Moralism vs morality

Moralism is not morality.

Morality proper is that branch of ethics, the theory of the good life and how to live it, that determines conduct through norms and principles that specify what is to be done and not done.

What is to be done or not done is equally obligation and opportunity: what in action is necessary and what is possible.

Morality like all ethics affirms potentialities; morality's laws and norms name them.

Moralism negates potentialities. It looks at persons and sees only risk of violence and crime, transgression and disobedience.

Moralism is about who is to be punished. It "knows" what is true and right in every instance. It directs its anxiety at the possible moral transgression or crime, of the Other.

Morality is love of the good; moralism is hatred of the Other.

This hatred is largely the class hatred of rulers and bosses, and of managers and agents of policing and social control, against the people being ruled, who are always suspected of a will to act that could be contrary to the demands that they obey and do the tasks expected of them.

The Holocaust was not a failure of morality; it did not happen because too many people disobeyed the moral authority standing about them, but because too many obeyed it.

Christianity's antinomianism makes more sense in relation to Roman than Jewish ideas of law. The Romans founded their political domination in ideas of governance and order, not justice. Justice retains its connection with love and the good broadly.

Moralism is about identifying potentialities and latencies for evil. It considers injustice, and sin and evil, as disobedience to authority and transgression of law or norm. Moralism seeks to use law and sanctions to limit potentialities for violence and crime, and dysfunctional behavior.

Morality seeks to realize the good.

Moralism's logic is double negation and reduction to the absurd. A good that could stand alone cannot be exhibited. It is aware only of what is baed. Not needing to be found and exhibited, as it is already painful present, the bad phenomena are to be limited, excluded, eliminated, or negated. War and policing are made possible thereby. The bad phenomena are negative and they promote negative affects that may be debilitating. They are then negated in turn with the help of thinking based on these affects. Then the bad thing or possibility will have been doubly negated, as its negative character is opposed. This opposition may not, however, suffice to yield the good.

Your doctor or therapist, like the police, may not want to help you realize any potentialities that you and those around you could affirm. To the doctor examining your soul, your interesting potentialities are for crime or failure.

The older institution of confession to a priest had one advantage over its medical and therapeutic successor: while it is true that you would be asked about your sins, that love and virtue as well as happiness and justice are possibilities in this world as well, and that that institution seeks to cultivate, may well have been lost.

When Hegel said that art and philosophy had replaced religion, he neglected to point out that religion has ancient siblings in law and medicine (including that of souls), and it was the invention of the art of theater that broke with all three.