Confession

I want a world in which no one morally judges anyone (themself or others). Put aside all the empirical hand-waving about how the world would be better (more to our collective considered liking). Who the hell knows or ever will? The real engine of my embrace of amoralism and especially moral abolitionism is a set of personal reactions I have to moralism. 

1) One reaction is to people being moralistic. I find this intrinsically distasteful. Like a bad smell. Its offensive features are its arrogance or egotism, its inevitable double standard, and the like (not to mention that it's based on a false belief, but I really won't dwell on that, since, like the empirical argument, it's not the main engine). 

2) Another reaction is to being morally judged by another. I really hate the idea that someone else sees me as doing something wrong or as morally bad. 

3) Another reaction is to feeling morally guilty or somehow morally inadequate. This is also really awful to feel. 

But 2) and 3) may just be how morality is supposed to work for the greater good -- by making someone feel bad about what they did or are doing or intending to do so that they won't do it or do it again. If not carried to excess (which any good thing can be, like eating), it performs a very valuable function. As for 1) – that’s just a defensive reaction, like hating the police officer who arrests you for the robbery. 

Meanwhile I acknowledge that since the real engine of my amoralist allegiance is this set of personal reactions and not some speculative empirical argument (although not so speculative at all according to Steve Morris, but I'm playing my own devil's advocate here) nor even error theory, I can see that what is really going on might just be that I don't like being criticized in this way  ... and then I funnel this dislike into an intrinsic dislike of people who criticize me like that, or of that form of criticizing. 

(I have suggested before that my reactions may indeed be extreme only because I feel everything in an extreme way. So it may not be that I am a moralist so much as that I am an enthusiast that is causing my problem [if I have one].) 

Indeed, I might even be hallucinating that such criticizing is going on. It is not unusual for a friend to flat-out deny that they are morally judging me when I think they are. Moreover the arrogance etc. might also be a figment of my own moralist imagination. That is, that my friend is being arrogant or whatever. That there is such a thing as arrogant etc. moralism is quite certain. I know this from my own experience of it. I can be arrogantly etc. condemnatory and disdainful and contemptuous etc., for sure. So am I merely projecting a lot of that when I "see" others being that way? 

(I have in the past alluded to a movie, Tin Men, where in one scene an aluminum siding salesman, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who uses every shady practice in the book, goes to buy a car. He then goes nuts because he cannot believe a thing that car salesman is telling him. It's an open question whether the car salesman is being honest. The point is: The Dreyfuss character simply cannot believe he is because of his knowledge of his own dishonesty.) 

And so I refute myself thus! And it is only fitting that I put this in the form of a confession, since my opening amoralist salvo was also titled “Confession” … of a (supposedly) former moralist. Now here I am “confessing” that I have remained a moralist all along, and this may even account for why I embraced amoralism! 

But in fact I have never denied this. There is this story about Socrates: 

A tour guide was showing around a visitor to Athens. When they reached the agora the guide pointed out Socrates badgering some local authority. The visitor exclaimed: “Ah Socrates, I have heard so much about him – the paragon of virtue!” But when afterward the guide told Socrates about this, he remarked, “Nothing could be further from the truth! I’m a veritable sewer. Why do you think I’m always trying to find out what virtue is?” 

Just so, I have always known that I strived so mightily to investigate amoralism because of my own moralism (plus my general enthusiasm regarding any project undertaken). 

But what this little essay is suggesting is not only that my amoralism has a largely personal origin in my own moralism, but also that this somehow discredits the whole project. Of course that is merely ad hominem and fallacious if being put forward as an inference. I’m still quite convinced that amoralism continues to stand on its own merits.

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