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"Other people can seem so mysterious, so strange, so stubborn, so wrong-headed. Why must they mess things up ? Why must they complicate everything ? Why can’t they see the error of their ways ? [...] Buddhism provided me with the first liberation from that worrying. I now accept people as they are." (p.V)
"We are all bound to be different, since desires arise from countless sources that vary from person to person (from nation to nation and era to era and moment to moment, etc.). The other is that we are not likely to change, since desires are natural, causal, and probably material phenomena that become entrenched through habit and circumstances and may sometimes even be “hard-wired.” To realize these things is liberating, therefore, since striving to alter what is inevitable and unalterable is pointless." (p.VI)
"Our desire nature suggests an ethics that I have accordingly dubbed “desirism.” Formulated as a maxim, it is this: Figure out, by rational inquiry, what you want, and then figure out how to get it, consistently with your rationally vetted desires. How does this help with the perceived stupidity and cussedness of other people (and oneself and even “the world”) ? It helps by directing one’s efforts to what can realistically be accomplished in the furtherance of one’s deepest desires. Moreover, I see this attitude as working out well (as I conceive “well”) for society as a whole, because it will have a moderating effect on both ends and means, thereby reducing strife. I dare to imagine that it might even preclude the existence of Hitlers and ISISes. Thus I have really given two responses to the objection that desirism would leave us helpless against such people: Resistance to Hitlers would continue to exist insofar as Hitlers existed, but maybe there would be no more Hitlers.
Another way to say this is that desirism is not Buddhism, even though it has been inspired by Buddhism; or at least it is not Buddhism as interpreted at face value. For Buddhism is commonly understood to advise the elimination of desire (and ultimately the illusion of desirer or self), since it revealed that desire is the source of our woes. But this would seem as well to strip us of the possibility of happiness (as the satisfaction of desire) and action (as motivated by desire). That cannot be right, since genuine Buddhists seem perfectly capable of both enjoyment and resolve. So “desire” must have a special meaning in this context, such that desire’s elimination is compatible with both satisfaction and motivation. For example, it might be shorthand for selfish desire or else disproportionate desire, leaving other desires intact. Just so, desirism is intended to modify our desires, but not necessarily eliminate them; and this modification, induced by rational inquiry, could well be expected to result in some desires (such as compassion) increasing in strength, or even coming into being, and not only some desires (such as selfishness) moderating or going out of existence. It would depend on the desire and on the situation." (pp.VIII-IX)
"I take ethics to be inquiry into how to live, and more particularly, what to do (on particular occasions or in various kinds of circumstances or possibly even at all times), what kind of person to be, and so forth.
The moralist’s assumption that this question must be understood as “How ought we to live?” is what I call starting ethics off on the wrong foot. It is the wrong question. It also merely presumes an answer to my question, that answer being, “The way to live is to do what one ought to do.” I think that is only one possible answer. I am convinced that ethics is not about ought at all. I question whether the concept of ought even makes sense." (XVII-XVIII)
"Both morality and religion (at least of the Abrahamic sort) deliver absolute commandments from On High, and yet are also alike in having mundane manifestations that offer diverse and conflicting prescriptions and proscriptions. These are the conditions for the perfect ethical storm: opposing yet categorical imperatives. I see this as the basis for much, possibly most of the strife and grief in the world. And so this is what lends urgency to my efforts to expunge not only religion but also its secular stepchild, morality. I call the combined enterprise “hard atheism.” ." (p.XIX)
"I have come up with a different answer from the moralist’s (and a fortiori, the theist’s), which is what the rest of this book details. In a nutshell it is the recommendation that we figure out what we (individually or collectively) want and then figure out how to get it. And my main argument is that this answer will better help us with the real work that needs to be done. Moral theorists assume that the real work is to figure out what we ought to do. I reply that there is no point in figuring out what people ought to do if people still won’t do it because they don’t want to or don’t care. The moral theorist replies that knowing what we ought to do provides precisely the motivation that is needed (to get us to turn aside from doing what we may want to do however immoral). I reply that the task of figuring out what we ought to do will be forever without resolution, so the practical upshot of that inquiry is nil or maintaining the status quo.
People will just continue to do what they want anyway but call it the right thing to do. For all these reasons I believe that an amoral motivation that is based on recognizing the actual desires that move us would be more effective in bringing about the kind of world that moralists and amoralists alike would prefer if we all reflected on the matter.
In a way, then, I am suggesting that we replace normativity with psychology, since I would have us replace ought with would. For example, in place of, “You ought to help your parents,” I predict that, if you reflected on the matter rationally, you would, other things equal, be disposed to help your parents. In other words, I would like us to replace an intense preoccupation with what we ought to do, with an intense curiosity about why we do what we do. What does “ought” add to “would” ? My answer: Only obfuscation and infinite opportunities for hypocrisy and self-delusion and egotism and irresolvable conflict. Hence I do not even want to parse “ought” as would; I simply want to get rid of it. Nevertheless, I think my alternative counts as an ethics and not a psychology per se, since it does not postulate simply that we do what we want, which could even seem a truism, but rather recommends that we do what we would want after we had reflected on the matter rationally.
The ethics I favor, therefore, points up two ways in which people can be mistaken in how they live their lives. One is to moralize their desires, while the other is to desire what they would not rationally desire. A person who makes the first mistake I call a moralist. A person who makes the second mistake I call a wanton. I call these mistakes because I believe the moralist is factually in error to believe or assume that morality exists, and the wanton is factually in error to believe or assume that his or her spontaneous desires would ipso facto, i.e., simply in virtue of being his or her desires, withstand rational vetting. Even so, however, I myself would be a moralist if I condemned the moralist and the wanton for making these mistakes. I just wish they wouldn’t (for such reasons as I will present in this book), and so I recommend that we not be moralists or wantons." (p.XIX-XXI)
"I claim that morality does not exist. But what is morality ? It is not possible to settle any existential claim without knowing the nature of the entity in question. Clearly there is a sense in which morality does exist; for example, defined as a code of behavior whose violation is considered to merit punishment (legal, social, or psychological), morality is to be found in every society. So when I assert that morality does not exist, I must have something else in mind. And certainly I do, namely, morality conceived as a universal injunction external to our desires. Thus, for example, even if the code of our society deemed homosexual behavior as such to be morally permissible, and even if you personally wished to engage in it, morality might pronounce it wrong. The morality I now reject is, therefore, a metaphysical one, as opposed to the sociological kind; the latter is a fact of our empirical environment, while the former is a figment of our wishful or fearful imagination.
For all that, metaphysical morality is widely accepted as real." (p.4)
"Consider that for the foreseeable future I will be living in a society that continues to pay homage to morality and believe in its reality implicitly. So I am likely to be confronted time and again by a question like, “Do you believe x is wrong ?” It would usually be hopeless to attempt to refashion the question into an amoralist mode of speaking ; at the very least this would change the subject from the particular issue under discussion, say, vivisection, to an abstract issue in meta-ethics, namely, whether there is such a thing as wrongness. But there is still a way I could answer the question both honestly and effectively. Thus, I could reply, “Vivisection is wrong according to morality as I conceive it.” For the quoted sentence is not asserting that vivisection is wrong, only that, according to morality (as I conceive morality) it is wrong. In the abstract this has no more force than if one were to say, “Unicorns are a type of horse (according to the common conception of unicorns).” There is no implication that unicorns actually exist." (p.7)
"On what basis would I myself be a vegetarian ? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness. For many, maybe most human beings in the world today, meat-eating is a mere luxury or habit of taste, while at the same time it promotes animal cruelty and slaughter, environmental degradation, global warming, human disease, and even human starvation (the latter due to the highly inefficient conversion of plant protein to animal protein for human consumption). For whatever reason or reasons, or even no reason, these things matter to me. Therefore I am motivated to act on the relevant desires.
But what if I were conversing with another amoralist : How would I convince her of the rightness of my desires ? Well, of course, I wouldn’t even try, since neither of us believes in right, or wrong. But what I could do is take her through the same considerations that have moved me to my position and hope that her heartstrings were tuned in harmony with mine. If the two of us have grown up in the same culture, we will certainly have many desires in common. For example, we may both be averse to animal suffering and to cruelty to animals. But even within the same society, there can be large differences in knowledge. I speak from personal experience regarding even my own knowledge, for, to stay with my example, I was blissfully unaware of factory farming until only a few years ago. Most people in my society continue to be, even though the institution has been prevalent for the last fifty years. Thus, there is a good chance that I would be able to influence my interlocutor’s carnivorous desire and behavior simply by introducing her to the relevant facts. The absence of a moral context, therefore, need not be harmful to my hitherto-moral project of honestly promoting vegetarianism.
But what if my amoral interlocutor were just as versed in the facts of factory farming as I but still did not care about animal suffering, or simply loved eating meat more than she loved animals ? At this point the dialogue might serve no purpose. But that certainly would not mean that I had no further recourse, even honest recourse. For example, I could try to bring around as many other people as possible to my way of seeing (and feeling) things so that ultimately by sheer force of numbers we might reduce animal suffering and exploitation by our purchasing practices and voting choices. In this effort I could join with others to employ standard methods of marketing, such as advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements. These things are not inherently dishonest simply in virtue of being strategic. (And of course if I did not value honesty, additional tactics would become available to me.)
I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal –once the initial shock has subsided– would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope ? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual house-keeping. But the thesis – call it “The Joy of Amorality” – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend
it.) A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue (of a member of my society, including myself) as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no morality. Yet, as with the nonexistence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely naturally explainable internal resources for motivating behaviors that uphold the benign functioning of society, which is what I naturally care about on reflection." (pp.10-12)
"As a defender of amorality, I am continually challenged by two allegations: egoism and relativism. But both are bogies. Let me explain why. That an amoralist would be an egoist seems to follow from the idea that morality is precisely a check on our selfish tendencies. Morality’s main reason for being is group cohesion, without which most personal endeavors could not even get off the ground. All of us depend on the viability of our group ; hence we must imbibe very strong motives “with our mother’s milk” to favor the group over our personal ego, if only for our personal good in the long run. Furthermore, my own way of speaking about amoral motives suggests an egoism, for I believe that, in the final analysis, we are moved solely by desire. The bottom line is what we want. Is that not egoism pure and simple ?
No. The above arguments conflate egoism with other things. The first argument reduces egoism to selfishness. But egoism is much farther seeing than selfishness. Long-term self-interest is egoism’s goal, and its rational pursuit a component of its charge. A hefty dose of other-concern would plausibly be part of any true egoist’s makeup since his or her own prospects depend on others’. Even so, however, an amoralist is neither necessarily nor essentially egoistic. This is because one’s fundamental desires could be for anything. Just because a desire is one’s own does not mean that what one desires is only one’s own welfare. You could just as deeply desire the welfare of your neighbor as the welfare of yourself, and even more so, such that you would sacrifice yourself for her. Thus, when I say that an amoralist is motivated solely by desire, I do not mean to imply any sort of egoism whatever." (p.13)
"What really is the difference, then, between the amoralist and the moralist ? Just that the latter believes in an external source of moral imperatives, whereas the former recognizes only desires." (p.14)
"Out of the frying pan of egoism, therefore, and into the fire of relativism ? For if there are only desires that are responsive to the environment, won’t desires vary according to different environments ? Yes indeed. However, there are still two ways to parry this possibility. First is to point out that human environments, whether natural or cultural, are both like and unlike. So we can count on there being uniformities across all boundaries as well as diversity. And it is surely the same with morality: for while it may be universal that, let us say, one should never torture a child, it is also respectably moral to permit or even require, say, killing human beings in some circumstances (such as to protect a child from being tortured) and to prohibit it in others.
My denial of moral relativism, however, rests mainly on the unintelligibility of the charge. “Moral relativism” seems to me an oxymoron ; for morality in its very concept and essence is supposed to be universal and absolute. Thus, even in the example I just gave: Morality’s take on the morality of killing would be that a single imperative underlies the difference due to circumstances, namely, “Thou shalt not kill the innocent” or something of that sort. Moral relativism, therefore, is a straw person to begin with. But it is downright question-begging as an objection to amorality, since it assumes what the position denies, namely, morality. Amorality cannot be guilty of moral relativism any more than your neighbor could be a goblin. That there are differences of desire, however, is a commonplace." (p.14)
"Normative ethics is as pointless a pursuit as theology, inasmuch as both seek to determine the truths about a fictitious entity. And the diagnosis is similar in the two cases: both suffer from “mono.” What I mean is that in assuming there is morality or God, they infer that there is a truth about them: What is the nature of (the one) morality ? What is the nature of (the one) God ? But the result is Procrustean since in fact there are distinctive conceptions of morality just as there are distinctive conceptions of God ; so there is no
place for (moral) monotheorism (or “monomoralism”) any more than for monotheism. (In reality, anyway.) All of us harbor Kantian as well as utilitarian as well as egoist etc. intuitions, most likely depending on the type of circumstances we find ourselves in, just as all of us imagine a loving God, a jealous and demanding God, a law-giver, a merciful one, a father, a mother, and so on. And, although presumably they perform some function in the evolutionary scheme of things, insofar as we take any of these intuitings and imaginings to signify a reality beyond themselves, we are just day-dreaming." (pp.17-18)
"I used to be a moral man, but now I am a material man. It has been a staggering experience to realize how much drops out of one’s picture of the world on this account. At the top of the list would be the notion of “should” – that is, “should” tout court – in other words, what one ought to do “in the last analysis” or “all things considered.” Moralists fondly refer to this feature of morality as “the highest telos,” from a Greek work referring to the end of a goal-directed process; thus, morality is supposed to override all other factors, especially selfish ones, in any deliberation about what to do. Immanuel Kant postulated a special psychological faculty of will, responsive to the dictates of rational conscience, to serve the purpose of wresting self-control from our inclinations or desires. The latter are mere motives of behavior, but the former provide us with genuine reasons for action; thus, morality is based on justification rather than causation.
Bunkums, I now declare. There is only cause and effect. Determinism reigns, not reason. We cannot do other than we do. There is no should ; there is only what we will do, or what we would do if in such-a-such condition under so-and-so circumstances. That is all we ever could do. Granted, sometimes we are motivated by beliefs about what we should do. But this is no different from being motivated to say “Thank you” by the belief that Santa Claus is noting whether you are naughty or nice. False beliefs can surely be motivators as much as true beliefs can." (pp.18-19)
"One objection to amorality is that morality is pervasive in a very deep sense. The claim is that we not only have frequent resort to explicitly moral notions, such as doing the wrong
(or the right) thing or blaming someone or being outraged by something, but we also continually make implicit reference to morality in attitudes and actions that appear overtly nonmoral. The worry, then, is that normal life and society would become unsustainable because they would become unintelligible if we were to abandon morality. Notice how this is different from, and more extreme than, the more accustomed objection to amorality, which is that human existence would become unsustainable because “everything would be permitted.” But an example of this new objection is that the notion of “person” is claimed to be morally imbued. On this account, a person is not just a certain kind of biological organism or a certain sort of functioning system but is specifically an entity having inherent worth that makes it merit moral respect." (pp.19-20)
"Anger does not always arise when somebody hurts or frustrates or slights you or somebody else you care about. In order for this emotion to occur, an additional element is required, it seems to me: that you believe that the person has done the deed deliberately (or at least carelessly), in other words, that there has been a particular type of intention (or else inattention) that is malign (or at least blameworthy). In a word, anger is the feeling that a wrong has been committed. If this is so, then all anger is a form of indignation, that is, all anger is moral anger. Thus, all anger would disappear from an amoral world. That, at any rate, is my hunch that an amoral world would be a world without anger. And this seems to me to be a happy conclusion, for two reasons: I like the idea of a world without anger, and I believe that amorality is true. Therefore, it would not only be correct to believe
that morality does not exist, but would also have a result that I like. Of course even if it were true that anger goes by the boards if (belief in) morality does, it would not follow without further argument that amorality is a good thing. Certainly there are those who are prepared to argue that anger is at least sometimes valuable, and that human life would, on balance, be worse off without it." (p.21)
"Nor does an amoralist believe in objective values, such as the goodness of health or the badness of pain; however much we might desire or be averse to these things." (p.25)
"When another person has a preference or desire that conflicts with one’s own, especially when we have things “just so” to our own liking, we tend to experience the other’s as an imposition or an intrusion. This is because we attribute a very special kind of quality to the other person: free will. We naturally assume that a human being is unlike a stone in that the former can act of her own volition. We therefore further assume that a person can be responsive not only to the way things are, such as the local pull of gravity, to which a stone is also responsive, but also to the way things ought to be, to which a stone is insensitive. And by an amazing coincidence (wink wink nudge nudge), what we ourselves desire coincides with how they ought to be, and what the other person desires does not. Therefore we expect the stone to ignore our wishes but another person to conform to them because what we wish is right. Indeed, even a sympathetic or “chivalrous” accommodation to the other is ruled out, since it would make oneself complicit in wrong-doing.
It turns out, then, that although morality is commonly touted to be the nemesis and antidote to selfish desire, in actual practice morality aids and abets it. For the most natural deployment of morality is as a check on somebody else’s behavior rather than on one’s own. And the explanation of this turnabout is that morality has no absolute basis that could act as a universal constraint. Thus, if it really were Writ On High that one shalt not, then it would be wrong not only for thine “enemy” to do it but also for thyself; yet hardly anybody accepts this. We ourselves are the universal exception (to coin an oxymoron) to every moral rule. And even in the one-in-a-million case of a bad conscience, the pull of morality is typically so weak that the prohibited act may go forward anyway.
So I would like to urge an alternative conception of ethics. According to this, there is only the way things are and there is no ought-to-be, and what sets us apart from stones is only that we have desires. In other words, instead of a presumed moral fact that the situation ought to be such-and-so, there is only the psychological fact that we would like it to be such-and-so. The latter is an empirical matter, just like the local pull of gravity. Thus, if my partner opposed my setting the thermostat low, this would be in the same metaphysical ballpark as a bunch of stones tumbling down a mountainside and heading my way. In both cases I would face a fact which threatened to frustrate my own desire, in the one case to keep things cool, in the other case to avoid being pummeled.
But in neither case would there be a question of whether the person or the rock was morally wrong to be so preferring or behaving. The only question would be how to deal with a practical situation. There is no “easy win” over the person by declaring her to be violating some presumed objective moral principle. Her opposed desire is just as implacable as the landslide (which is to say, as implacable as my own desire, which I can no more change by an act of will than halt a landslide). The only operative objective principles are laws of nature, whether physical or psychological. When the question is what temperature to keep in the home, a person who is no longer living alone would need to add to his or her list of considerations the needs and desires and beliefs (whether true or false) of another person. What is overlooked in the singling out of a newcomer as intruder is that it has never been a case of things being “just the way I like them” – some personal Golden Age before the arrival of the benighted other – but was always under a set of constraints, such as the type of heating system in the house, the layout of rooms, one’s financial resources, etc. The newcomer’s desires simply add to this set. To see her or him as a moral agent is implicitly, and ignorantly, and to everyone’s disservice, to deny this.
Realizing these things has been, for me at least, a source of great relief, for I am no longer fighting unnecessary battles in a purely mythical realm of oughts. My partner wants it hot; I want it cold. How do we work this out ? That is the question, not “Who’s right ?” It is a joint project for true partners, not a unilateral initiative against an adversary. Thus, instead of attempting to instill moral guilt in the other (almost always a doomed effort), each of us could moderate our language and tone of voice. Furthermore, some of the reasons we have given for our respective positions are probably bogus to begin with; would I really be invoking the environment and she unemployment if we did not first have preferences on other grounds ? I don’t mean that we are not also concerned about those other things; only that they are decidedly secondary to the matter at hand, and addressing them won’t resolve it.
Of course I would still be free to try to persuade my partner of any error in her thinking (and she in mine), or she to coax me into greater empathy for her discomfort (and I for mine), and so forth. But I (and, I hope, she as well) would now be dealing with reality and not invoking a mythical god of morality to make the rough ways smooth. What we need to figure out is how best to accommodate our respective considered preferences. “Would it work to place a space heater in the room where you spend most of your time during the day, but otherwise leave the house thermostat set low ?” We would also have the whole picture before us, which is to say in this case, not just the matter of temperature, but also our relations with each other.
Maybe I would decide in the end to suffer the heat in order to warm up her affections... or just because I love her. Or we might part after all on grounds of irreconcilable differences. It’s all one big system and not a set of commandments. That’s what I mean by amorality." (pp.25-28)
-Joel Marks, Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire. An Alternative to Morality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 195 pages.
