Amoral Moments

Gertrude Stein is famously said to have asked Alice Toklas, “What is the answer?” and upon hearing only silence then asked, “In that case, what is the question?” It occurs to me now that the distinction between meta-ethics and normative ethics could be put in similar terms, as follows. Meta-ethics is in the business of figuring out what question to ask about ethics; normative ethics is then the business of offering an answer (or answers) to that question.  Here is how this division of labor comes into play with my ethics of desirism. I propose that the proper question to ask about ethics is How shall I (or we) live? or What shall I (or we) do? and not the moralistic How ought one (everyone) live? or What ought one (everyone in such-and-circumstances) do? In other words, ethics is about how to live but not about morals (understood as categorical and commanding). I have called this proposal desirism because the import of the “shall” is to ascertain how to achieve what we ...

For someone to say they are going to explain the meaning of life is like trying to answer the prosecutor’s question, “Why did you commit the theft?” when there has been no theft. “What is the meaning of life?” presumes that life has a meaning. But it doesn’t. It would be more precise, then, to speak of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of life, that is, why life seems to have a meaning. Yet a third option is to offer an alternative meaning of “meaning” as something subjective. In that case I can indeed offer an explanation, that is, of why life has, or can have, subjective meaning. And that is what I intend to do, and simply, in this essay. We are all filled with desires. These desires provide whatever meaning life has for us. If we desired nothing, life would indeed have no meaning, neither objective nor subjective. But if I am set upon having something, or keeping something I have, or getting rid of something, then meaning appears. And if there is some overarching desire (or...

My practical argument for ethical desirism contains these two premises (or, more accurately, this is my explanation of why desirism appeals to me and why  I recommend it to others, since I am not trying to prove or require anything):  1) Moralism (the belief in objective morality or values or norms generally, possibly including truth itself) does a lot of damage (to the self, to others, to society, to nonhumans) and, more precisely, is net noxious relative to desirism (= amoralism + reflection).  2) There are ways for a desirist (and desirist world) to achieve the practical ends a desirist deems worth keeping and without the damages inflicted by moralism (or mere, unreflecting amoralism).  Objection: I think the chief bogeyman when one considers those two claims is that without the objective imprimatur of morality, one’s opponents, whom a moralist would deem evil-doers, will have the practical upper hand. There are two ways that might seem to be so:  ...

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 re...

My house is my castle, and, living in it alone, I have the privilege of posting a No Solicitors sign on the door and filtering phone calls. Every minute that I am at home is spoken for with something I need or want to do. Despite this, I am very social and arrange to get together or Zoom with friends and colleagues all the time. But whether alone or with someone one, I want the time to be uninterrupted. This is why I first fell in love with emailing, since it allows the best of both worlds: the continual opportunity for communication, which is my lifeblood (thus, even when I am alone writing my essays and books, I think of myself as writing for someone ), and the complete control over when I engage in it.  But more recently I have discovered the joy of text messaging, which enables even more communication because it tends to be briefer and hence less of an interruption even if engaged in, while still offering the option of a delayed reply. So my working day is pleasantly peppered...

I am excited by the prospect of a simple and ideal frame of mind for deciding what to do and how to live. I think I have found it to be what I call desirism, although it could just as well be called rationalism or reflectivism. It has two key features: It is practical and it is factually oriented. The practical aspect means that you are focusing on what you want and how to get it. It is crucial to understand that this does not mean that you are selfish (although you might be). What you want might be entirely unselfish. Also crucial is that “how to get it” does not imply ruthlessness; for the means to your end will conform to the same considerations of what you want or what you like, which, for example, might preclude acting dishonestly.  The ”factually oriented” part of the desirist mental state means that, in figuring out what you want and how to get it, you are interested only in relevant facts, as opposed to moral precepts or divine injunctions or any other superstitious or s...

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 ...

I considered that for the title of my most recent book (which instead became Ethical Health: Managing Our Moral Impulses ), but I found by Googling that it was already “taken.” Now I think it’s a good fit for what I want to write in this little essay (which essentially amplifies a theme from the book), to wit: Despite my aspiring to be an amoralist (and in truth, an amoralist saint), I have come to realize that I will probably always be a moralist at heart. This is a demoralizing thought (ha ha). But it is also key to further progress in the kind of demoralization (in the sense of becoming amoral) to which I aspire, since the main painfulness of realizing I am a moralist is the moralist judgment of this (my being a moralist) as bad . So the realization challenges me to make the meta-leap to a more profound amoralism, by which I stop making moral judgments not only about actions and people but also about doing that , that is, about making moral judgments (and about the people, includ...

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 cons...