Is There Anything ‘Moral’ About Morals?

I recently promised to write a few words about my problems with ethics and morals. To lay it out with any amount of sophistication I would have to put my life on hold for about six months and write a book or something like that. Nonetheless, although this silly little essay will not do the trick, I hope that, at the very least, it will sketch a vulgar and unrefined shadow of my position.

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with my sentiment on things in general, then, before you rush to judgment, please browse through some of my writing here that might hint at a few things that might be helpful: 1) I am a very real realist, ontologically speaking; 2) I am extremely skeptical about epistemological certainty; and 3) I consider the only way to understand what language means is using the criteria of belief. Taking that into consideration, I don’t think that you will be too surprised about what I think about morality and ethics, which is:

I do not think that morals exist. I deny the phenomenological reality and veracity of morals. Especially in language. The main reason is because I do not think we mean anything ‘moral’ when we are speaking about things that we assume to be related to morals (or ethics if you like). Languages of axiology, permissiblity, moral quality, goodness, rightness, and the rest are not ‘moral’ properly speaking, as I see it.

For example, the act of putting a cigarette out in the eye of an infant is not ‘immoral’. We might say that, but what we mean is not even a matter what is good or bad, permissible or impermissible, right or wrong, and so on. What we mean is that it is ugly and sick and twisted and a host of other things we cannot express. In other words, what we really seem to mean when we want to say that this or that is moral of immoral is really whether something is beautiful or ugly. Morals are deodorized aesthetics.

So, instead of confronting the sheer power of beauty in our lives, we prefer to use morals that create entire systems of judgment, behavior, norms, and alike. But, what we mean is not a matter of what is ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘right’, and alike, morally speaking; we mean what is closer to beautiful. What is closer to God.

While language will always distort the iconic reality of God, moral language is especially destructive. We begin to think that God is something good and not evil as a matter of conduct or behavior. The talk of morals reduces God from a divine artist, to a calculable and predictable—some call this scientific—actor. But this is a lie. Beauty is one of the few expressions that can escape the shackles of language and offer itself to us in the form of music, poetry, children, lovers, and God.

Good and evil, permissible and inpermissible, right and wrong, do not mean anything moral. What they mean, or what I think we believe them to mean, are aesthetic intuitions about how close or far away things are to or from God. Hate is not immoral, it is ugly. Making it immoral changes nothing about it except our ability to know the difference.

I have no problems using moral language. My problem is forgetting what we mean when we are speaking. Forgetting the aesthetic and divine meaning of morality begins an alienation from who we are as persons who are created and redeemed by a Love Sublime that exceeds morals and calls us home.

In short, there is nothing, at the level of belief and meaning, ‘moral’ about morals. At least that’s what I think on the matter.