Unmotivated

Earlier today, I encountered the fascinating subject of "amoralism." It doesn't mean what common intuition, based on the common understanding of "amoral," would suggest that it means. Rather than a glib indifference to whether an action comports to some or another theory of moral justification, it simply regards all such theories as irrelevant. I encountered the viewpoint in reading this article on why moral philosophy is a waste of time and effort, and in a desire to understand the viewpoint (and how it might differ, if at all, from Nihilism), I found myself reading an article on moral motivation.

Personally, I do not consider myself to be moral. I am of the option that supposed moral statements are little more than preference statements. So "murder is wrong" (which is a tautology, as I see it) is better stated as "killing without proper justification meets with disapproval," and that disapproval is a thing unto itself. It neither has nor needs, any other foundation or justification. As long as someone is ready, willing and able to enforce their approval or disapproval via some sort of imposed consequence, they may define something as "wrong," and to the degree that they are able to get enough other people to either internalize their viewpoint, it will be promulgated by the society at large as a moral stricture. In other words, might, when it backs preferences, makes those preferences right. I'm okay with this; the world appears to work this well well enough that I can make workable predictions by following this, and without some sort of objective "correct state" to compare things to, it is, as they say, what it is. There is no "ought" to contravene it.

In place of morality, I have interests and preferences of my own. Now, according to the article on moral motivation: "Morality is widely believed to conflict, frequently and sometimes severely, with what an agent most values or most prefers to do." And I understand this; it's a very common viewpoint. But there is no particular reason why it should be so. Sure, there is the common Abrahamic idea that everyone is a sinner; that people are simply incapable, basically by design, of fitting their behavior into the divine commands that they are expected to follow. But crediting that first requires that one believe in the Abrahamic deity, or one very like it; and this is a matter of faith more than anything else. Generally speaking, people with the ability to reliably free themselves from accountability to others are free to act on interests and preferences that violate established moral norms, but people genuinely in this position are very few and far between; forbearance and lack of coordination among the public at large are more of a factor than personal independence. And this is what allows for the differences between common norms morality and an agent's values or preferences.

And so while I can conceive of having a set of interests that would put me at odds with the people around me, that's different than saying that I currently have many such interests. And to the degree that amoralists see the world in similar terms, their understanding that moral thought carries no value is more trivial than people would make it out to be. In his article, Professor de Sousa, sees a "right to blame" as a primary casualty of adopting amoralism. I think I see it more as an external justification for blame, but that's likely only a semantic difference. Either way, in a amoralist system, one has to own one's judgements. Sounds like a good idea to me.