We assume that our picture of how the world should be reflects not only our attitudes and desires, but also some transcendent morality. Thus, we feel it is not enough to say that we are upset by how a friend has behaved – we must say that the friend has behaved badly, in some objective sense. In this piece, Joel Marks proposes that this impulse, though natural, is mistaken. There is no objective morality, Marks argues, and we would avoid considerable strife and conflict if we did not mistake our desires and preferences for a value-laden reality. There is an attitude one finds everywhere, in oneself as well as in others, that I would like to see vanish from the face of the Earth. It is best captured in what I call the moral moment, a kind of snapshot view of the attitude I am talking about. Suppose, for example, that you wanted something very much. It does not matter what. It could be something purely selfish. It could be something quite selfless. Somewhere in …
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