This book aims to advance the defense of moral nihilism by challenging the prevailing conception of ethics and morality. It suggests replacing morality with an ethics of desire, or "desirism". The author presents detailed theoretical analysis and extended examples to offer an original meta-ethics that would eliminate normative ethics. Marks argues that where previous attempts to replace moral theory have been largely destructive, this book offers a positive ethical theory of rationalized desire. This book challenges the widespread assumption that the good life and society must be moral, or even that they must be good, in any objective sense. In his previous works, Marks has rejected both the existence of such a morality and the need to maintain verbal, attitudinal, practical, and institutional remnants of belief in it. This book develops these ideas further, with emphasis on constructing a positive alternative.
Calling it "desirism", Marks articulates and illustrates what life and the world would be like if we lived in accordance with our rational desires rather than the dictates of any actual or pretend morality, neither overlaying our desires with moral sanction nor attempting to override them with moral strictures. Hard Atheism and the Ethics of Desire also argues that atheism thereby becomes more palatable because it is more plausible than the so-called New Atheism that attempts to give up God and yet retain morality.