The Genesis of Objectivism

My diagnosis of the ills of moralism has been that we objectify what is fundamentally subjective, transforming our beliefs and desires into facts and (objective) values. Thus, if we believe something, we take it to be true; and if we desire (or like) something, we take it to be right[1] (or good).[2] The resultant “ills” are therefore twofold: We are overconfident in our judgments, and as a result of these hardened attitudes, we take actions that are both stultifying and aggressive. Thus, wars are fought because the opponents consider each another not simply to have different or conflicting beliefs and desires, but to be wrong and evil. If the differences were only the former, there would be more possibilities for mutual tolerance, negotiation, and change.

            But where does the faux and noxious objectification come from? I have previously noted that it lends a certain advantage in certain circumstances, which may have been instrumental in assuring the survival of our species such as it is. The most obvious just-so Darwinian story is that individuals who hold tenaciously to their views may be more likely to prevail over those who harbor uncertainty.[3] In this essay I would like to put forward an even more fundamental explanation (hypothesis).

            Some decades ago it hit me that I was living in a state of continual astonishment at other people’s beliefs and desires. Prior to that I had assumed other people, or at least others of my acquaintance and milieu, thought about things pretty much as I did. With increasing age there came, however, one shock after another. This led to a double realization, then: not only that others were sometimes exceedingly different from what I had assumed, but also, and hand in hand with that, that I myself had been extremely naïve about the world. It finally reached the point where I conceived myself as involved in a lifelong project of disillusionment (and in both senses of dispelling illusions and finding reality to be disappointing).

            I also came to diagnose the cause of my condition as having been brought up in a parochial environment. By parochial I mean with a narrow perspective. At first this seemed paradoxical, in that I grew up in an extremely cosmopolitan location: New York City. But the more I learned about the world, the more I could understand how such a situation is quite commonplace, and the particular ways I had been outfitted with blinders while being surrounded by a vast variety of things that thereby remained invisible to me.

            Now I would go further and surmise that this is nothing but the human condition, for we all begin with some sort of (largely)[4] undifferentiated experience of the world, and only over time learn to distinguish others from ourself. I often tell the following episode from my days as stepfather to a little boy. Little Sean would be sitting at the dining room table poring over one of the Garfield the cat cartoon books he loved, while I was somewhere in the vicinity. A particular cartoon would tickle his funny bone and I would hear his soft, high-pitch giggle. Then he'd say something to the effect: "Isn't that funny?" He was almost demanding my concurrence. Laughter loves company. But from my position there was no way I could see the cartoon; I might even be in a different room. At the very least I might be on the other side of the table and have to ask him to turn the book around so that I could read it.

I came to interpret these events as revealing an aspect of the young mind: It does not distinguish between itself and the rest of the world. Sean -- like everyone -- was seeing the world from a point of view. But as far as he was concerned that was the way the world was, not just his perspective on it. Thus, if he could read the Garfield cartoon, anybody could. He could only be impatient with my need to have the book turned toward me; he could see no reason for that, other than perhaps my convenience, which was an inconvenience to him.

            I suspect that most and perhaps all of us never escape this condition entirely: For even as we come to recognize that others are not ourself, we still fail to wholly grasp the full implications of that, which are that others may be profoundly different from ourself. And the thesis I am now putting forward is that this failure in turn helps to account for our objectification of everything subjective, since our prevailing assumption is that others see things just as we do, and hence (this being the most parsimonious explanation of that) we are all seeing an objective reality that corresponds exactly to our subjective experience.

            Clearly at some level of abstraction we do all see things “the same way.” But this “level” may be so abstract as to be meaningless for all practical purposes. For example, of even ardent pro-lifers and pro-choicers it could be said that they (we) are all alike in being ardent about their beliefs regarding abortion. And I suppose I must immediately qualify this assertion by acknowledging that such similarities could also have practical implications. Indeed, my very call for amoralism is premised on the noxiousness of our all (or most of us) being so very ardent about things (because of our faux objectification of them).

            So in the end: Of course we have significant similarities and significant differences. In this essay I have suggested a way that this fundamental fact leads to a faux and noxious objectification of our subjective experiences.


[1] Or permissible.

[2] Granted there is not a perfect symmetry between belief and truth on the one hand and desire and good on the other. Truth is commonly taken to be part of the very meaning of belief: to believe something is precisely to believe it is true. Contrast this to desire, where to desire something is not necessarily to believe it is right (“I want to eat another scoop of ice cream even though I know it’s not good for me”). I finesse this difference by claiming that as a matter of empirical fact we tend to deem right or good whatever we desire or like. And therefore, since my goal is to de-objectify all of our attitudes, I am in effect calling for a universal skepticism, that is, a moderation of the intensity of our beliefs, along with a recognition of our desires as only desires. (Another option would be to craft a notion of belief that does not imply believing something to be true, in which case we could retain our beliefs as well as our desires without being objectivists. It’s all a web of beliefs that, à la Quine, we are free to tweak, provided we make adjustments in several of them and not only one.)

[3] A contemporary demonstration of this, if one is of a Democratic frame of mind, is how the minority of MAGA Republicans, who appear capable of fanatically holding the most outlandish beliefs (Biden stole the election) and desires (every man woman and child should own an assault weapon or two or ten), are able to hold sway over the majority of more moderate and peaceable and sensible liberal-minded folk.

[4] Although I also still assume that we innately make a number of fundamental distinctions from the very start of infancy.

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