Abstract
Ethics is commonly conceived as the effort to justify our actions and life choices. But desirism wants nothing to do with justification of the moral sort, simply because there is nothing moral that needs justifying. Nevertheless, desirism does not leave our lives to be decided willy nilly. This chapter characterizes the manner in which desirist ethics proposes that we go about figuring out what to do, how to live, what sort of person to be, etc. Reason remains crucially involved with this ethics as with characteristically moralistic ones. But desirism’s namesake desire is equally involved, so its meaning is also clarified. It is argued that desire is something that we share with other animals, and that realizing this provides insight into the nature of ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
Thank you, Mitchell Silver.
- 2.
I first proposed and defended the thesis that all desires have a desire1 component in Marks (1986). Subsequently William Lycan, Richard Garner, and Mitchell Silver challenged me on this (personal communications), and I no longer rely on this thesis. More on this in the sequel.
- 3.
A first-rate example of how to go about examining desire to its essence is Schroeder (2004), although it concerns mainly desire1.
- 4.
This is the challenge from Lycan previously alluded to.
- 5.
Cf. Pölzler’s (2015) very interesting article on this subject.
- 6.
See for example Hayward (n.d.).
- 7.
The mechanism or mechanisms that assure the persistence of altruism in the human population are complex and even controversial; indeed, the very nature of altruism is contested. For a state-of-the-art treatment of the issues, see Wilson (2015). My example is only for illustrative purposes, to show the theoretical possibility of accounting for altruism in the seemingly selfish world of natural selection.
- 8.
As Nagel (1974) famously held there was.
- 9.
I am using “evolution” here as synonymous with natural selection, but natural selection is only one actual, not to mention possible, mechanism of evolution in the broad sense of undergoing change. The equivocation seems warranted by natural selection’s prevalence in our current understanding of the evolution of animals. But see Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2010) for a (contested) corrective.
- 10.
It then becomes possible for “intelligent” creatures like ourselves to exploit these feelings for contra-survival purposes. Witness blocking reproduction with contraceptives while having sex solely for pleasure, courting heart disease by gorging on salty snacks, and growing obese from eating too many highly sweetened desserts (although any or all of these could also promote our species’ survival prospects in an overpopulated world).
- 11.
And most generally, in axiology, the domain or study of value as such. Thus, axiology encompasses not only ethics but also, for example, aesthetics, which is another value domain where subjectivity is commonly mistaken for objectivity (“I love Beethoven’s 5th Symphony” becomes “Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is magnificent”).
- 12.
And also the fruit of that reflection.
- 13.
The value of walking “for its own sake” is perhaps more naturally styled as “good” rather than “right” since we experience it more as an enjoyment than as a duty. Walking could, however, be styled as a duty or as objectively required in the instrumental sense, when its value is derived from some further good, such as health.
- 14.
The situation could also be characterized as an interaction between an organism of a certain type, in a certain state or under certain conditions, and an object (or surface) of a certain type, in a certain state or under certain conditions. But I still think it would make sense to characterize the value as a projection, which results from the interaction.
- 15.
“Subjective” in the sense of belonging to the subject of the experience, that is, the one who is experiencing the red color sensation – the experiencer. It is of course an objective fact of the world that the sensation exists (although its nature is problematic).
- 16.
Note that I am not (necessarily) rejecting all inherent qualities, but only all inherent values. The former is a metaphysical notion, not an axiological one. Thus, for example, human beings may be inherently belligerent (under certain circumstances); I only reject that belligerence is inherently bad or good, or right or wrong. Of course many of us intrinsically dislike belligerence, but that is a different matter (this being my main point) – and it would still be a different matter even if we universally, i.e., all human beings, disliked it (you could then even say: even if human beings were inherently averse to belligerence). For that would still be a fact about our nature and not a fact about the nature of belligerence.
- 17.
And grounds-shaking, to coin a term, in that it removes certain considerations as legitimate grounds for drawing rational conclusions about how to live.
- 18.
It is comparable to losing one’s belief in God. Indeed, objectivity is the secular version of God, since for most nonbelievers (in God) it is the metaphysical source of value in the world.
- 19.
In fact it is potentially a hard sell in any value realm. Consider: “How can you eat gefilte fish? It’s disgusting!” For someone who feels that way, it is almost impossible to conceive that the disgustingness of gefilte fish is entirely relative to the individual. Indeed, this phenomenon can arise outside the realm of values and in the realm of facts. Consider: “How can you go around wearing shorts? It’s cold!” The person who says this simply cannot fathom how her experience of feeling cold could be only a subjective fact about herself rather than an objective fact about the temperature. Of course we could define “cold” to mean, say, 50 degrees Fahrenheit or lower; but this would only shift the speaker’s pseudo-objectivity to the question of whether one is rationally or prudentially permitted to dress lightly when it’s cold.
- 20.
The objectifying impulse is so strong that one can experience not only disapproval of someone else’s action, etc., but even incredulity. “I simply cannot believe that they would cut somebody’s head off.” “I simply cannot believe that they would skin an animal alive.” This is the power of desire. It is the same force at work when a highly aroused male simply cannot believe that the person he desires is not also turned on. The result may be rape. Objectification is dangerous. It is like a weapon, which can be employed for benign purposes but has a great potential for havoc and must always be handled with care; and in most situations it may be best for citizens simply to be unarmed.
- 21.
Compare this comment by the Dalai Lama:
Every night in my Buddhist practice I give and take. I take in Chinese suspicion. I give back trust and compassion. I take their negative feeling and give them positive feeling. I do that every day. This practice helps tremendously in keeping the emotional level stable and steady. (Reported by Newsweek’s Melinda Liu and Sudip Mazumdar, March 20, 2008)
- 22.
I also desire these things instrumentally, since I also like the consequences I believe they have; for example, cautious driving results in fewer accidents, injuries, fatalities, etc.
- 23.
The second part of Marks (2013e) contains many extended examples of what I find advantageous about the amoral life. See also the final section of the present book.
- 24.
More precisely: Value is inherently subjective, but it does contain objective (or harmlessly objectified) components as well, specifically the unevaluative qualities of the things we value (the honesty we find so virtuous, the arrangement of lines we find so beautiful, etc.) and the psychological attitudes that give rise to our valuations (the desire that everyone be honest, the pleasure at viewing a drawing, etc.).
- 25.
Of course I mean “interesting and important” to me, this being in keeping with my subjectivism. However, I sense (or at least hope) they would be found interesting and important by many others as well, which is why I bother to write about them.
- 26.
Although I will be disagreeing with an interpretation of the wasp’s behavior, the claim about how exactly the wasp does behave can also be questioned. Furthermore, my account of the experiment and its conclusions comes from secondary sources and my own speculations. A folklore has developed around it (actually a number of experiments were conducted over a century), and it is that rather than any actual experiment (or experimenters) which is the target of my critique. See Keijzer (2013) for more details of the history of the experiment and how it has been appropriated.
- 27.
By the way, there is also the possibility that the wasp has good reason to reinspect the burrow on every occasion. Cf. Merow (2013).
- 28.
Following on the preceding note: Merow (2013) applies this latter point to the wasp (albeit tongue in cheek), attributing reasoning to the wasp in the experiment.
- 29.
Indeed it is so intermittent that I call ours an off-again/off-again relationship.
- 30.
Cf. “A Moralist Crosses the Street” in Chap. 4.
- 31.
Also comical from a third-party point of view.
- 32.
The objectivist about reason and morals might object that I could not possibly have been reasoning when I decided on such a course of action, since I was obviously in the throes of passion (anger). But this is just the kind of Monday morning quarterbacking I object to in turn. If bad reasoning turns out not to be reasoning at all, then it becomes trivially true that rationality, that is, good reasoning, will always lead to the right conclusion.
- 33.
This obviously bodes ill for the desirist project, which is based on reasoning. But…hope springs eternal!
- 34.
von Bülow (2003) appears to have come to the same conclusion.
- 35.
In fact this is itself a vexed issue: to what degree if any the world is governed by causal laws and/or what that would mean. For example, is not the physical world indeterministic at the fundamental level of quanta? I will assume that the world of people and familiar things is governed by nonexceptionless laws. (On this point see the marvelously concise Fodor [1974].) Thus for example, if a human being stubs her toe, then generally or all other things equal, that person will be unhappy.
- 36.
The story is not as simple as this, of course, for, for instance, if not your behavior but your belief and desire that caused it had been implanted by the evil scientist, the compatibilist would probably not say that you were acting “of your own free will.”
- 37.
And we could add “Ought not implies can” to cover prohibitions.
- 38.
Indeed the very same that figured in “Neti Neti” in Chap. 2.
- 39.
Compare this from Fried (2015):
…the ex post consequences of our choices can yield important information to help guide similar choices in the future (e.g., the discovery turned up in the investigation of the Challenger explosion that O‐rings crack in freezing temperatures). In some small number of cases, the consequences can shed some light on the ex ante prudence of the particular decision that produced them. But our reactive attitudes towards bad outcomes are, alas, not that discriminating. They generally take the much cruder and logically indefensible form of concluding that if something bad has happened and some human agent is a but-for cause of it, that agent is to blame (in the moral, not causal, sense).
- 40.
Compare this from Michel Faber’s novel The Book of Strange New Things (London: Hogarth, 2014) about the Oasans (the native people of the planet Oasis):
If someone dropped a dish and broke it, they would remember next day that the dish was broken, but rather than reliving the incident when the dish fell, they would be preoccupied with the need to make a new dish. (p. 376)
- 41.
Instead I reacted more like Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) in Duck Soup: “‘Upstart’ you call me? This means war!” Funny? Yes indeed. And yet the tragicomedy of the human condition is nowhere better rendered than in this 1933 film, wedged between two global holocausts having equally ludicrous origins.
- 42.
See the story “Is That So?” in Reps (1989), pp. 7–8.
- 43.
And this does strike me as an excellent and purely secular and amoralist reason to embrace Jesus’s suggestion, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…” (John 8:7).
- 44.
See the following section for a fuller discussion of this distinction.
- 45.
A similar criticism has been lodged against some philosophers whose postwar “deconstructionist” philosophies serve as a suspiciously convenient counterpoint to their having harbored Nazi sympathies during the Hitler regime.
- 46.
Cf. Cartwright (2015)’s sympathetic portrayal of this as a philosophical method. I might here mention also Anderson (2015)’s article in the same journal issue, which defends “experiments in living,” another pragmatic methodology I am employing; see also Anderson (1991). Finally I can cite Hall (2006)’s astute observation that advocates need “to cultivate an alternative viewpoint, one that takes hold, gains energy, and becomes plausible to enough people to effect a paradigm shift” (p. 73).
- 47.
Recall the discussion of argument to the best explanation in “Second Pass” in Chap. 1.
- 48.
Here I am attempting to answer a concern expressed by Schroeder (2012 and personal communication).
- 49.
Had the holdout made a mistake of fact or logic, then there would be grounds for discrediting his or her dissent.
- 50.
Cf. Herzog and Golden (2009).
- 51.
Note that I have listed only items I take to be true and well-established. But of course a desirist amoralist – and probably even a moralist – might rationally decide to include speculations and even perpetrate deceptions or misunderstandings to further his or her purposes.
- 52.
And even with regard to that cause, you might on occasion enlist it as a reason, as when you are trying to convince someone to believe that the Earth is round by noting that the proposition is put forward as true even in elementary school.
- 53.
About both how I think we do use reasons (and the label “reason”) and how I recommend that we do.
- 54.
Or otherwise further our considered ends (which, furthermore, as always, need not be self-serving).
- 55.
In other words – to let another “Marx” (namely, Groucho, supposedly) have the last one – “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”
- 56.
So “defective” is to be understood only as relative to my own considered desires and not as an objective judgment. The word is itself tendentious, and I have used it as a personal indulgence, or perhaps, cheatingly, to influence my readers. So let this note compensate for that. And why would I want to “compensate” for employing a tactic that might help bring about what I desire? Because I desire even more strongly to be consistently honest.
- 57.
And always I must keep in mind that the bottom line is only getting what I want. So my friends might equally lament that I am denying myself the pleasures of omnivorism, and attribute it to some defect in my capacity for pleasure or whatever.
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Marks, J. (2016). Desire and Reason. In: Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43799-6_3
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