Ethics without Morals

In Defence of Amorality

Joel Marks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136202278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

In this volume, Marks offers a defense of amorality as both philosophically justified and practicably livable. In so doing, the book marks a radical departure from both the new atheism and the mainstream of modern ethical philosophy. While in synch with their underlying aim of grounding human existence in a naturalistic metaphysics, the book takes both to task for maintaining a complacent embrace of morality. Marks advocates wiping the slate clean of outdated connotations by replacing the language of morality with a language of desire.

The book begins with an analysis of what morality is and then argues that the concept is not instantiated in reality. Following this, the question of belief in morality is addressed: How would human life be affected if we accepted that morality does not exist? Marks argues that at the very least, a moralist would have little to complain about in an amoral world, and at best we might hope for a world that was more to our liking overall. An extended look at the human encounter with nonhuman animals serves as an illustration of amorality's potential to make both theoretical and practical headway in resolving heretofore intractable ethical problems.

1 What Is Morality?

God’s in his Heaven–

All’s right with the world!¹

As surely as up and down, dark and light, our world contains right and wrong … saith the moralist. We can simply see that a balloon is rising or that dusk is descending or that Fagin’s corruption of a child is wrong. God’s in his heaven, and, while not all is right with the world, ever since our fall from grace we have judged almost everything on Earth to be either right or wrong, good or evil, pious or impious² … just as, before acquiring that fatal knowledge, we had named³ “every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air.”⁴ Our common conception of morality, therefore, is of something real and pervasive, if perhaps also a little hot for us humans to handle.

Exactly how commonly held this conception is,⁵ is an empirical question, which I will leave to the social scientists to answer definitively.⁶ Morality may be peculiar to Western civilization,⁷ or it may only be the preoccupation of theologians and academic philosophers of a certain stripe. What I can assert with confidence is that I myself believed in a morality of this sort; and when I did, it seemed clear to me that my belief was widely, indeed universally, shared. Although I am now skeptical on both counts—that is, I now believe that the belief in morality is neither universally accepted nor even true—I still sense that it is widely enough held, and with sufciently baneful infl uence on the world, that going to some ef ort to dispel it would be a worthwhile undertaking. But it is clear that I cannot simply ask, “What do we mean by ‘morality’?” since it would always be meet for someone to inquire in turn, “Who are ‘we’?” As I continue to characterize the concept in this chapter, you will have to judge for yourself whether or to what degree this book is addressed to you and to the world.⁸

So what is this thing called morality? I have always taken it to be a set of absolute and universal imperatives and prohibitions, the Biblical Ten Commandments being paradigmatic in the West. Morality has a lawlike structure, but in the way of human rather than scientific laws. In other words, the moral law does not act on us directly, the way the law of gravity determines the rate of our descent in a free fall.⁹ Instead it acts via the intermediary of our will, so that “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” does not guarantee that you won’t lie but only solicits your voluntary compliance. This is just how a speed limit works, or a criminal law against murder. Neither can stop you from committing the infraction without the concurrence of your will to refrain. The dif erence between the human law and the moral law, however, is that the latter is infallible and universal. Human laws can and do vary from country to country and era to era because they are the products of human beings situated in a culture and possessed of vying interests. By contrast, moral law is, or is as it were, the product of divine fiat; it emanates from an unchanging and univocal font—of wisdom and beneficence, one would like to think, but at least of authority and power.

When I look into my own moral heart I discern fear more than respect or love for this One God of Right and Wrong. I cower before my conscience. Sometimes conscience speaks to me with what seems simple reasonableness. But at other times it just pronounces, so I am not asked to agree but only to obey. Curiously, however, there are yet other occasions when I am filled with a moral emotion emanating only from myself, and that emotion could be compassion or anger. I then myself become the god, who wants assistance to be tendered to the unfortunate or punishment meted out to the evildoer. Even so, with only this internal bidding, the feeling or judgment retains an absolute and universal character; I would expect every right-thinking soul to share my emotion or opinion, and I would feel a further, condemnatory emotion toward someone who failed to.

The above account makes frequent reference to God or a god. Could we say, then, that morality is equivalent to religiosity or piety? At this point philosophy diverges from theology. The former sees “piety” as simply a way of being moral. In its most well-known formulation,¹⁰ the philosophical view takes piety to be allegiance not to God so much as to God’s unerring understanding of what is good or right on independent grounds. That is to say: It is not just God’s declaring something to be (morally) right that makes it so, but right’s being right that makes God declare it so. In the same way, the fact that 2+2=4 made your arithmetic teacher’s assertion of it correct, rather than vice versa; so if your teacher had told you that 2+2=5, your teacher would have been mistaken.¹¹

Just so, according to the philosophic notion of piety, if a voice inside your head told you to murder your innocent son, you would have clear grounds to doubt that that voice came from God, because God would never tell you to do something wrong, and it would be wrong to murder your innocent son. Moreover, since religion as it is commonly presented in the Abrahamic traditions, condones, indeed glories in Abraham’s willingness to “sacrifice” Isaac,¹² the philosophic piety of which I speak eventually decayed into a pure secularity of morality. Philosophical ethics became the pursuit of grounds independent of either God’s fiat or God’s instruction for telling the dif erence between what we should do and what we should not do. Thus, ironically, secular ethics seeks to replicate the religious origin of sin (of wresting the knowledge of good and evil from God’s providence).¹³

It is interesting to consider how morality relates, then, to decision making as such. After all, terms like “should” and “ought” have applications outside of morality. Wherever there are norms or standards, there is should (and also right and wrong). You should use an apostrophe in the contraction of “it” and “is”; it is the grammatically right thing to do. You should take an umbrella if it looks like heavy weather outside; that would be the prudentially right thing to do. You should use a hammer if you want to drive in a nail; that would be the pragmatically right thing to do. You should drive on the left side of the road in England; that would be the legally (as well as prudentially and morally) right thing to do.

So what distinguishes the moral should? Observe that one kind of should can trump another; for example, on a given occasion the grammatical rule to use “isn’t” for “is not” could be over-ruled by a rhetorical justification to use “ain’t.” My conception of morality is as the highest telos,¹⁴ by which I mean that the morally right thing to do is supposed to be what we should do “all short” (tout court) or simpliciter or “in the last analysis” or “all things considered.” Thus, the moral should trumps all others, and at all times and everywhere.¹⁵

Considered in this way, morality would seem to be equivalent to practical rationality, for once we have figured out what we ought to do according to morality, we could plausibly be supposed to have gauged, simultaneously and in the nature of the case, what reason would dictate as well. Could there be a confl ict between reason and morals? Could, for example, lying on some particular occasion be morally wrong and yet the rational thing to do? If you think not, then it naturally seems to follow that one way to determine what is the right, or at least a permissible¹⁶ thing to do, would be to figure out what it is rational to do. This way of thinking about morality has appealed to many philosophers, who love reason to begin with.¹⁷

But here we have come upon one of those “vexed questions” that keep philosophers philosophizing perennially. For as much as we may be drawn to the idea of moral living as the epitome of rational living, we also have intuitions militating against their identity. For one thing, even if the moral thing to do were always rational, it would not follow automatically that the rational thing to do was always moral. There are three reasons for this. One is pure logic: From if p then q, it does not follow that if q then p. For example, it is plausible to maintain that everything that has a color also has a shape, or “if x has a color, then x has a shape.” But the converse does not follow, because you could have a square piece of untinted glass. Just so, even if everything that was moral turned out to be rational, there might be some things that it was rational to do but not moral to do.¹⁸

The second reason to doubt the equivalence of morality and rationality is (as alluded to earlier) that “moral” is ambiguous between “morally right” and “morally permissible.”¹⁹ If something were moral in the latter sense, then it would not be wrong to do it. But if something were moral in the sense of being the right thing to do, then it would be obligatory—in other words, wrong not to do it. And third, the analogous is true of rationality: “Rational” can mean either rationally permissible or rationally obligatory, the latter being the right thing to do rationally speaking. For example, reason may dictate that you not lean your hand on the hot burner, but only allow that you choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream, given that you like them both equally (and “all other things equal”); the latter would be rational simply in virtue of not being irrational.

So when we ask whether morality and rationality always go hand in hand, we could be asking any of several different things, namely: (1) Is every morally obligatory act rationally obligatory? (2) Is every morally obligatory act rationally permissible? (3) Is every morally permissible act rationally permissible? (4) Is every morally permissible act rationally obligatory? (5) Is every rationally obligatory act morally obligatory? (6) Is every rationally obligatory act morally permissible? (7) Is every rationally permissible act morally permissible? (8) Is every rationally permissible act morally obligatory? (If the reader’s eyes have just begun to glaze over, you may skip the six following paragraphs and resume reading at “Ergo.”)

The answer to (8) seems clearly to be “No”: The ice cream example settles that. It is a matter of rational indifference which flavor you choose, and, far from being morally obligatory (or “moral” or “right” tout court), hardly a moral issue at all. (5) is also easily decided: It could be rationally compelling (as always: “all other things equal”) for you to go out to eat because you were hungry and there was nothing in the cupboard, and furthermore it might be perfectly permissible (morally or “tout court”) for you to do so, there being no confl icting urgent moral demand placed upon you, such as performing CPR on a stricken roommate; but in the run of cases it would certainly not be your moral obligation to go out to eat just because you were hungry and hadn’t gone food shopping lately. Therefore even though you have, as it were, a rational obligation to go out to eat, you are not, in the last analysis, obligated to do so, for morality, which trumps all else, does not require that you do so. Therefore the answer to (5) is also “No.”

But how about (6): Would a rationally obligatory act always be at least morally permissible? I think “No” again, although this is a more interesting question. Suppose you have learned that a bundle of cash is stashed on a yacht anchored in the harbor and decide to steal it. The next day under cover of darkness you swim to the boat when you think no one is on board, climb in, grab the bundle, scuttle the boat to cover the crime, and then leap overboard. As you are about to swim back to shore with your precious booty, you hear someone shout: “You took that! I saw you!” You look back and notice a small boy on the deck. Meanwhile the boat is taking on water, and the boy suddenly notices. “I can’t swim!” he cries. Soon the water is swirling around you both. The boy is floundering helplessly. You realize that he will drown unless you rescue him. But you cannot grab hold of him and hold onto the bundle of money at the same time. The choice is yours: Save the life of the one person who can incriminate you and lose your ill-gotten gains in the bargain, or solve both problems simply by going about your business.

Clearly it would be morally impermissible to let the boy drown. But it also seems plausible to maintain that it would be irrational for you to save him .²⁰ If in the end you do “make the right choice,” it will have been the morally right choice, but not the one that prudence would have dictated .²¹ And, curiously, reason does seem to ally itself more with prudence than with morality. So in rescuing the child you would be listening to your conscience rather than reason. Oh yes, there could be reasons to save the child, such as to avoid an even worse “rap” of manslaughter than of robbery if you were ever caught; and the boy might even “cover” for you out of gratitude (or fear). Furthermore, you might have to live with a “guilty conscience” if you didn’t rescue him. But these things—some bad feelings, risk of punishment—might be viewed by you as the cost of doing business, your business being burglary, which, on balance, has a bigger payof for you than an honest job and a clear conscience. Therefore, again, the answer to (6) is “No” because it is possible to be rational and immora...