Amorality: True Freedom Or Pure Selfishness?

What is amorality?

Amorality can be defined as an absence of ethical considerations in an individual’s behavior or judgment.

It’s important to note that amorality isn’t a psychological disorder! Admittedly, some personality disorders, such as asocial behavior, may display amoral behavior, but the truth is that anyone can commit amoral behavior. We act without worrying about whether our actions have consequences, we act out of our own personal interest.

What’s an amoral act?

At first glance, you get the impression that amorality is a bit of frivolity 😌. Yes, you’re free from what other people think, you live for yourself and that’s great! On Wengood, you’re often encouraged to be a bit more selfish, to think about yourself, but amorality isn’t about that. It’s about behaving without thinking about the consequences behind. To fully understand the concept of amorality, I’ll give you a concrete example 👇:

When I was younger, I used to download music and movies illegally. I knew it was illegal, because it deprived artists of fair pay for their work. Yet I did it without scruples, telling myself that “everyone does it” or that “it’s not really stealing”.

I think I felt that it wasn’t doing anyone any direct harm and well, I was a teenager, I did as I pleased.

👉 That’s what an amoral act is! When we commit it, we don’t think about the ethical dimension. We can apply this to eating meat, consuming fast fashion, etc. We do it without thinking because the harmful consequences of our actions are distant or abstract.

“In many everyday situations, we’re content with a minimal ethic that consists of not directly harming others. But we don’t always feel concerned about the indirect or diffuse damage caused by our actions.” - Philosopher Ruwen Ogien

👋 Discover another philosophy of life: What does Ikigai mean?

Is amorality the way to freedom?

It’s true that when we don’t think about the harmful consequences of our actions, we’re freed from the feeling of guilt. By adopting an amoral stance, we free ourselves from the weight of moral judgments and feel free to act as we wish, without worrying about whether it’s right or wrong.

But guilt is a useful emotion that teaches us many things, not least empathy. It allows us to consider others and the world around us. It encourages us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and to feel the consequences of our actions on others. Without this emotional safeguard, we run the risk of sinking into selfishness and indifference, which will leave us isolated. Nobody wants to be in a relationship with someone who only thinks about themselves 🤐.

Today, I’d be incapable of doing something that infringes my values. Not out of compulsion or fear, but out of choice and conviction. I’ve integrated ethical principles, and they’re part of my identity. It’s important to remember that ethics isn’t something that looks down on us and judges us from the outside. It is a constitutive dimension of our narrative identity, of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, as the philosopher Paul Ricœur explained.

Morality, a means of acting as part of a “whole”

Amorality therefore isn’t true freedom, but rather slavery to our desires and whims. By cutting us off from our humanity and our moral sense, it paradoxically makes us less free and less human. True freedom, on the other hand, consists in freely choosing to submit to universal moral principles. As the philosopher Kant pointed out, “always act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in yourself and in everyone else, always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means.”

It’s by recognizing the intrinsic value of every human being, by freely imposing this moral duty on ourselves, that we achieve true fulfillment 🤗.

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