Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire

An Alternative to Morality

Joel Marks

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319437996
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

This book challenges the widespread assumption that the ethical life and society must be moral in any objective sense. In his previous works, Marks has rejected both the existence of such a morality and the need to maintain verbal, attitudinal, practical, and institutional remnants of belief in it. This book develops these ideas further, with emphasis on constructing a positive alternative. Calling it "desirism", Marks illustrates what life and the world would be like if we lived in accordance with our rational desires rather than the dictates of any actual or pretend morality, neither overlaying our desires with moral sanction nor attempting to override them with moral strictures. Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire also argues that atheism thereby becomes more plausible than the so-called New Atheism that attempts to give up God and yet retain morality.

© The Author(s) 2016

Joel MarksHard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire10.1007/978-3-319-43799-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Story Thus Far

Joel Marks¹

(1)

University of New Haven, West Haven, Connecticut, USA

End Abstract

Desirism: First Pass. Anti-Epiphany

This book begins in medias res – in the midst of a discussion that began in a series of columns I wrote for Philosophy Now magazine, which introduced my “counter-conversion”¹ from moralism to amoralism, and continued in journal articles and three other books. It is appropriate, therefore, that I review the earlier material at the outset. The columns, written in relatively nontechnical language for a wide audience,² will serve nicely to orient the reader of the present book to the more detailed and technical investigation to follow.

Hard Atheism

For the last several years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether. This has certainly come as a shock to me (and also a disappointment, to put it mildly). But this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t. How did I arrive at this conclusion? The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument “hard atheism” because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as “hard determinism.” The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a “soft determinist” believes that, even if your reading these words right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang thirteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a “soft atheist” would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of “New Atheists” are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that many religious believers are correct that without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality. (So I call this my “anti-epiphany.”)

The New Atheism is interestingly, and perhaps tellingly, like another “new” movement, namely, the New Theology (or one version thereof). For the latter strives to preserve God even while embracing the scientific worldview, as the former strives to preserve morality while embracing the scientific worldview (and eliminating God). But the God and morality thus preserved are curiously etiolated because they have lost their metaphysical pith. Meanwhile, the remaining husks can be noxious. As an amoralist, therefore, I now see the New Atheism – and indeed mainstream analytic ethics – as an apologetic rhetoric, whose mission is to “save the phenomena” of (“that Old Time”) morality.³ So amoralism is to the New Atheism as atheism is to the New Theology. The point of both critiques – atheism and amoralism – is to eliminate, as unhelpful and even baneful, the language (and all its attitudinal and other empirical concomitants) along with the metaphysics of theism and/or moralism.

Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being this sort of commands? In sum: While theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, that is, God, I now take the nonexistence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, that is, morality.

Note the analogy to Darwinism. It used to be a standard argument for God’s existence that the obvious and abundant design of the universe, as manifested particularly in the elegant fit of organisms to their environments, indicated the existence of a divine designer. Now we know that biological evolution can account for this fit perfectly without recourse to God. Hence, no Designer, no Design; there is only the appearance of design in nature (excepting such artifacts as beaver dams, bird nests, and architects’ blueprints). Just so, there are no moral commands but only the appearance of them, which can be explained by selection (by the natural environment, culture, family, etc.) of behavior and motives (“moral intuitions” or “conscience”) that best promote survival of the organism. There need be no recourse to Morality any more than to God to account for these phenomena.

But what is it like to live in a world without morality? Is such a life even viable? I was reeling – much as, I imagine, a religious believer whose whole life has been based on a fervent belief in the Almighty would find herself without bearings or even any ground to stand on if suddenly that belief were to vanish, no matter whether by proof of just by poof ! Just so, morality has been the essence of my existence, both personally and professionally. Indeed, morality has been my God, that being the point of the hard-atheism thesis.⁴ Now that God is dead.

I have had, therefore, to learn how to live life all over again, like a child learning to walk. And just as a child growing up discovers one fascinating thing after another about the “new” world she is exploring, so a dazzling array of new possibilities is spread out before me.

What Is Morality?

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. (That is itself an empirical claim about people’s beliefs. I would be happy to have the hypothesis tested by experimental philosophers or moral psychologists. If it turns out not to be a nearly universal belief but is perhaps typical only of some cultures or personality types, then my complaint would be limited to them.) But why not, then, simply propose a reinterpretation of the word “morality,” as well as its attendant terminology, such as “right” and “wrong”? Why do I feel compelled to banish that entire way of speaking? So my suggestion could instead be along these lines: Morality should be understood, not as a metaphysical absolute, but instead as a code of conduct generally agreed upon by (a given?) society.

However, I am still for the elimination of morality, even though I approve the idea of bounded codes. I wouldn’t want to call them “morality” (or “moralities”) because of the heavy baggage that terminology lugs along with it.⁵ Precisely because moral talk of the absolutist ilk is so ingrained (if my empirical speculation is correct, or at least in those folks for whom it is correct), I think it is unlikely that people could make the switch to a different attitude if they continued to use the same language. Words bring meaning in their tow. To attempt to supplant one meaning with another is much more than stipulating the change. Meanings form countless associations with other words besides the ones they explicitly define, and these become part of the meaning itself, extending it beyond denotation to connotation. Words as prominent as “moral” and “wrong” in the moral sense help constitute the fabric of our whole world. It won’t be possible just to snap one’s fingers and have them mean something else, however much Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty might demur.

I feel that the new understanding of morality as more myth than reality is important enough to warrant the inconvenience of dropping our accustomed ways of speaking and thinking about it and learning new ones. This is for two reasons. First is the value of truth itself. If it is true (or, more modestly, rational to believe) that metaphysical morality does not exist, then that in itself is reason for us to believe it. Of course this presumes that one is rational. I grant that, in the end, truth and rationality may be matters of subjective value or desire as well, for some people may not care very much about them, or at least not place paramount importance on them, if, say, the alternative were happiness. Think blue pill in The Matrix. So my first argument is addressed only to those who would take the red pill.

My second reason or argument for preferring the elimination of morality to the reinterpretation of morality is stronger as an appeal to your concurrence: I believe that the resultant world would be more to our liking. That is a big claim, I grant. I think it is testable, but I will leave that to the professionals. As an armchair philosopher trusting mainly to my own intuitions and experiences, I am satisfied at least that I myself would prefer to live in a world where nobody believed in either God or morality but instead habitually engaged in observation, study, conversation, introspection, and reflection. This could be an idealistic streak in myself – wishful thinking – and the cynicism that can be read into Voltaire’s statement be fully justified: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God [and morality – JM], because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.” But I put it to you to assess by your own lights.

In the Mode of Morality or I, Socrates

I have relinquished the mantel of the moralist since I no longer believe there even is such a thing as morality. How, then, shall one live? One thing to note is that in asking that question I am able to retain the title of ethicist, for ethics is just the inquiry into how to live. But I would also like to suggest at the outset of this undertaking that, even though an amoralist, I can still engage in moral argumentation…and in good conscience (so to speak).

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.

Note further that it is possible to argue about these things whose existence is not being asserted. Thus, I could say, “Vivisection is wrong (in my conception of morality) because it involves treating sentient beings merely as means.” This is of course a kind of Kantian justification for my claim. And I would offer it as an argument that I believe to be perfectly sound because (1) it articulates the analysis of morality that I consider to be the correct one, namely, Kant’s categorical imperative (suitably modified to accommodate nonhuman animals), (2) it characterizes vivisection in a way that I consider to be correct, namely, as violating the Kantian imperative, and (3) it logically draws its conclusion therefrom. Again this would be just as if I had argued, “Santa Claus could not possibly be mistaken for Popeye because Santa Claus has a big beard while Popeye is barefaced.”

Thus, I have become like the father in this joke – courtesy of my lawyer’s rabbi – about a Jewish boy from a liberal family who attends the neighborhood parochial (Christian) school:

• One day Isaac comes home in great puzzlement about what he had been taught in school that day; so he goes to his father and asks him about it.
• “Father, I learned that God is a Trinity. But how can there be three Gods?”
• “Now get this straight, Son: We’re Jewish. So there is only one God…and we don’t believe in Him!”

Just so, I no longer believe in morality (like God in the joke), but I would still insist that the nature of morality is Kantian (monotheism in the joke) rather than utilitarian (Trinitarianism in the joke).

Now, if I were to employ this technique without elaboration, it could easily be part of a deceptive strategy, since it is likely that people would assume I was defending something outright rather than only hypothetically. A statement like “If anything is wrong, this is” is naturally interpreted as a rhetorical emphasis of just how wrong the speaker considers this to be. But if I, as an amoralist, were to say “If anything is wrong, vivisection is,” I would mean it literally, not rhetorically; that is, the “if” would have real force for me, even suggesting that I do not believe that anything is wrong (since morality does not exist): all the more, that I do not believe that vivisection is wrong. (Of course that does not mean I think vivisection is right or even permissible, since those are moral notions also. I just want it to stop.) So my intention in making the utterance would be at variance with the impression it would leave in my listener’s mind; and knowing this, I would be a deceiver.

However, if I were only trying to persuade a Kantian vivisectionist of the error of her ways, its usage, it seems...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Story Thus Far
• 2. None of the Above: What Desirism Isn’t (and Is)
• 3. Desire and Reason
• 4. It’s Just a Feeling
• Backmatter