an attractive alternative to their own moralism.[7]

Postscriptum. My original reaction to my friend’s action was, I myself admit, extreme. That is, even as a moralist reaction, it was over the top. This is even more the case for my retaining the bad vibes these several decades later. In fact my whole attitude toward my friend has changed since prior to the incident, such that there has been a tension in the relationship, which may last till death do us part. So many things he has said or done since then have bene concretized into his very character by my confirmation bias, despite so much else that has evidenced true friendship. But this just reinforces the main point of my essay, namely, that I am a moralist, no matter whether I believe or disbelieve in morality as a matter of philosophical conviction. 

Furthermore, and in synchrony with the biographical element, the very genesis of my amoralism may have been a mistake, indeed a double mistake. Make that triple! The first mistake was the one I have written about in the essay above: that I was morally judging my friend’s behavior, when, as I now believe, this presumes the false belief or assumption that there is such a thing as morality. A possible second mistake is that my friend may not have been doing anything morally wrong at all, that is, even from a moralist perspective, but simply committing an error of etiquette (not to mention, no misbehavior whatever). A possible third mistake is the one I am now bringing up, which is that, whether moral wrong or breach of etiquette, my reaction has been out of proportion to it. 

The thing about moralism (and one of the reasons I think it is a bane) is that it rates the wrongness or badness of something (or someone) as all or nothing. I mean this in the sense that wrong is wrong, period; and so a peccadillo counts as much as an atrocity. I know that “and so” is not a logical inference; but I think it is part of the moralist’s (or at least my!) psycho-logic. So when I judged my friend’s behavior as wrong, I was “outraged” … and it reverberates in my soul to this day. Or, as I wrote in my narrative, it is at any rate sustained by my continuing to see so much of what he has done ever since as morally judging (whether me or others), which I instinctually react to as itself a moral wrong. 

Let me mention one additional element of this mirroring of wrongness: ego. One of the aspects of my friend’s moralism that I react to with intrinsic (moralist) distaste is its arrogance. It does seem to me that, as a rule, someone who believes in right and wrong (etc.) believes that they themself are in the right. (When this conviction falters, it can turn into an equally fallacious and damaging sense of guilt, which often in turn, to ward off the pain, boomerangs into blaming someone else.) This bias in favor of oneself is the arrogance I am referring to. 

But the intensity of my reaction to my being found at fault suggests that I too harbor an arrogance – call it pride. For my reaction is very much a “How dare you!” as if I were someone whom the world ought to hold as above reproach. My amoralism is very sensitive to this exaggerated self regard. Two of my amoral heroes embody the antithesis of this pride. One is the Zen master Hakuin, who when falsely accused by a young maiden of fathering her child and then losing his reputation in the village, simply replies “Is that so?”[8] (and also takes good care of the child the maiden’s condemnatory parents hand over to him). The other is Father Zosima, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who apologizes to the people who show him disrespect. I am lightyears away from embodying (enminding) this attitude, although I aspire to be a saint with the same passion I bring to everything else, for better and worse.

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[1] Or, at a minimum, less net good than amoralism, or at least the form of amoralism I have championed, which I call desirism

[2] Again, I have gone beyond favoring merely the eliminating of moralism to promoting a particular replacement for it, which I call desirism.

[3] An interesting factoid is that this occurred while I was visiting the home of the same friend whose home I was visiting when I had my anti-epiphany. However, note, this time the scales did not fall immediately, since this event took place seven years before my anti-epiphany. That is why I speak if its laying the foundation; it primed me for my leap to abolitionism once I had become a moral nihilist.

[4] Why boiling? See the Postscriptum.

[5] In fact I think my friend did relent about my bringing someone at the time. But I refused to be accommodated in such a condescending way. So while I did show up for the ceremony, I skipped the festivities afterward.

[6] Of course all of this is an interpretation by me, and my friend would probably see it differently (just like in a divorce: S/he says, s/he says). More on this is the Postscriptum.

[7] This story about the Bar Mitzvah parallels another biographical episode at the beginning. For it so happens that just before my anti-epiphany I had become an ardent animal advocate on moral grounds. Much of my subsequent struggling with and theorizing about amoralism was motivated by this seeming disconnect. But I did pretty early on come up with the basis of my ultimate resolution, which was that I had been moved more by compassion, an ordinary and purely contingent albeit in my case strong feeling, than by morality, a set of categorical obligations.

[8] From the eponymous story in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, edited by Paul Reps.