Two-tiered Justification

Ronald de Sousa and I have characterized moralism as double counting and gratuitous punctuation, respectively. These metaphors are intended to indicate that attributing objective moral value to someone or something (an action, an intention, etc.) is superfluous to some nonmoral reaction (desire or aversion, liking or disliking). For example, if you see someone slapping a child, you may be repelled, and then on top of that judge it to be wrong (and the slapper bad). But according to de Sousa and me, beside the slapping and the feelings of the slapper and the child and the further consequences of all that, the only real thing is your feeling or nonmoral reaction to it; the moral judgment is either doubly counting a single thing (the slapping, as being both aversive to you and wrong) or, as it were, the placement of an exclamation point after your feeling. 

Yet there is a whole morality-industrial complex built upon the second term of this spurious doublet. Thus for example, I just read a long opinion piece about why in vitro fertilization (IVF) ought to be a right for anyone who wants to be a parent, even a male couple or a single male. The arguments made a lot of sense to me. However it occurred to me midway that a certain ambiguity or equivocation was inherent in the essay. So far as I could make out, the argument for making IVF legally available to everyone was based on proving that everyone has a moral right to have children. 

This is not an uncommon move. In fact it might be considered a universal assumption, namely, that for something to be legal (or illegal) it needs first to be shown (or assumed) to be morally required or permissible (or impermissible). Take murder as the most salient example: Is it not illegal precisely because it[1] is morally forbidden? It simply would not make sense to make murder legal – why not? because it’s immoral! 

But an implication of amoralism (to which de Sousa and I and other so-called moral error theorists subscribe) is that there is no such justification to be had, simply because there is no such thing as objective values (including right and wrong and good and bad). Does it follow, then, that “anything goes” – or as Ivan Karamazov puts it, that therefore “Everything is permissible”? 

Not at all. For one thing, Ivan (and Dostoevsky) erred logically by overlooking the moral nature of permissibility. If there really is no morality, then not only is there no right or wrong but also permissibility. This is a conceptual fact, that is, on the presumption that Ivan was not talking (also) about legal (or some other nonmoral) permissibility, which intention would involve the same legal/moral conflation I am in the process of exposing. 

But more substantively, even in the absence of moral prohibitions (or promotions or permissions) there can be robust reasons for making something illegal (or legal). Murder (that is, intentional killing of a certain kind) is something that most (or all?) of us would want to be made illegal because we implicitly understand its aversive consequences (or we may even find it intrinsically aversive regardless of its consequences, so that we would not want to sanction intentional killing of one person, say for organ transplants, even to save the lives of five persons). 

Therefore I suggest that legal and other applications of moralism (the belief in objective values) can be replaced by nonmoral considerations, which is to say, one need only specify why one does not like the originating situation (for example, someone’s slapping a child) or even simply recount the originating situation (“He just slapped his child”). A second tier of moral justification is not needed, and in fact (as I and other so-called moral abolitionists have argued abundantly elsewhere) can be noxious (i.e., counterproductive) in its own right.

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[1] Strictly speaking murder is itself a legal concept. So I am equivocating in my use of the word to have it also refer to the nonlegal concept of killing someone intentionally (possibly other than for specified reasons, such as self(or other)-defense or as part of specified police or military activity).

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