is professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007) and Love: A Ve

Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful | Aeon Essays

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2021-07-24 10:30:03

is professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007) and Love: A Very Short Introduction (2015).

Let me start with a disclosure. I am not a ‘moral philosopher’, but I have taught moral philosophy for several decades. I have come to regard the very idea of morality as fraudulent. Morality, I now believe, is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time. But that claim is bogus.

By ‘morality’, I refer to the sort of rules the transgression of which common sense decries as ‘immoral’, ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. Such rules are generally regarded as obliging us without qualification. They prescribe duties not in virtue of your goals or role – such as ‘the duties of the secretary includes taking minutes of the meeting’ – but without qualification. They are claimed to ‘bind’ us merely in virtue of our status as human beings. And philosophers have constructed a vast industry devoted to the elaboration of subtle theories designed to justify them. Against morality thus conceived, I have five complaints.

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