Morality in the way

In a post with the title 'Morality Is Overrated', Robin Hanson argues that advice about what we want - from 'amoral advisors, like economists' - is more useful than advice about what we should do or choose. But we tend to listen more than is wise to moral philosophers and other purveyors of the second kind of advice, because of 'our tendency to want to appear to care more about morality than we actually do'. Or, as Hanson also says, 'we want to be moral'.

His post might be considered another way of saying that morality is not enough: we need to know not only what is right or has the best consequences in principle but also what is feasible, what can be achieved, and what are the least difficult or most economical ways of achieving it. We must be sensible of what lies within people's capacities as well as within some concept of their obligations.

Hanson's argument, however, goes beyond insisting that morality isn't everything to the claim that it is overrated. Really?

The pointer towards the fact that it is not, he supplies himself. We want to be moral, he says, or if not that, then at least to appear to be. Indeed. Look around you. Open a book or a newspaper. Read some blogs. Watch a movie. The passion for justification and self-justification is one of the most powerful human impulses there is. We could scarcely understand a thing about human interaction if our eyes were closed to that. Moreover, we could not understand the societies within which people pursue their other (non-moral) wants if we were oblivious to the fact that the framework of law, custom and convention is hugely influenced by moral beliefs of one kind and another. There are other angles from which this subject can be approached, of course, and other emphases proper to those different starting points; but even if you begin from individual wants, you'll find morality on the path before you. (Via Chris Dillow.)