Ethics without Morals: In Defence of Amorality

181 Pages·2012·1.38 MB·English

by  Joel Marks

Ethics without Morals
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral
Theory

1 The Contradictions of Modern
Moral Philosophy
Ethics after Wittgenstein
Paul Johnston
2 Kant, Duty and Moral Worth
Philip Stratton-Lake
3 Justifying Emotions
Pride and Jealousy
Kristján Kristjánsson
4 Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill
Frederick Rosen
5 The Self, the Soul and the Psychology of Good and Evil
Ilham Dilman
6 Moral Responsibility
The Ways of Scepticism
Carlos J. Moya
7 The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle
Mirrors of Virtue
Jiyuan Yu
8 Caste Wars
A Philosophy of Discrimination
David Edmonds
9 Deprivation and Freedom
A Philosophical Enquiry
Richard J. Hull
10 Needs and Moral Necessity
Soran Reader
11 Reasons, Patterns, and Cooperation
Christopher Woodard
12 Challenging Moral Particularism
Edited by Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč, and Vojko Strahovnik
13 Rationality and Moral Theory
How Intimacy Generates Reasons
Diane Jeske
14 The Ethics of Forgiveness
A Collection of Essays
Christel Fricke
15 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
The Good Person is That
Amy Olberding
16 The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity
William H. Smith
17 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics
Virtues and Gifts
Andrew Pinsent
18 Social Humanism
A New Metaphysics
Brian Ellis
19 Ethics without Morals
In Defense of Amorality
Joel Marks
Ethics without Morals
In Defense of Amorality

Joel Marks

NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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© 2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of Joel Marks to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marks, Joel, 1949— Ethics without morals : in defence of amorality / by Joel
Marks.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory ; 19) Includes
bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Ethics. I. Title.
BJ1031.M3153 2012
170—dc23
2012020547

ISBN: 978-0-415-63556-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-09307-8 (ebk) Typeset in
Sabon by IBT Global.
To Jack Davis, Jerry Shaffer, and Joel Kupperman, my steadfast mentors from
graduate school to retirement (mine!) and beyond.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 What Is Morality?
2 Does Morality Exist?
3 Would Amorality Be Viable?
4 Might Amorality Be Preferable?
5 Is Amorality Just Another Way of Being Moral?
6 How Shall We Treat Other Animals?
A Case Study in Applied Amorality
7 What Is Ethics?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

How this book came to be is a story in itself, which in fact I have told (in part)
in a memoir which preceded it. This has been a personal journey as well as a
professional one, and in both respects, many other individuals have been
integral to it. Therefore I will combine a brief recapitulation of what
transpired with acknowledgments to many friends and colleagues.
As with any series of events, there have been some noteworthy coincidences.
One is that the episode that precipitated all that has followed occurred on
Christmas Day (of 2007). I call this a coincidence because I think on that day I
heard the glad tidings of the end of moral guilt, which is the secular equivalent
of sin. Another coincidence is that the episode took place in the home of
Mitchell Silver, whose ideas in his 2006 book, A Plausible God, have
contributed both causally and substantively to the central argument of the
present book. I call this a coincidence because Mitchell was not even present,
nor his ideas in mind, when the episode took place.
The person who was present along with me was H___, with whom I was
having a conversation about God. This was not unusual for us, as H___ is a
minister and I was an agnostic. But there is still more of coincidence, or
perhaps now it tends to irony. For it was discussion with H___ that had
inspired my previous monograph, which was a defense of morality; whereas
the result of the later discussion was to be my “counter-conversion” to
amorality.
(It was also ironic—or maybe absurd, or simply funny—that the thoughts
that came to me from that conversation were apparently due to my
misunderstanding what H___ was telling me … as she later explained to me
… I think! None of this bothers me in the least, as it fi ts quite well with my
new view of life as largely governed by unseen causes. But I had already
become sympathetic to the manner of accidental inspiration from hearing Sam
Wheeler in a seminar when I was in graduate school wax breezily about his
own inspiration for a particular thesis from having possibly misunderstood the
ancient Greeks.)