Can you do what you want

Tackling the modern myth of an alternative to ethics

On thinking about our basic concepts

I am attempting to teach an understanding of the world from old books, and thus understand how we got from there to here and how we can find a way out of here in their light. In these attempts, I find I quickly run into a number of accepted axioms, which most people nowadays just cannot think outside of. When pressed for justification they usually don’t even understand what is in need of justification, as if these axioms are as clear as the sky is blue (i.e. are “primary ineligibles”). However, the old books we are reading don’t share these axioms, and to our ancient teachers the opposite of what we take as simple is the basic axiom that needs no justification. It is difficult to get people to even see this contradiction, and we tend to automatically supply our own assumptions in place of the old ones, even when this causes the book to say the opposite of its intentions or makes it obviously absurd.

Particularly prone to this unnoticed rewriting are those thinkers who see themselves as working within a religious tradition and thinking it through. Since they define their task as making the tradition intelligible, they just assume that “intelligible” means what seems intelligible to us. They do not include in their task the primary imperative of thinking, which is interrogating the things that seems to us obvious. All the more so don’t they include in their task interrogating our concepts in light of the concepts provided by the tradition.

Once we do open ourselves to this questioning, we are surprised to find that so many things we just take to be obvious truths, or conditions for all thinking, are not. Not only are these obvious things not at all obvious, they are barely intelligible at all. It then becomes hard to even articulate the disagreements we begin having with the common understandings, since their claims to obviousness start to seem laughable. It becomes necessary to find ways to express the common understandings not as obvious truths but as the complicated and radical assertions that they are. Only then can we being to show their internal contradictions and propose other ways of thinking which, although they aren’t free from difficulties of their own, seem to start from more intelligible premises.

These assumptions occur in every area of thought, some I keep on bumping into are in epistemology the radical and weird assertion that our minds can just make up concepts ex nihlo. In hermeneutics the funny idea that one can and should interpret texts without regard for the truth, and on the other hand that it is possible to take out of a text when was never there in any way. and some others I don’t remember now. I should start a series talking about these. Today I want to talk about some unfounded assumptions in ethics.

On the possibility of beginning from meta-ethics

When beginning to think about ethics in a critical way, it seems the first question we must answer is the most general one: “Why have any ethics at all”. This is very different from the question about the details of ethics : “why are these specific things considered good and not other ones”. We should also question what the correct method of proceeding is, but it seems that the general must be logically prior to the details.

For people brought up in a traditional religious ethical system (a very long way of saying “religion”), the general question (sometimes called “meta-ethics”) seems even more salient. I think this is because most religions, at least nowadays, teach by way of authority. So you are continually being reminded of the reason why you should obey the ethical precepts, hearing things like “do this because it is in the holy texts” or “we must obey the deity”. When people start questioning, they will question what is most salient in their education, the reason for being good, and not the specific things claimed as good.

Now, if we would have a fixed idea of what the good things are, and thus would be free to only discuss the reason behind them, we might be able to intelligibly compare different options. For example if we keep the idea “stealing is bad” fixed, we can then argue “is stealing bad because God said so, or because people decided so, or because it is bad for them”. But if we attempt to follow the logical sequence and ask “why would anything be good or bad” before knowing what is good or bad at all, it becomes a lot more difficult to have this discussion.

This is because it is very hard to have an intelligible thought without starting from any options. If someone says “why any ethics?” without any idea of what we mean by “ethics”, or conversely of what life without any ethics would look like, I don’t even know how to auto-complete the next word. Per the proposition “there are no ethics”, there are also no “not-ethics”. Since ethics is in any event some idea of what humans are to do with their life, if we have no constriction on the definition of “ethics”, any idea of what humans should do would just be an alternative ethics, and thus the “why ethics at all” discussion we are attempting to have, which must be distinct from “what are the ethics”, cannot even begin.

“Do what you want” is an ethical system

The fact is that people do have the “why ethics” discussion all the time. This is only because we do assume an alternative to the the ethical life exists. And thus when we are asking “why ethic” we are really asking “why a certain definition of what is a good life and not another one”. The reason this discussion is thought to be the discussion of “why ethics” is because both popular anti-ethical opinions, and popular ethical theories, assume that this life is the coherent alternative to ethics. There are even some popular ethical theories that make following this alternative the basis or an important part of their ethics.

This alternative is thought to be the “natural” state. it is what we would have done had no system of ethics been “imposed” upon the “natural” “pre-ethical” state. It is thus also the thing that supposed “a-ethical” sciences of the human study, meaning most of modern psychology. This is “do what you want”.

Any teenager you will discuss ethics with will ask you “but why can’t I just do what I want?”. Many a religious believer will tell you “If not for God/Divine Law, I would just do whatever I wanted”. Some entire systems of ethics are based around the idea “You should not just do what you want, rather you should care about what others want too”, or “rather you should do what is your duty and not just what you want”. Other ethical systems exhort you “Do what you want, nothing is wrong with that”. Or “You should follow your passions and succeed in actualizing whatever it is you wish for”.

We can already see, and this should be emphasized here, that this is a positive idea of ethics, in the sense of a way to organize a human life. Doing whatever you want is not really the same thing as “having no ethics”. Just as any other system of ethics, it has a psychology and a demand. It assumes a picture of what a human being is, i.e. a psychology, and makes demands of the human being that are in accordance with this picture. “Do as you want” assumes that humans have wants, and that this is a basic fact about a human being, needing no work or explanation to arrive at. It then makes a regulative demand of that human, saying what is good is that he does what he wants.

This is why it can masquerade as the “no-ethics” option, by assuming that any other ethics makes demands of a human that go beyond what is just a basic fact about them. This is true both for the psychology, as well as for the demands. For example many religious ethics begin from assuming that human beings have a “higher” soul than the soul or part that just wants things, and therefore this higher self makes certain demands, while “do what you want” belongs to the “lower”, natural self, which is said to make no demands on us since “do what you want” is supposed to somehow be the natural action which is no demand at all.

Where is the fabled do-what-you-want’er?

Now that we know what the idea of doing what you want is, Let us try to see if it is coherent, and can it fulfill it’s role as the “natural” “pre-ethical” state, which we need to argue our way out of if we are to establish a meta-ethics.

When we try to clarify what this “doing whatever you want” consists of, we begin to realize we don’t really know what this means. For one, we don’t have an image of an ideal person who follows this path. The easiest way to think about a specific ethical imperative is to put in front of us the paradigm case of the person who follows this ideal, at least in a specific context. For example, if you want to talk about duty, a clear way to bring this to mind is to imagine a soldier in an organized army, who does everything in his soldiering out of duty. This paradigmatic example then helps us examine what a life of duty would mean, and can show us the questions and difficulties inherent in this kind of life. But who is the paradigmatic person who follows this “whatever you want” way of life? It seems it can be anyone, since doing what you want makes no specific claim. So what is to tell us that it means one person and not another. The problem here isn’t just that doing what you want doesn’t give us a picture of a person, that is consistent with the claims of the idea, since doing what you want just means there not being a specific thing you must do. Rather the problem here is that having no such picture, it is hard to begin discussing this option, what precisely are we to discuss here? It is very hard to discuss nothing, even if to disprove it.

Perhaps you might think it is someone who lives some kind of bohemian anything-goes lifestyle. But there isn’t anything to tell us that the “natural” or “default” thing anyone wants is to be a bohemian free spirit. It seems just as possible that a natural thing to want to do is to be an ascetic monk. And if we have nothing to go on but the way people actually are, there are obviously monks as well as bohemians in existence, so again is the theory we are discussing that there is no difference between these? We again face the absurd emptiness which allows no discourse to begin.

Or perhaps the do-what-you-want guy is someone who just lays in bed and stares at the ceiling. Perhaps the person who does is whatever it is teenagers do on the weekend for his whole life. But, without disparaging teenage sleep-schedules, there is nothing more “default” about this behavior than any other. All we know is that some teenagers go to school when forced and when not don’t know what to do.

Now you end up saying that yes, everyone should do what they please, and yes it does seem it pleases some to fast on mountaintops and others to have non-stop parties, so so be it. The problem here is that this means that this theory of what is natural has zero explanatory power. It can barely be said to say anything. “Do what you want” Turns out to mean “Do anything”, or really “Do, or don’t do, anything”. So is our argument for ethics to begin by saying “there are reasons to do something specific”? This does seem to be a question one should resolve prior to ethics conceived this way.

In reality though, when not pressed to the wall in the way just described, everyone who discusses the “do what you want” option has a particular way in life in mind. For people who grew up in a sheltered religious context, when their teachers spoke about “do what you want” they really meant “do whatever the English are doing”, and this in turn is imagined to mean some sort of unbounded bohemian lifestyle. It takes some experience of the real world for these children to discover that the English are mostly not bohemians, and even those are not really doing what they want, only following a different (perhaps more “open”) set of ethical ideals. Instead of presenting them as amoral they would be more honest if they would have identified the alternative morality they are against and argued against that.

Where is the fabled “unique will”?

What this theory of doing-what-you-want entails becomes clearer when we discuss the more fleshed-out ethical theories, who see “self-actualization” as the ultimate value in human life, and especially those versions who see the diversity of human wants as the solution and not as the problem. “Everyone should follow their own unique path” they say, meaning you should do what you really want Now we see that these theories have tried to face the problem of there being no natural human wanter, and have attempted to turn this into an advantage. It is a good thing that no two people want the same thing, because what you are to do is precisely the thing that makes you unique. And you should do this because you want it. There are also theistic versions of this ideal, who say the same thing except they end by saying “and you should do this because God created you uniquely”.

It turns out that we are still dogged by the same problem of doing-what-you-want being meaningless. Changing the stress from “do what you want” to “do what you want”, didn’t help us know what we are asking you to do. But this helped me see clearly what the theory of human will everyone seems to think makes sense is saying. It says this: Each person has a natural will to something specific, and this will is prior to any thought or reasoning. He must not know why he wills this specific thing, or this wouldn’t be a natural pre-thought will, and we can ask him to justify why he wants this and if it is correct to want this. No, in order to fulfill it’s role it must be entirely prior to any choice and to any deliberation. It must even be prior to any exposure to anything, since if this will can be ascribed to hearing an ad for it on television, nobody can still claim this is the natural pre-ethical state.

We can now see who the ideal hero of this paradigm is. Someone born in a forest somewhere, with no human contact and nothing to receive any concepts from, who suddenly begins to have an inexplicable drive to go and do something very specific like start a social media marketing company. This is the hero of “follow your passions”. If this story begins to sounds like something out of a myth, it is because it is. In the real world it never happened yet. We begin to see why the theistic version of this story might in fact be the plausible version. And while we’re at it, it would make even more sense if we called this inexplicable will a prophecy or daimon sent by the Gods to cause you do do something. But then again you are a tool in the hands of God and not an agent following your will.

This same paradox persists even if we go back and tell the story in an atheistic way. The dilemma is such: either you are following your wills, meaning you chose them. or else you are not following your wills but something outside of you. If your wills are chosen, you lose their whole charm which is that they are before any deliberation of what is good to do, which is just another word for ethics. If you wills are not chosen, then in what sense are they your wills at all, they are just the causes that act on you. The promoters of the do-as-you-will theory very confusedly claim that following what is not in your power is a way of “empowering” you. I don’t get this at all.

In reality, nobody know what they want. I know this because I spent months introspecting according to this popular paradigm and doing almost nothing, and having nothing to show for it. Young people definitely don’t know what they want, and they change their basic wants every hour. So maybe do-what-you-want needs another qualification. do what you want now. At this point we’re close to literal madness. Madness being someone who has no coherent story of their life or even of their day.

Why should you do what you want?

Now let’s say we have solved all of this. Say we somehow know what we want, or what we would have wanted had we removed all our social conditioning, which is what we really want. Let’s say we somehow want to do what we must want to do and that this seems to us a perfectly free path of self-actualization. The question remains: Why should we do any of this? What if I don’t want to do what I want? Or what if I am lazy and unmotivated to do what I want? Or am I just stuck in a contradiction, not knowing do I want to do it or not? This kind of contradiction isn’t a logical problem but a psychological one, and makes it impossible for me to even be coherent to myself. Now not only don’t I know what I want, I don’t even know who I am.

This whole opinion seems to assume that not only do I want to do what I want, but I should do what I want. Otherwise the many exhortations directed at us to follow our passions make no sense. What do you mean “follow my passions”, by definition I am already following my passions and this cannot be otherwise. No, the theory we are battling here must think that the fact I want something, creates a sort of ethical imperative for me to do it. I cannot say, “yes I want to go to the park, but so what, I’m not going anyway”. This is not just incoherent, it is wrong. You must just be afraid or disempowered or something. We must direct advertisements and speeches and campaigns so that you finally do what you want. My mind is spinning from trying to ascribe any sense to this.

In reality, these exhortations have an almost theological belief that one ought to do what they want. They also have some sort of belief in the hierarchy of wants which informs them on which things I really want. For example, any want which pertains to my body directly is more real than one that pertains only to my family or community. No argument is given for this, only various pieces of rhetoric meant to make me feel that this is what I really want. No argument can be given for any of this, since the belief that one ought to do what they want, unless a god revealed this imperative on a mountain, must follow up with because they want it, which itself opens the question, and what if they want it?, oh because you mut do what you want, ad infinitum.

[An important theological note here: Many confuse the conditions for good actions and the reasons these actions are said to be good. It is traditional to say that people should fulfill the roles for which they are predisposed, and that it would be very hard for someone with no natural inclination to something to fulfill that role. For example we should sort society so that those with inclination to study should teach and those with inclination to action should be men of action. However, nowhere do these traditions make the mistake of saying that the good of being a good teacher consists in actualizing the unique predisposition you have to study. This would be absurd as we have explained.]

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have tried to show that a central myth in popular discussions of meta-ethics is that (1) there exists a pre-social, pre-ethical, and pre-rational “will”. 2) That each person has a unique such will. (3) That following this will is the default, natural, or pre-ethical way of life.

I hope it is clear that none of this makes any sense to anyone who thinks about it for more than five minutes. Nor is any of this the obvious way of understanding humans to anyone who introspects or who looks at people in the real world.

Any of this might be tenable as an esoteric doctrine based on arcane arguments or revelations, which only initiates into a mystical system understand and can live by. The way these far-fetched ideas have become the beginning point of an almost universally accepted discourse is, like the rest of the beliefs in this family, one of the great mysteries of modernity.