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Socrates is in heaven (or Hades). I would like to thank the hundreds of readers who have posted comments and sent me emails about the “Confessions” of this ex-moralist. Since the best hope of mutual understanding lies in dialogue, I will now reply to my many interlocutors, and in particular, to those who disagreed with my amoralist thesis.
Several took issue with the statement, “I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized.” I offered this as an alternative to the moralist emphasis on doing the right thing. My critics saw an egocentric focus that is most unfitting to morality. But that criticism is doubly off the mark. First, desire in itself does not make a motive egoistic. As I put it in my essay, “Mother Theresa was acting as much from desire as was the Marquis de Sade.” I am not a cynic like Hobbes, who believed that we are only capable of acting from self-interest. I doubt that you are either.
But even more to the point is that I am not offering an analysis of morality but an alternative to morality. It makes no sense, therefore, to fault desire as falling short of some moral standard. This tripped up my readers again and again, but that is understandable, given the radicalism of the proposal and the habits of our thinking. So once again: My proposal is that we abandon moral concepts, attitudes and language. This means, in concrete terms, no more seeking or demanding moral justifications, no more experiencing or trying to instill moral guilt, no more assuming or assigning moral responsibility, no more assessing moral desert or exacting just retribution, etc. In the words of Putney Swope, “Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. You gotta sink the boat!”
My proposal is that we abandon moral concepts, attitudes and language. In the words of Putney Swope, ‘Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. You gotta sink the boat!’
But I do offer a life raft, indeed, a luxury yacht to the rescue. For desire has rich resources that would please even the moralist who was not simply doctrinaire. For example, I find in myself a great deal of Kantianism extant from my days as a moralist. How could this be? I am not referring only to some atavistic holdover, although that is certainly there too; one does not lose lifelong habits by the snap of a finger. But I can also embrace, in full amorality, a desire for the ideal of treating all sentient beings as ends-in-themselves and not merely as means, which is an essentially Kantian notion (although Kant himself limited such regard to a certain type of rational beings).
Several readers objected, however, that I was only sneaking morality in through the back door. Where, they ask, did my “Kantian” desire come from? Some readers are confident it came from God. Others are convinced that it could only have come from my moral upbringing and subsequent training as a philosophical moralist. I do not doubt that the secular speculation is correct. But how would that count against desirism as an alternative to morality? For unlike a moralist, I am not insisting that everyone ought to treat all sentient beings as ends-in-themselves. It’s simply something that I would like very much to come about, and that I do my very best to help bring about, short of trying to deceive others into becoming Kantian moralists, because that would violate my desired ideal of treating others with Kantian respect.
But then some readers objected that I was trying to impose my preferred ideal on others. This objection seems to me misguided, however, and, again, doubly so. For one, it smacks of a moral critique, but that is begging the question of whether moral critiques are legitimate as such. But insofar as the critique is intended only to address my claim of acting in a Kantian manner, my reply is that it is hardly un-Kantian to engage people in, as I put it, honest dialectic in a context of mutual respect.
No sooner am I out of that frying pan, however, than I land in a fire; for still other readers objected that my preferred means of bringing about the world I desire would be laughably ineffectual. They see me as allied with Kant when he notoriously defended telling the truth even if a knife-wielding madman should come to the door asking for the whereabouts of your best friend. But I make no such defense. Just because your favorite food is chili does not mean you will never eat an apple. Just because my preferred means of bringing the world into conformity with my desires is respectful dialectic does not mean that I cannot or would not avail myself of some other means of persuasion, or even deception or coercion (which includes lobbying for legislation), should the occasion demand the cooperation of others and seem sufficiently pressing by my cognitive and conative lights. But this is true for everybody, moralists included, is it not? And if Kant did refuse ever to stand down from principle, as in a madman scenario, would not even most Kantians demur?
But then why not just call what I am about “morality”? It certainly sounds like it fits that bill. True, it allows for others to have a different morality, but that would only make it moral relativism. But it’s still morality, isn’t it? Well, no, I don’t think so. I could also say, “yes, but that won’t help.” First of all I am not sure that the notion of a flesh-and-blood, which is to say, psychological moral relativist is even coherent, any more than would be a divine font of morality. But putting aside that qualm I will simply point out that if I were a moral relativist, then, presumably, my attitude towards non-Kantians would be: Live and let live. Whereas as an avowed Kantian desirist, I am going to continue to try to influence the world to become more mutually respectful.
If there is anything distinctive about the kind of amorality that I favor, it is perhaps the elimination of moral language from our everyday discourse and thinking.
But still, some objectors persisted, what is really new about this thesis? They proceeded to list the usual suspects: Hume, Nietzsche, Ayer, Sartre, Mackie, Rorty and so on. I owe a great debt to them all, to be sure. If there is anything distinctive about the kind of amorality that I (and Richard Garner) favor, it is perhaps the elimination of moral language from our everyday discourse and thinking. What I did not explain in the earlier essay is that I am making two distinct claims. One is that morality does not exist. This, odd as it may sound to say so, is relatively uncontroversial in modern ethical philosophy; for what I mean by morality here is its metaphysical conception as a truth or command that comes to us from “on high.” Very few well-known philosophical moralists have believed in such a thing since a century and more.
But precisely my gripe is that you wouldn’t know it from the way they speak! And even if they can communicate clearly with one another, the lay person is left to think otherwise. For the goal has been to interpret or sometimes reform moral language. In the process it has been turned into something that, I believe, goes against the grain of much everyday usage and perhaps even our evolved psychological nature. My argument is therefore that nothing less than the abolition of the highly connotative language of morality will suffice to get us thinking clearly about how to live — the purview of ethics. The form of this argument, by the way, I owe to Mitchell Silver, whose book “A Plausible God” lays out an analogous case for ending God-talk.
But why do I care so much that people are using a misleading language of morality? Especially since I have also argued that morality is often just window-dressing for our nonmoral desires. My answer is that invoking the god of morality, like invoking the God of religion, serves to add a hefty dose of imprimatur, authority and self-assurance to the pre-existing strength of our desires, thereby bumping up the level of damage that is likely to ensue from trying to get our way in the face of opposition. The most horrific acts of humanity have been done not in spite of morality but because of it. (Here I pay homage to Ian Hinckfuss’s “The Moral Society.”) The great actors on the human stage — villains to some and heroes to others — have always believed they were doing the right thing.
Just as the plight of animals in the wild confirmed Darwin in his atheism, so their plight at human hands has confirmed me in my amoralism. For what has morality done for animals?
One further important clarification is in order. In my manner of exposition there has been the suggestion that the absence of moral justification means the absence of any justification at all; so when I use a phrase like “I just like it,” it may seem as if I am a creature of whim who is recommending a world of wantonness. Mea culpa. In fact my assumption is that some desires are definitely more conducive than others to the kind of world you and I would prefer, not to mention, to our very survival (which is probably why we have them). And one main species of desire that I desire to see prevail in general, if not in every instance, is that which is based on true or at least rational belief. Thus, for example, when one person wrote to me that veganism is not viable because it cannot satisfy our protein needs, I was sure to correct that person’s false belief in an effort to bring his appetitive desires in closer alignment with both mine and the truth.
Last but definitely not least, a word about nonhuman animals. Just as the plight of animals in the wild confirmed Darwin in his atheism, so their plight at human hands has confirmed me in my amoralism. For what has morality done for animals? By any moral or amoral measure, the harm we humans visit upon most of the animals who come within our sight (and sights) is an enormity. For instance, in the five minutes it has taken you to read this essay, 100,000 land animals have been killed for food in the United States alone. Every one of those animals had sufficient sentience, intelligence and personality to be someone’s beloved pet, whom their guardian would never have permitted to be treated in the way these animals are. As an amoralist, I am not drawing any moral conclusion from these facts; but as a desirist, I am profoundly moved to do whatever is in my power, subject to the constraints of circumstances and my other desires, to turn the situation around.
I know full well that somebody else could survey and accept the same facts as I and still declare, “But I love my steak.” I would be tempted to point out the implication: “If that, and not some exigency or further argument, really is your reason for continuing to eat animals and animal products, then, it seems, you care more about an accustomed taste or tradition than about the suffering and killing of sentient beings.” It is up to that person to decide whether he or she concurs and, if so, prefers that self-image to some more animal-friendly one. Should, on reflection, that person change his or her pattern of consumption, I would be glad. If not, I would be sad … but not mad. I would, however, redouble my efforts elsewhere.
Joel Marks is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and a scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. He is at work on a book called “Ethics without Morals.”