Why it’s OK to Be Amoral argues that self-righteous moralism has replaced religion as a source of embattled and gratuitous certainties. It offers readers a vigorous and entertaining polemic against both the popular tendency to moralise and philosophers’ attempts to justify morality's supposed “laws” and “commands.” High-minded moral convictions invoke the authority of sacred moral truths; but there are no such truths. In reality, moral passions are rooted in atavistic emotional dispositions and arbitrary social conventions.
While public and private discourse is saturated with guilt, shame, and righteous indignation, professional philosophers, under cover of clever argumentation, promote the utopian idea that all practical questions have uniquely right answers—providing that you adopt the right moral principles. But their justifications for those principles appeal to contested “foundations,” among which no rational adjudication is possible. Moreover, because there are two discrepant ways of understanding motivation, our access to agents’ true reasons is never sufficiently reliable to warrant moral praise or blame. Finally, every agent has a wide diversity of reasons for action; yet moralists claim that some reasons trump all others, because they are “moral” reasons. Since these too must be grounded in facts, that amounts to double counting some reasons.
Having exposed these aspects of the institution of morality, this book suggests that if we cannot abstain altogether from moralising, we can at least try to use it against itself.
Key Features
- Describes and criticises seven approaches to the question, Why should I do or not do X?
- Develops an original objection to the idea of identifying a domain of moral reasons: namely, that it amounts to the unwarranted double counting of a subset of our reasons.
- Describes two ways of thinking about reasons and choices, and explains how the discrepancy between them makes it impossible to assess an agent’s motivation reliably enough to warrant moral praise or blame.
- Outlines the subtle changes in attitude involved in espousing amoralism, without giving up on rational choices and honest political commitments.
ONE: INTRODUCTION; TWO: FOUR ANSWERS TO WHY QUESTIONS; THREE: THREE MORE ANSWERS TO WHY QUESTIONS; FOUR: MORAL SYSTEMS TEND TO BE TOTALISING; FIVE: TWO FRAMEWORKS FOR REASONS; SIX: DOUBLE COUNTING; SEVEN: THE BLACK HOLE OF FOUNDATIONAL DISPUTES; EIGHT: WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE AN AMORALIST?
Biography
Ronald de Sousa, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, was born in Switzerland and educated at New College, Oxford (BA) and Princeton (PhD). He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion (1987), Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007), Emotional Truth (2011), and Love: A Very Short Introduction (2015). A number of his interviews and debates are available on Youtube.
“A marvel of sophistication and articulateness and a wholly original take on amoralism as a viable option in ethics. Given the breadth and detail of argumentation, it could also serve as an excellent primer on moral theory. This book is suitable for undergraduate philosophy majors, graduate students, and philosophy researchers.” - Joel Marks, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of New Haven.
