We have convinced ourselves, and taught our young, that our conventions, laws, practices, and principles are subject to “higher” standards. We subscribe to natural laws, acknowledge eternal values, respect inalienable rights, and agree that we ought to avoid evil. We fear that if morality were “merely” conventional, “merely” a product of evolution and intelligence, it would lose its authority and become, in Kant’s words, “a mere phantom of the brain.” (Kant [3], 48)
To say that morality is a “phantom of the brain” is just to say, in scary language, that we make it up. But what if we do make it up? Would that be so bad? After all, we make up our laws and our rules of etiquette. But there is a difference. We take morality more seriously than we do etiquette, and we think that morality is above the law. We may fear that if we admit that we make up morality we would also have to admit that it is optional, malleable, and relative. Because such an admission would undermine our highly prized ability to impose moral duties and restrictions on others, we are strongly motivated not to admit, even to ourselves, that morality is only a clever human invention, rooted in convention and aimed at control.
It is natural for victims of deceit, cruelty, greed, or ambition to think in moral terms about the ways they were treated. As they see it, bad people broke their promises and violated their agreements, evil bureaucrats ignored the rights of the defenseless, and someone, or even everyone, ought to have acted differently. Moral judgments, moral arguments, and moral posturing permeate our social life and our private thoughts. Anything that lives will be attracted to some things and repulsed by others, but our likes and dislikes have become so infused with moralistic concepts that we think we deserve what we want and that others are morally obliged to do things our way.
Many of our familiar traditions and practices are quite useful, and others are wasteful or even dangerous, but a natural conservativism awards all of them a presumption of correctness—a kind of moral inertia. Any attempt to alter them is likely to be resisted on moral grounds, and unless reformers can meet this resistance with moral arguments of their own, or something even stronger, they can forget about trying to change things. As new issues are propelled into the public eye by this or that discovery, disaster, scandal, or network special the one thing that remains constant is the moral tone of the discussion. Everyone claims to have correct answers, and everyone has plenty of reasons and arguments to defend even the most extreme and absurd of those answers.
I call this book Beyond Morality because I believe that this moralist approach to questions about how to live and act is inherently flawed. It is too easy to find moral arguments to support both sides of any dispute, too hard to explain the claim that we are bound or required by morality, and too unsettling to see such widespread and apparently irreconcilable moral divergence. It is time to face these facts and to explore other alternatives.
Moralists assume more than they can prove, and they promise more than they can give. They say we are “subject to” objectively binding moral requirements, but never explain what this means or why it is so. For example, strong moralist pronouncements appear in a book by Jeffrey Stout, who writes that it is a knowable truth, independent of human contrivance or agreement, that “slavery is evil” and that “knowingly and willingly torturing innocents is wrong, impermissible, unjust.” (Stout, Ethics After Babel, p. 245) He says he is more certain of these things than he is of anything he might use to support them—so he doesn’t support them. But neither Stout’s strong belief nor his inability to support his moral intuitions lends any credibility to his moral claims.
The critic of morality will reject Stout’s dogmatic intuitionism and all the other forms of moralism, whether offered by Christians, Jews, Hindus, Platonists, Buddhists, Muslims, Unitarians, or atheistic proponents of natural laws and rights. Let us, at least temporarily, call this critic “the amoralist.” We cannot ask the amoralist to refute every form of morality that has ever been devised, but we can hope for a serious attempt to make a case against the moralists and to explain why so many people hold so many mistaken moral beliefs and beliefs about morality.
If moral disputes are fated to remain unresolved, it will be because there really is no fact of the matter about what is “wrong, impermissible, unjust.” The first four chapters of this book are designed to support this negative claim. By the end of Chapter Four I hope that my proposal to abandon moral language, moral judgments, and moral thinking will no longer seem outrageous. In Chapter Five I will survey what is to be abolished by anyone who is rash enough to adopt my recommendation, and in Chapter Six I will further defend and explain the position I call “moral abolitionism.”
After clarifying and defending moral abolitionism, I set out to show that there are effective non-moralistic ways to reach some of the goals moralists set for themselves and for others—a reduction in suffering and an increase in the happiness and contentment of those capable of happiness and contentment. In Chapter Seven we will hear some wise, but not at all moralistic, suggestions about how to deal with our troublesome desires and emotions. In Chapter Eight we look a little more closely than we usually do at what goes on when we make our decisions, and I identify some of the many factors, other than moral pressure, that we can draw upon to control what we and others think and do.
One of the principal influences on us is our language, so in Chapter Nine we spend some time thinking about ways words can either save us or lead us astray. We then explore the efforts of three philosophers, Sextus Empiricus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and The Buddha, to find ways not to be misled by language.
Morality is about control, so in Chapter Ten I raise the question of whether we need as much control as we think we do. Taking charge is sometimes a good strategy, but not nearly as often as we think. Morality, which presents itself as the repository of truths about how things ought to go, gives us enough false confidence to be comfortable about forcing others to do things our way. When we see morality as the human creation it is, we may also realize that our way is not the only way. This may help us begin to grasp both the true nature of the conflicts that divide us and the importance of transcending the distracting and endless debates of the moralists.
In Chapters Eleven and Twelve we take a fresh, that is, a non-moralistic, look at some of the standard problems of applied ethics. Our criminal justice system is in ruins, and we are far too concerned with the personal decisions of complete strangers. Our treatment of non-humans is problematic and our concern for the environment is as endangered as the species we are threatening. In these final two chapters I will show that if we leave the moralist out of the discussion, and make a few other changes about how we relate to one another, we will find it easier to make decisions that we, others, and all but the most rigid moralists, will find more than acceptable.
By the end of the book I hope to have shown that we can do without morality if we supplement our amoralism with clear-headedness, compassion, and a passion for good information. By “doing without morality” I do not mean doing without kindness, or turning ourselves into sociopathic predators. I simply mean rejecting the idea that there are intrinsic values, categorical imperatives, objective duties, natural rights, or any of the other preemptory items moralists cherish. Before we are through, I will have explained what morality is, what is wrong with it, and what we can do to construct, without self-deception, superstition, or duplicity, a satisfying strategy for living happily.