Hard Atheism and The Joy of Amorality

Joel Marks thinks he has had an epiphany, a unique concept that has finally landed upon him due to his “intellectual honesty”. He has written a book about it, and fortunately for us, an article summarizing it (don’t have to buy the book).

Marks has concluded that there is no morality because there is no God. He apparently has not read Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, which makes a far better but still fatally flawed argument than does Marks. But ignoring Marks' reason for adopting amorality, let’s examine the rest of the argument.

Assuming that delusion is wrong, throughout, Marks attempts convince (himself?) that he can make certain arguments… correctly, if there is a correct. And Political Correctness is certainly correct he knows, and he uses the approved pronoun “she” throughout in obeisance to that Truth. And he presumes that deception is wrong, even for amoralists that don't recognize "wrong".

” Rather aptly, I now realize, I have been led to a sort of Socratic mode of moral argumentation. Socrates was notorious for interrogating his interlocutors rather than asserting and defending theses himself. Similarly, I am suggesting, I will continue to be able to hold forth as a critical moral reasoner, even though I no longer believe in morality, so long as I confine myself to questioning the inferences of others (and gingerly deflect their questions about my own moral commitments by speaking in the mode of morality, as above). It is true that I would thereby fail to be completely forthcoming about my own meta-ethics whenever doing so would be disruptive to the dialogue; but I do not think I would be doing anything that is considered unkosher even when moralists are arguing among themselves. After all, my meta-ethics could be mistaken; maybe there is such a thing as morality. So my ‘suspension of disbelief’ could be conceived as an expression of intellectual humility, and my arguments considered in themselves by the intellectual light of my interlocutor.“

He awards himself intellectual humility in light of his “suspension of disbelief”. What disbelief has been suspended? Disbelief in God? No. Disbelief in morality? No. This confuses the rest of the argument unless it is ignored, so let’s ignore it.

” The bottom line for me, as both a philosopher and the possessor of a particular personality, is that I do not ‘suffer fools gladly.’ This has always been true of me, but it used to be supplemented by a belief (or assumption) in morality. Now that I have turned the philosophic eye on my own largely unexamined assumption that morality exists, I see that I have been a moral fool. But I retain my belief (or assumption) in Truth as such, as well as my pig-headed allegiance to it. Thus, I shall henceforth apply a skeptical scalpel to the moral arguments of all, unsparing even of the ones I have been sympathetic to as a moralist, since all of them, I now believe, are premised on a bogus metaphysics. For it is intellectual dishonesty or na ïveté that I am most temperamentally disposed to dislike, even as I retain my passionate preferences for certain ‘causes,’ such as animal liberation."

Not suffering fools gladly is an admission of arrogance, a lifetime of it. As a one-time Atheist and vegetarian, I know full well that those are maximal sources of arrogance and self-righteousness. It does take an epiphany to remove those character flaws. But is this the right kind?

The last sentence is an admission of paradoxical beliefs. And a passionate preference for “causes” indicates a self-asserted moral disposition that has not been abated by the new epiphany of amorality. Has he really rejected his beliefs in order to examine his presuppositions? Or is he justifying them in a different manner?

” Meanwhile, I myself, as an amoralist, believe meat-eating is neither right nor wrong; but I would have done nothing dishonest in convincing my interlocutor that it is wrong, that is, by her lights.”

But why would an amoralist need to claim honesty?

” But why would I even care whether I was being honest or not? Isn’t that, again, something an amoralist would be indifferent to? Strictly speaking, yes. But an amoralist still has a compass, a ‘guide to life’, an ethics, or so I would argue; and it can be a match for anybody’s morality. Thus, consider that in purely practical terms, honesty may still be the best policy. A reputation for truth-telling will likely make one a more attractive person to do (literal or figurative) business with, which will enable one to thrive relative to one’s less scrupulous competitors. Thus, ‘survival of the fittest’ could naturally promote honesty as a prevalent trait even in the absence of any moral concern.“

And how does an ethical “compass” differ from morality? Even a self-annointed morality? Here it comes:

” There I am, then, honestly discussing particular issues with opponents, and justifying my positions to them by their moral lights. But how do I justify them to myself, since I have no moral lights anymore? For example, on what basis would I myself be a vegetarian? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness.”

It simply is ethical because he wants it. He considers the wants of others to be trivial. And it is based on convenient lies:

” For the vast majority of human beings in the world today, meat-eating is a mere luxury or habit of taste, while at the same time it promotes animal cruelty and slaughter, environmental degradation, global warming, human disease, and even human starvation (the latter due to the highly inefficient conversion of plant protein to animal protein for human consumption). For whatever reason or reasons, or even no reason, these things matter to me. Therefore I am motivated to act on the relevant desires.”

Every one of these issues is false. With the noted exceptions of a few (very few) bad players - regulated of course - beef animals, at least, live a very good life, with an instantaneous death which is administered more humanely than the deaths administered historically by Atheists with their own ethics. And the idea that more people could be fed with the land devoted to animals is false: most pasture is on land not tillable due to roughness or small sized patches too small to effeciently plant; the rest is pastured on crop stubble that would otherwise rot. These are demonstrable facts; evidence that is studiously ignored by the passionate rationalizers of the agenda driven left.

Now Marks becomes an evangelical amoralist:

”I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.)

A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.“

Marks’ intellectual honesty stops at understanding that Atheism implies amorality, something that most Atheists deny. In fact, most Atheists claim to be more moral than theists, which they validate by creating their own moralities based on their current tastes and behaviors. That excludes those who don’t share those particular interests of course, with the result that Atheists' behaviors are more congruent to their own ad hoc standards than, say theists' behaviors would be. As Obama said, immoral is when I deviate from my standards.

That is precisely what Marks is doing for himself. He creates an ethic based solely on what he wants and how he feels. Then he recruits others. When enough believers have signed on, that ethic will be a dogma, one which is religiously promoted and protected as Moral. And it will be unquestionable, as are Marks' other preconceptions.

Far from being amoral, Marks is merely doing what other Atheists have done before him: creating his own faux religion. Far from the intellectual honesty of Nietzsche, who acknowledged that rationality could not exist under the intellectual conditions produced by amorality and was obliged to create Anti-Rationality as a philosophical response, Marks merely wanders off in the direction of self-annointed Morals. Nothing new here.