On my ethical and metaethical theory

Let me put my cards on the table up front: I will be assuming pragmatist epistemology, and will not deal in depth with competing ethical and metaethical philosophy, especially not the cutting-edge stuff, because I'm a regular human being, not a PhD in philosophy, and I have limits. As such this is more a general sketch of what I believe and why I believe it than an in depth point by point proof of it and rebuttal of all possible responses and points.

Generally, my position is that of an ethical noncognitivist (a combination of expressivism and prescriptivism) because of a combination of Hume's is-ought gap and the epistemic vacuity of putative moral facts, as well as their ontological queerness. On the back of that, I view moral discourse as essentially functioning as a way of obscuring these facts from our interlocutors and ourselves, as a way of obscuring power relations and incentives, with the knock-on personally harmful effect of reifying our morality in a way that traps us.

Instead of falling back on moral quietism or pure hedonic or sadistic nihilism, however, I propose a positively constructivist project of creating our own ethics based on our own drives and values, as part of a necessary process of self improvement and self-overcoming, which is nonetheless still responsive to our changing needs, desires, and contexts.

I then sketch out what my ethical system might look like based on my own drives and values.

I do not believe that there is such a thing as objective morality — i.e. a rubric of values that entails some kind of normative obligation on morally capable actors independent of their own desires and drives, and which itself can be constructed stance independently.

This is for three interlocking reasons.

First, I find the very concept of a drive-independently-normative value to be logically incoherent. As Hume's Guillotine states, ought statements and is statements are two fundamentally different kinds of propositions — for one example of why, consider that, as I argue in point two, ought statements are not truth-apt, whereas is statements are — and rational argumentation, being a truth-preserving mechanism, cannot generate anything in a conclusion that was not already implicit in the premises. This means that for any given argument that claims to conclude that one ought to do something, or ought not do something else, it must have an intrinsically obvious and motivating ought statement in the premises; lest one end up in a circular argument, an infinite regress, or a completely unjustified ought claim backed by nothing and so dismissable with nothing (this is a problem referred to as a Munchhausen Trilemma).

Now, many philosophers argue that one can find oughts, which can be brought into operation as statements, but which exist in some fashion as facts (brute or otherwise) apart from us, thus allowing us to ground morality objectively even despite Hume's Guillotine. This is where my next two points come in crucially, to show that, for me at least, the concept of a stance independent moral fact which can justify an objective ought statement is both empistemically and ontologically queer. So, let's continue with those two points:

First, I find the concept epistemically vacuous because, as a perspectivist pragmatist, it is not at all clear to me, even conceptually, what it means for it to be true or false that one is "required" to do anything stance-independently, when there is nothing enforcing the requiring, and I don't see how something can be a meaningfully objective moral theory if normative requirements and reasons for acting are not accompanied — what sort of objective moral theory could fail to convince a good faith and rational actor, if they only refuse one of the premises?

To explain why, without any means of enforcement or requiring, moral facts don't seem to have any epistemic coherence, let me ask this question: how does a moral "fact" "cash out," to borrow William James's phrase? For something to be meaningfully truth-apt in the pragmatist sense I subscribe to, it has to have some effect on how we expect to perceive or experience the world, or how we guide our actions to better achieve our goals (which is really just an offshoot of being able to better predict the world). Thus when someone says "you must do this!" the only possible response I can have is "what will happen if I don't?" But moral statements have no response to this question of themselves: they don't actually enforce anything themselves, and therefore there is no difference in the desirability of the outcomes of our actions when guided by any particular moral system just on the basis of its claims, or in our ability to understand the world. They can contingently have an answer in a particular case (and they're likely to be often wrong in that case — see my criticism of virtue ethics above — or too general to be called moral claims at all) or they can be enforced by social, political, or other means (see below), but in the latter case then a moral claim is not being made at all, but a legal or social claim; moral claims don't have consequences inherently in the way claims about experiences or empirical facts do. So morality isn't truth-apt.

Second, I think the notion of stance-independent values (from which to derive ought statements, and thence moral imperatives) "existing" on their own in the first place to be ontologically incoherent. The epistemic problem is essentially evidence of this ontological incoherence: the fact that there are no epistemically noticeable facts that morality allows us to better predict or navigate indicates that whatever morality is, it at least isn't describing something that operates on the level of anything we can notice with any of our normal epistemological faculties or strategies. Not empirically, obviously, but also not even in a way similar to mathematics (some kind of a priori derivation), because while I'm a constructivist regarding mathematics too, I will admit that mathematics is a frighteningly effective language game for constructing descriptions and predictions of things we regularly find in the real world; whereas morality does not appear to add any guiding or descriptive power like that at all. As J. L. Mackie famously says in his "Argument from Queerness:"

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sQrt, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly diferent from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. […] Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to point out its implausibilities. What is not so often stressed, but is more important, is that the central thesis of intuitionism is one to which any objectivist view of values is in the end committed: in tuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up. When we ask the awkward question. how we can be aware of this authoritative prescriptivity, of the truth of these distinctively ethical premisses or of the cogency of this distinctively ethical pattern of reasoning, none of our ordinary accounts of sensory perception [since that only gives facts and internal reasons] or introspection [internal reasons again] or the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses [moral facts don't give explanations] or inference [you'd need to start with moral facts to infer them!] or logical construction [logical construction is not categorical] or conceptual analysis [relies on taking the concepts for granted], or any combination of these, will provide a satisfactory answer; ‘a special sort of in tuition’ is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clear-headed objectivist is compelled to resort.

This queerness does not consist simply in the fact that ethical statements are ‘unverifiable’. Although logical positivism with itsverifiability theory of descriptive meaning gave an impetus to non-cognitive accounts of ethics, it is not only logical positivists but also empiricists of a much more liberal sort who should find objective values hard to accommodate.

Worse, positing a whole new plane of existence and set of senses separate from the normal ones we experience and exercise just for moral facts, when the existence of that plane actually seems to have little to no bearing on our lives or experiences, and when its existence — let alone its contents — are so hotly contested and show such little sign of convergence towards any kind of consensus (unlike scientific or mathematical fields) seems to needlessly violate Occham's Razor. To quote J. L. Mackie again:

The argument from relativity has as its premise the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community. […] radical differences between first order moral judgements make it difficult to treat those judgements as apprehensions of objective truths […] Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round […] This is not to say that moral judgements are purely conventional. […] But [reformers and even radicals] can usually be understood as the extension, in ways which, though new and unconventional, seemed to them to be required for consistency, of rules to which they already adhered as arising out of an existing way of life. In short, the argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions (most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted) of objective values.

The fact that such a moral plane and set of epsitemic senses would indeed carry an ontological burden is also well-stated with an example from Mackie:

Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something's being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly. if there were objective principles of right and wrong. any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it. Or we should have something like Clarke’s necessary relations of fitness between situations and actions, so that a situation would have a demand for such- and-such an action somehow built into it.

Of course, this does not disprove the possibility of demonstrating such a moral plane and moral senses, but it does place stringent requirements for doing so which, to my knowledge, no moral objectivist has met.

Thus, on the basis of the previous two reasons, I find it necessary to affirm the idea that values are derived from drives reified into ideas; they are not things-in-themselves that can exist "out there" in the world when no one's looking. In other words, they do not inhere in things. And the only source of drives, being as they are fundamentally psychological phenomena, must then be the unconscious (or one's creative nothing, if you prefer). Combined with the first point this means that values, to be normatively effecatious, must not only exist within a mind, or somewhere out in the world, but within one's own mind — already, or be produced there somehow.

There have been numerous attempts throughout history to overcome this problem, to show how we're already committed to drives or values that imply something that looks like traditional objective morality, but each of them generally takes one of two approaches.

The first approach, seen especially in Kant, but also in philosophers like Rawls, J. S. Mill, and others, is to make an appeal to universalized rationality or "fairness" which implicitly leaves out one or more of: the situational context of an action, the intentions or ends of that action, the limited available options or knowledge for action, and the crucially fundamental separation between the person acting (their identity and subjective experience) and that of others when assessing the rationality of actions, which usually serves the purpose of smuggling some set of features of the philospher's desired moral framework into their account of rationality, so that when they "pull the rabbit out of the hat" and produce morality from rationality, morality will have the features they desire. But since the only common notion of rationality everyone starts with is practical reason, which is precisely about starting from a particular position as a particular person and attempting to solve a problem to achieve a particular goal, this smuggling-in is purely question-begging. Not only that, but this appeal some sense of reason that follows rules of universality and fairness to justify morality is, itself, a smuggled-in claim: namely, that one must always be perfectly rational and rationally consistent at all times, even when it runs contrary to the general purpose that we have reason, namely, achieving goals in the world.

Likewise, there have been attempts to find some sort of mostly-objective source of desire, value, or drive that is still somehow connected to individual drives and thus has some bearing on them — a morality constructed out of hypothetical imperatives, in other words. This family of attempts ranges from Thomist natural law to virtue ethics.

This may be right in a sense (I believe, empirically, there's decent evidence for some common human needs and tendencies), but even if we ignore post-structuralist anti-essentialist reasoning and descriptions of how fundamentally abritrary, political, and socially constructed human nature and even notions of sanity, are, and dismiss inhumanist and anti-naturalist critiques of taking human nature as ultimately good or unchangeable (as transhumanists, posthumanists, Nietzscheans, accelerationists, and others do, calling instead for transcending those limits in a million different directions), they are nowhere near as absolute as the virtue ethicists and especially the natural law theorists need them to be. The complexity of individual human psychology, libidinal production, social context, and more make those needs far too fluid, conditional, constructed and social yet individual to allow virtue ethics or natural law, properly carried through, to have much of any content beyond a sort of strange form of self help, and leaves them with little to nothing to say to those with fundamentally alien psychologies or motivations, of which there are not a few.

Likewise, these fundamental needs can be satisfied in such polymorphic, or sacrificed or traded off each other in combinatorial explosion, such that the means of acting in line with whatever human nature one might find are nowhere near specific enough to constitute a natural law. Not to mention the fact that the basic needs and tendencies found across all human beings are just quite minimal.

In the end, then, in my opinion, rigorously consistent and nuanced natural law or virtue ethics systems should inveitably devolve into something like a nihilist "ethical system" anyway, and they don't is through overly rigid and abstract analyses and interpretations.

This is why all virtue ethicists and natural law theorists always tend to produce ethics that, while supposedly derived from human nature and fact, is never surprising or inimical to their personal prior lifestyles and beliefs: there's such a fluid range of ways to live that might satisfy some human nature, and in fact so many ways to construct such a nature, that they essentially get to pick and choose whatever is convenient for them.

Nevertheless, while I think morality does not exist qua objective force, nevertheless it does empirically exist as a force and discourse, much in the same way that Abrahamic God does not exist, but still acts in the world as a force, and the Abrahamic religions exist as discourses around Him.

What is it that we are really doing, when it comes to moral discourse? Well, if we were to look at surface level intention and lay ontology/ethics/epistemology to figure out what moral statements "really mean," we would be left confused, since most people clearly think they're expressing objective, truth-apt, normative statements when they talk about morality, but we know that to be almost certainly an incoherent position. Instead, then, I take a Wittgensteinian language game approach: I focus on what the intended (and actual) effects, on the minds and actions of others, of moral statements are, and the underlying emotional drives that lead people to produce them.

As a result, I'm solidly an ethical noncognitivist. I view all moral statements or evaluations as being constituted — beneath the objective-morality-talk — by some combination of the following:

1. a subjective (aesthetics-like) value judgements about the world, according to a concomittant vision for the world: "this moves us toward/farther from the world as I want to live in it, and therefore I like/dislike it";
2. a personal commitment: "doing this would run contrary to my sense of self or self worth or what I believe in."

1. a universalized command with an implied desire for that command to be backed up by personal, social, or political sanction, or rewarded: "don't do that, and don't anybody else do that either, lest either I, society, or the State hurt you";

Crucially, I think that in moral discourse, moral statements or evaluations of the third type tend to be the business end of personal commitments or value judgements. This is for two reasons: first, one typically engages in moral discourse when one wants others to behave or not behave a certain way; if one only has a vision for how the world should be that one wants to personally act towards, but not make others adhere to or act towards, or if one only has personal commitments that one holds close to one's heart, one has little motivation to talk about it with others, except in specific settings. Second, because the inherent structure of moral statements or evaluations of the first two types inherently lead to a desire to enforce them on others when bolsered by an undeconstructed lay moral ontology: if one is able to hide one's aesthetic desires for how the world (and the people in it) should be and behave, then it becomes almost automatic to justify declaring, and trying to, enforce whatever is necessary to achieve that end state! It's essentially inherent in the definition: by definition, by having that aesthetic judgement, one wants the world to be some sort of way — without any barrier, the rational thing to do would be then to act and speak so as to achieve it, even if it requires others to change their behavior! Likewise, if one has a personal commitment to something, well, misery loves company, and self-restriction is a kind of misery; or, if it does not bring misery but happiness, happiness also loves company! Humans are eusocial creatures; we want fellow-feeling with those around us. More than that, those personal commitments don't come from nowhere. They themselves generally come from prior subjective value judgements, thus producing the same logic I went through previously.

Thus, ultimately, moral discourse is merely the obfucation and then violent enforcement of normal drives such as personal commitment and desires about the world.

The confused facade of objective morality that lay people — and many philosophers — couch their moral intentions in, when phrasing them as actual statements, while superficial, also serves an important function, however. Namely, it allows people to conceal from both themselves and others the true origins of their moral statements, which is ultimately just themselves and the society, lives, and present incentives that shape them, allowing them to appear both to themselves and others impersonal, unbiased, and objective, concealing how their morality serves them and their interest while not serving others, and otherwise absolving them of any kind of need to defend themselves. Worse, it allows them to conceal the source of enforcement of their moral dicta, which are the institutions of violence they call upon to enforce their values, but which they can make appear to be natural and inevitable, thus absolving them of having to admit what they're doing to others and take direct responsibility or encur retaliation for it.

The whole sphere moral discourse, then, when iterated out from all such moral statements, is entirely composed of signs, signifying practices, and performativity designed to describe and encourage actions in line with the values of the actors engaged in moral discourse while obscuring the true origin and enforcement of those values and actions.

This is why I find moralist discourse extremely harmful: this fundamental dishonesty about its origin, intentions, and enforcement rots it at its core. Everyone pretends it is not they who want thus-and-such a thing but Platonic ideas of the Good, gods, categorical reason, the general will, the social contract, human nature, or something else, appealing to those things to disguise the power dynamics that underly moral discourse, thus absolving themselves of guilt and blame and accusations of bias, or the need to introspect about the subjectiveness of their values. Everyone gets to get high off moral crusades and mob mentality, or the jackbooted enforcement of Leviathan, guilt-free.

Even worse, this self- and other-deceiving masking of the origins of moral discourse allows morality to be reified and rigidified: if one understands that it is merely an outgrowth of one's own drives, one understands that those drives which we typically categorize as moral do not have any claim on one over and above one's other drives; one also understands that they can shift and change, and there is no reason not to allow one's valuational and moral codifications of them to change with them. Thus, moral discourses trap people in self-denying, self-flagellating, yet also self-righteously self-aggrandizing and self-pleasuring, stasis.

Here, however, I do depart from the vulgar moral nihilist positions you'll see particularly — but not nearly exclusively — in caricatures of my position. This analysis of morality is not accompanied by a concomittant retreat from expressing and promoting my values. Far from it! After all, why should I? The idea that, if no morality is "objectively" correct, then no morality can be proposed or imposed is merely another moral proposition attempting to lay claim to objective normative force, to be stance independent, etc., one which I need not accept. I do, however, reject moral discourse.

Instead, what I do is sit with myself and try to understand my drives as they present themselves to me, their three-dimensionality, their tensions and contradictions as well as their places of alignment, and follow them as they shift and interplay over time, finding patterns in the chaos of that change, to construct a phenomenology of desire. I must understand that these desires are not eternal and unchanging, or inherent to me; nor are they natural, shaped as they are by the social and incentive machines I live and have lived in; yet they are also immanent to my experience, a part of me, constitutive of this "me" as I know it, and thus not worth dismissing just on the basis that they're constructed.

This is useful for all drives or desires, regardless of whether they'd usually be categorized as moral or otherwise, because once you understand what drives flow through you, how they respond to and interact with each other, how they change over time, and how they react to the environment and society, you can undestand better how to satisfy those drives, or redirect them: how to be happy. This is something that people do, or at least understand that they can and even should do, when it comes to "non-moral" drives, but it is only through deconstructing moral discourse that it becomes clear that we can also do this with "moral" drives too!

This better understanding of one's "moral" drives can then, if one so desires, be transformed into something like an "ethical system" through a construction of one's own values.

Whether something constructed after the deconstruction of moral discourse can or should be called an ethical system, given the deconstruction of morality that proceeds it, is an open question, and I'm calling it that intentially with a healthy helping of irony: an oxymoron makes a good title. Nevertheless, even more ironically, perhaps it does deserve the name: it's doing all of those same things, after all: expressing an aesthetic judgement about the world, a personal commitment to acting a certain way, and a willingness to enforce that with violence! The crucial difference is that it is your property (in a Stirnerite sense), not the other way around. Much in the same way an understanding of what sorts of aesthetics or genres of art one appreciates might help you decide what to do, but does not dictate what you must do, any post-deconstruction ethical system is now not something that requires you to rigidly limit yourself; it is just a predictive system to guide what you generally choose to engage with, which you can step "out of" at any time.

Like an understanding of one's own aesthetic preferences, this own-system can serve as a tool to make you more comfortable, by finding you actions or things to engage with that you know will align with you; or it can be a system constructed to challenge and push you in a direction you know you already like — like reading more and more difficult literature in a genre you enjoy, and engaging more deeply with it — or even as a lever through which to shape new drives that your higher (meta?) drives find necessary — like forcing yourself to read forms of literature you don't like, to find the beauty and worth in them, because you want to broaden yourself. One can even construct systems through Ulysses pacts, to force yourself, in according with longer horizon drives, to adhere to a moral system you've created despite short term drives, like constructing one's life so as to avoid junkfood, or stay on a diet, without having to rely on flimsy in the moment willpower. A system that is your own need not be like Huxley's Soma; if it is, that is a choice you are making, and if that makes you dissatisfied with it or yourself, you can change it! The point is that at no point will this challenging, this pushing outside your comfort-zone, be contrary to your drives, your values.

Thus, this deconstructed approach, which allows you to modify and update your ethics, provides the opportunity for a feedback loop — or, as Rawls describes it, "reflective equilibrium" — between yourself and your ethical system: it can modify your drives, and your drives can modify it, and each thus modified system can continue on to modify and respond to the other. You and your morality will grow together, as often happens with wise and mature people, but you can do it consciously, and without guilt.

More than that, it allows your ethical system to enter into a feedback loop with the objective world: the world itself chanign in reaction to an action guided by your ethical system, you experiencing the results of that, and then changing the moral system in response to that, which then produces new actions. Most people already do this to some degree — see how often peoples' moral views change when they're put in new situations or introduced to new context — but refuse to admit it, and in my opinion don't do often enough: if the ethical system you create makes you constantly guilty, paranoid, unhappy, nonfunctional, or obsessive, or makes it difficult to operate in the world, perhaps by making certain useful facts too difficult or even "immoral" to recognize, the feedback loop is necessary to restore reality and sanity.

There's also a sort of sympathy with moral quasi-realism here: in essence, if you've rejected moral quietism and embraced full throatedly advocating for and acting out — even, sometimes, if it is temporarily painful or inconvenient, or requires enforcing it on others — an ethical system of your choosing, you've essentially earned the right to some sort of semi-objective moral discourse despite having deconstructed the foundations objective moral discourse traditionally rests on: you can say that this or that is right or wrong, evil or good, knowning you mean it in the sense that you won't have any of it, and are personally committed not to doing any of it yourself, and it isn't part of your ideal vision for a world or for aesthetically pleasing personal character. This is very useful, especially since this is the language all of us — ethical non-cognitivists included, but also especially the people around us whom we need to make ourselves understood to, and even convince of our desires — are used to expressing these drives in. However, I would caution against diving too fully into a moral quasi-realist project, for one crucial reason: in trying to find a way to justify the use of moral talk that sounds objective, even though it isn't, one is essentially diving back into the project of obfuscating language and confusing yourself, creating cognitive dissonance which may, eventually, collapse back into traditional moral discourse.

The ethical system that I've arrived at myself can be summarized thus: I enjoy living in a world that has a maximally diverse, and maximally great, number of fully autonomous, acutalized individuals, because I like forming relationships with, communicating with, or being enemies with them. Furthermore, I do not want to

1. Foster the maximum autonomy for each individual compatible with the equal autonomy of all, including both fighting against political domination (the state, capitalism, colonialism, etc), social domination (religion, indoctrination, racism, sexism, transphobia etc), and against the domination of the "natural" (using technology to create new degress of freedom and control through which we can exercise autonomy).
2. Only concern myself with any individual with which it is conceivable that I could have (say, if I were to travel to them, or learn their language), a mutually responsible/culpable, mutually respecting, mutually beneficial, and mutually communicating, relationship. Anything else is tertiary at best.
3. Prioritize those individuals with which I already have such a relationship — a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush — and otherwise scale my prioritization with the actual likelihood of developing such a relationship.
4. Never engage in pre-crime: no one should ever have their autonomy restricted on the basis of what they might do, either because of themselves, or because of some supposed inherent possibility for misuse in the axis of freedom that is being restricted itself. This restriction, since it restricts autonomy that may (and in most cases would) have been used in a way that doesn't result in domination, is itself domination, and nothing more. Instead, more resources should be devoted to specifically targetting and stopping negative uses of that axis of autonomy. For if we were to restrict all autonomy that could be used badly, to attempt to create perfectly safe world, we'd have no autonomy left.

As you can see, this has relatively clear implications for morality. For instance, focusing on my friends and local community if I want to help people, not being a vegan, etc.