The uncanny absence of nihilism
meaningness.com
meaningness.com
I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch. With that said, this idea that his philosophical writings are deeply nihilistic just needs to go away. His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism—how to find purpose in purposelessness.
The will to power is not nihilistic at all. Sure, it's extremely amoral and probably wrong, but it's certainly not nihilistic. The eternal recurrence is brought up as a way to cope with meaninglessness and as a way to find purpose in ones life. Other ideas are purely rationalist, like the subject-predicate (non-)distinction (in his famous lightning flash example). Sure, Genealogy of Morals is probably all wrong, but its purpose is to re-intuit a moral system without socio-religious underpinnings.
The idea behind nihilism is that it's valueless, whereas Nietzsche tries to find new values.
Like Nietzsche, he has a bad reputation for being moody and depressing, but the way I see it, he is really liberating and optimistic. A true humanist.
In terms of interpreters of Nietzsche, it's considerably more difficult, but Deleuze wrote a really good book on Nietzsche that's worth reading.
Edit: As someone else mentioned, Walter Benjamin is also very interesting!
> At times he described himself as “a nihilist,” by which he meant not that everything is meaningless, but that he actively rejected the available eternalisms. He also condemned “nihilism,” understood as apathetic unwillingness to take problems of meaningness seriously. He particularly included Christianity and “Apollonian” rationalism in that. Nietzsche’s intention was to develop a new, positive alternative.
It raises a red flag…why didn’t an author just define a new term for the concept instead of distorting an old term? Why the required effort for a reader to make the translation from accepted definition to the author’s “special language”? This is prose, not poetry. Redefining accepted terminology is the intellectual equivalent of cultural appropriation and, at best, leads to confusion and empty bickering over terminology. Just sounds sloppy to me…imagine doing that in a STEM discipline, you’d be laughed out of the room.
Could be a useful strategy in cult psychology, though, I grant you that.
And if the accepted definition is already the dishonest and dangerous type?
> I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch.
IMHO: A few years ago, "straightforward, vivid, and outrageous" was exciting, transgressing. Now it's very tired and a bit aggravating - who wants to deal with more of it?
You must admit there is some sort of grand comedy in this: Nietzsche's one 'novel', "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" entire plot line is about a man who tries to warn society of the evils of nihilism and instead of being scared-off by it, all the people he warns fall in love with the idea (ie. willing trade their dangerous freedom to gain safety).
Its a deeply ironic that the current pedestrian understanding of him is that he advocated "atheism and nihilism". You almost couldn't make it up.
All wrong according to what exactly?
All wrong as a viable moral theory. It gained a bit of popularity in the "evolutionary ethics" crowd (i.e. those that might think The Selfish Gene is a profound piece of work), but no one really takes it seriously when compared to utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc.
Nietzsche's position that "morals" are simply the "herd instinct in the individual", that is, simply the social instinct combined with the norms and customs that have built up in a culture over time due to its particular history and development. He does not assign a value to morals from this anthropological position - indeed his ultimate task was to devise a new system of valuation that would let us do this. It's hard to see how any other position could possibly be valid. Nietzsche was not entirely original here, but he was completely devastating.
There is nothing profound about utilitarianism. It's simply abstract thinkers asking "what do we value most of all, and what are the logical means of maximizing it." There's nothing particularly profound about deontologists either, except, as Nietzsche would have said, they're less decadent and more intellectually honest - right is defined by their moral intuition (which, according to N, is simply decided by the above) or God, or whatever, and that's the end of the story. Both of these, along with virtue ethics, already assume they know what good and bad, and everything falls from that based on the particular method (assumption: hurting people is bad; deontologists: hurting people is bad, don't do it, because that's the rule utilitarians: hurting people is bad unless by so doing you decrease the net amount of hurt people.) Nietzsche's question is much more fundamental. He is establishing the nature of morality, pursuing a history of moral development (which he agrees may not be accurate and certainly not anywhere near complete), asks a few questions about the consequences of different moral systems, etc.
This is vastly overstating his impact on moral ethics (and philosophy in general). He will most certainly remain a historical curiosity (I put him in the same bucket as Wittgenstein and Spinoza), but the world has moved on. Elizabeth Anscombe, GE Moore, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, etc. have all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century). He doesn't even remotely stand up to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and so on.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is something that was truly devastating—putting an end to the rationalist vs. empiricist debate that had been raging for centuries. Nietzsche? Not so much.
> all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century)
Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.
His attacks on Kant are extremely surface-level. Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't. That's basically it. I mean, Nietzsche's moral theory doesn't even explain baseline moral actions (e.g. a mother's love for her child, not murdering people you don't like, paying your taxes).
> Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.
Nothing, but that's kind of the point. His meta-ethical views are empty, uninteresting, and ultimately fruitless. They don't really help us become more just or more fair, nor do they illuminate the moral world. It's not like people write deep biting critiques of stoicism or solipsism, either.
These are essentially dead philosophies, in contrast with something like Kantian ethics—which is a sort of "hardline" deontology—and probably wrong-ish, but still studied and taken somewhat seriously.
It absolutely does! That's the 'herd instinct', what we would call the social instinct. It also conveniently explains why other mothers could believe the right thing to do was sacrifice their children to Moloch, but obviously one of these exists at a "lower" level and therefore more common than the other since one is more closely tied to survival. (Though, given the frequency of ancient infanticide, it presumably had some survival benefit as well.)
It is really strange to see you making such strong statements about Nietzsche's philosophy when you are clearly completely missing his central points. It really sounds like you've just read secondary sources (like Russel) that have some extremely wrong caricature of Nietzsche's views that amount to "selfishness is the only good" or something. That is not Nietzsche's moral theory. Nietzsche's moral theory is that there are no real tables of morals, just a social instinct that manifests differently in different times and cultures according to the various historical and psychological forces that formed them. No doubt in-group altruism is a necessary prerequisite of social animals to exist at all - that doesn't mean that it has some sort of moral reality.
> Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't.
Not only is this not true, unless you meant is the sense of some real, universal objective Duty, the whole problem is that Kant never stops to consider his priors, let alone demonstrate that such a thing even exists. (And unfortunately for Kant, it didn't stop there: the thing-in-itself is broken too.)
See TGS 335.
The only way to sustain moral realism in the usual sense is to declare "this is what God commanded." If you posit omnipotent supernatural entities, they can do anything. But there's no real or logical foundation for morality otherwise, except to look at it from an anthropological view. And that's okay - humans don't need logical reasons to do things.
It felt to me more like we had to accept meaninglessness but also be willing to go on, to be generative spirits. When Nietzsche talks about the risk of becoming a monster from staring into the void, one of the primary subtexts that sounds strongly to me is the risk of taking a view of purpose or meaning, just as much as accepting a view of meaninglessness. We should be wills to power, but it is not an act of turning our back on the abyss, of any cosmic cause or ethic: it is accepting it, mastering it, and becoming more anyways. It's lessons, as to what we are, what happens: those will always be true too. Show-offy mind exercises like Eternal Recurence highlight that Nietzsche had to go to glorious fabrications to motivate ourselves through the nihil.
I'll give the author that I've never heard of a serious metaphysical nihilist. It's hard to deny that something does exist and that it does work in some way.
There's another flaw in the analysis too: Why would people write about things they don't believe in and don't care about? Anti-theists do that, but what if they're the exception rather than the rule (because of a certain oppressive history in the area there.)
Maybe there are plenty and they just don't give a shit.
Like minimalism. Sure, there's the minimalism that's being sold, but that's some mutant strain made to be able to market
The Index Card is a bit amusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card where it's rooted on something free (the content of the index card), yet somehow they've tried to expand on it enough to be able to have something to sell
I think this also shows up with corrupt people reaching places of power, where you can't blame them so much as the power structure selecting corrupt people for its own self propagation (the idea that "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" can arise without the man being willfully ignorant when there was a selection process for someone capable of that ignorance)
There are plenty floating around, but it's sort of the prime feature of their behavior - they really only care about themselves. So, why would they write a book to give society a glimpse?
Their motives simply don't align with that goal, because it's the literal definition of their behavior.
Or not, whatever.
Problem with advocation of "nihilism" that gets distributed widely is that it is a performative contradiction.
In reality it is either about a wish fulfillment gesture on absolute freedom; a misguided attempt at individuation that ends up objectifying self into a nothing-burger or it is a pragmatic cynicism that seeks to stop the "explore" and promote the "exploit" in explore/exploit tradeoff every agent has to make by asserting there is nothing to explore.
Author is then surprised that it has no proponents among academics.
The reference to uncanniness is also kind of strange. That has a pretty specific meaning in philosophy (starting with Freud) which doesn't seem to apply here.
Oh, well. The rest of the book might be an interesting read.
Pointing out that certain statements are self-defeating and (by definition) have no proponents can help someone escape a dangerous psychological process ('stance').
As a personal example, when I deconverted from evangelical Christianity, I was disturbed for a long time by the idea that I now had no reason to act morally. Even though that's obviously self-defeating (being disturbed was in itself a sign of morality), I didn't realize that for quite some time.
Better to believe in anything however pointless and get doing something productive.
For any organism, being able to correctly read their subset of "reality" is the only thing that increases their chance of survival - and over time their genes. It is a genetic algorithm deeply tested against reality; there is no skirting around it.
Human consciousness is able extend projections into the future or to other humans and thus have a greater capacity for conformance to reality. It has horrible failure modes and room for self deception - nihilism being one - but even though this proliferation looks like the paper clip maximizer that was never the goal but the side effect. Now that we're tasting the unadaptive consequences of over-proliferation we will see how well our reality conforming machinery can overcome our collective self-deception modes.
I feel like unclosed quotation marks have to rate pretty high on the list too twitch
Maybe.
If philosophy is noodling about the past, present and future, rejecting philosophy as a nihilist would be focusing on the present tense.
That is, living like an animal.
Which gets at the point that ours is a most nihilistic age.
"Nihilism: you're soaking in it." => https://youtu.be/dzmTtusvjR4
Not sure why you'd assume animals don't have memory and predictive ability.
Nihilism allows me to not take anything too seriously because I know that nothing is important and everything will end eventually.
Surprisingly, it can also be a source of altruism. For example, I know that once I'm dead, I will be nothing. My consciousness will be destroyed permanently and all my achievements will cease to be my own since I will have no connection at all to the universe or my former identity. Any trace I leave behind in the universe might as well have been left behind my someone else who is not me.
The fact that when we die, we all end up in exactly the same state of absolute nothingness gives me compassion towards fellow humans and other conscious creatures. We are all the same in the end; nothing.
It also helps me to enjoy life more because from a nihilist perspective, every second of my life seems to defy the foundation of my belief system. Even though I know consciously that this sense of meaning is just an illusion in my primal brain.
You are making a value judgement there. Rookie mistake in this nihilism business.
Also another value judgment. Two rookie mistakes.
OP seems to be implicitly arguing that nihilism is morally justified (incoherent) because it can cause altruistic behavior (but who cares, if you're a nihilist?).
I don't see that as a value judgment. If nothing matters, you might as well feel good about it. It simply makes logical sense, no appeal to values necessary.
But yes the desire to 'leave behind a trace' is not nihilist.
No living human can be completely nihilist. The subconscious mind is still primal.
That's why I think nihilism is a great ideology because it balances out primal beliefs that we naturally have as a result of being derived from evolutionary processes.
I'll leave you with a quote.
“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
I can’t recommend it enough.
> “Nihilizing” is a thing we all do at times: refusing to recognize meanings that are right in front of us.
If there is a refusal of recognition, it implies a pre-processing stage of estimating a lack of payoff for the cognitive work in that area, which itself is requires a meaning system we made that evaluation from! This is not nihilizing, it is merely not committing cognitive suicide by trying to make sense of everything indiscriminately with a limited information processing capacity. By their definition, only a "god" would not be nihilizing.
> Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. It’s a conversion experience, and the adopted identity may persist for years. It’s uncanny that you can go that long without noticing that there isn’t an –ism. That’s a feature of the peculiar cognitive distortions nihilism produces as a stance.
Author asserts "true nihilism" is merely an existential state, and not a system. True nihilism is not a useful category though; dead matter would be the most "true nihilists" while a breathing human would always have a pre-supposition of meaning as they continued to breathe, since they are meaning making agents strongly embedded to their bodies and within their environment. This is not a very useful way of diving things up.
The pragmatic existence of nihilism is not a pure empty state; it is not even throwing noise to our meaning making machines, it is throwing "anti-meaning" patterns that take the deconstructing and dismantling to an extreme without any goal to put things back better. Certain post-modern thought can both perform and propagate nihilism in this way pretty well; an assertion of non-existence of any meta-narrative that joins all narratives while scrambling all the puzzle pieces you've tried to piece together and then throwing them into an acid vat as a proof is an -ism.
Peculiarly, author is also a nihilist in the -ism sense; in addition to this article, their "No cosmic plan" article is subtitled "Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.", or "Nihilism: denying meaning" with "Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning."
Those are serious (and in my opinion misleadingly incomplete) assumptions on first principles that also happens to be the WIP chapters of their book.
I think people are far more likely to declare themselves as depressed or even antinatalist than nihilist.
1. Suppose moral nihilism is true.
2. Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a human child alive for pleasure is morally wrong.
3. But clearly (2) is false.
4. Therefore (1) is false.
You might wonder how we can know (3). The answer is that (3) appears to us to be true, and we have no good reason to think it is not true. This has been called the "Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism" in philosophy books, and it's the same principle that justifies our belief in physical/scientific facts (e.g., that tables exist, or that evolution is true). But it also implies that moral facts exist as well!
Of course, sometimes things appear to us to be true, but we eventually discover reasons strong enough override those appearances. For example, if you stick a pencil in a cup of water, it appears to us that the pencil is broken in half. But through scientific rigor, we have learned that this appearance is just an illusion. But this is not the case with (3). It both appears us that it is wrong to cause needless harm to children for fun, and any reason we might consider to doubt this fails to be strong enough to persuade us otherwise.
Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate. Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true.
No it doesn't. It boils down to something appearing to be true to me (or "us") and there being actually no good reasons to think that it is not true.
> Also, that’s really not why scientific facts are considered true. Science is based on positive evidence as in a prediction is made and it turns out the prediction was accurate.
You're wrong, and here is why: first I would ask you what counts as positive evidence that a prediction made was verified. You would give me some theoretical explanation (depending upon the context), and then I would keep asking you more detailed questions about your explanation. Eventually I would ask a question that you wouldn't really be able to answer, other than "look, it just appears to me that such-and-such counts as predictive evidence!" (or something like that).
So for example if we had a scientific theory that all red cars cannot exceed 100mph, and you said "that's not true, for look at my red car going 105mph!", I could ask you "well, yeah, your speedometer reads 105mph, but how do you know you're actually going faster than 100mph?" You would give me an explanation about how speedometers work, and I would say "well yeah, but how do you know that theory can be generalized to this particular case <blah blah blah>". Eventually after this chain of questioning you would be left relying on some sort of mere appearance being true. And of course that is rational. The problem is that this chain of reasoning can also be applied to moral theories as well.
> Simply presupposing something is true isn’t considered evidence that it is true.
I'm not merely presupposing something is true. I'm observing that something first appears to be true, asserting there are no good reasons to think it is not true, and then supposing it is true.
Contrast these two cases:
1. It appears to me that 2+2 = 4, and I can think of no good reasons at this moment to doubt otherwise. I guess, therefore, that 2+2 really is 4.
2. I shall pressuppose that 2+2=5!
You're acting as if I'm taking the strategy of (2), but I am actually taking the strategy of (1). And in fact you are as well. Here's a really simple way to see why.
Suppose you thought of some argument that showed that the Principle of Phenomenal Conservativism was false. But why should you, after pondering that argument, believe that argument? Because it appears to you to be true, and you can give no plausible retort for why it's false. Thus in "refuting" the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, you must use it! This shows that it is self-defeating to argue against the Principle.
The Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism has to be true for other reasons as well. For example, the following are all statements that I'm sure you agree are true:
1. 1 = 1.
2. The law of non-contradiction is true.
3. Empirical theories which make testable predictions are more likely to be true than empirical theories which can't.
4. The keyboard in front of you actually exists.
But why do you believe these statements? You won't be able to insert some other empirical theory to justify them. They are instead just sort of raw appearances that we suppose are true (because we can't think of any good reasons to doubt them). We make use of our sensory instruments to do this (e.g, our eyes, our non-moral intuitions, etc). But this is exactly like me asserting that "it's wrong to torture children for fun", which relies on a moral intuition that it is wrong (plus the fact that we can't think of any good reason to think otherwise).
All of this is to say: you can't be a scientific realist without also being a moral realist at the same time, or at least if you can, it's because of some argument I haven't yet considered :]
No, I am relying on a prediction of appearances. If I predict an instrument will show blue I don’t need to go through anything below that level. It’s now on someone else to make a different prediction and show new evidence.
> Contrast these two cases:
There is zero difference between them 2 + 2 = 5! could be true. 2 + 2 = 4 could be true, or they could both be false and 2 + 2 = 7.629.
We define math as things that follow from initial assumptions. 2 + 2 alone doesn’t have a definite answer, it only has a specific answer in a specific context. We generally don’t need to list the underlying assumptions to build a chain like 2 + 2 = 2 + 1 + 1 = 3 + 1 = 4, but that’s simply based on an assumed context.
> 3 Empirical theories which make testable predictions are more likely to be true than empirical theories which can't.
Again no, being testable has nothing to do with being correct. Suppose I come up with a theory that has absolutely no direct or indirect impact on anyone or anything ever. Why exactly should we care about it?
Anyway, moral intuition isn’t a sensory perception. If I say “camp fire” you might remember warmth but you can’t avoid actually freezing from remembering fire. Similarly ask a cannibal their moral intuition around eating people and you don’t get the same responses where everyone could actually be burned by an actual fire.
But it would be absurd to think that scientific disagreement implies that there are no scientific facts. Analogously, it is absurd to think that moral disagreement implies that are no moral facts.
I don't like the answer of "Because this X is obviously true" since the "obviously true" part changes so much. Do we think that morals that are "obviously true" are proceeding forward, like science, and are based on an increasing body of knowledge? There certainly doesn't seem to be the same kind of rigor applied to moral knowledge as there is to scientific knowledge.
2. I believe we can resolve a lot of moral questions, as well as a lot of scientific questions. Some might be out of our grasp (just as some scientific theories might be out of our grasp of testing, given technological limitations over time, or what have you).
3. There is evidence that we have an increasing body of moral knowledge (aka "moral progress"). For example, 500 years ago it would have been an insane position to think that a society should be governed by a non-King, that slavery was unjustified, that women should have the right to work in all fields, etc. If you zoom out, moral positions across all cultures on earth seem to be converging to something. This is evidence that that something is actual moral truth.
4. Things seeming "obvious" to one but not "obvious" to another is just moral disagreement. But moral disagreement doesn't imply moral nihilism, just as scientific disagreement doesn't imply scientific nihilism. All we can do is keep better watch over our moral intuitions, explore counter-arguments/thought experiments, etc, and try to converge to reflective equilibrium/moral truth. Just as all we can do in science is to make better/simpler theories that best fit our sense data, and keep conducting scientific experiments.
The west today is based on the liberal science revolution. However much of the world has rejected it. The Taliban believes they are far more moral than Western infidels. Nothing is converging.
If you were a man with land?
> The west today is based on the liberal science revolution.
How would you set about demonstrating this? Why is the universe intelligible? Why should it follow regular laws? What is it that would cause us to suppose that it does, or to investigate it systematically?
I wound demonstrate that the West is based on liberal science by simply observing it is. To your other questions - pass the joint.
I think you may have assumed someone else was replying to you. The idea of democracy certainly exists in ancient times, but not in the modern sense.[1]
> I wound demonstrate that the West is based on liberal science by simply observing it is. To your other questions - pass the joint.
I guess I'm a little confused: what is "liberal" science? Is there a specific observation to which you could point to show that the West is "based on" it?
The other questions are, I think, relevant, but I'm content to pursue this one as it's where I'm most interested in your thoughts.
[1]: some good contrasts at https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-greece...
There were other times when thunder was thought to be caused by Thor. What bearing does that have on the fact that thunder is actually caused by lightning which is generated from electrostatic buildup? It doesn't mean that natural facts are subjective does it?
Moral beliefs are not moral facts, just like beliefs about natural phenomena are not natural facts.
2) Then it would be incorrect to think that boiling a lobster child alive for pleasure is morally wrong.
They would probably get through 3 and 4, but many humans would not agree with them. So the proof is not universally applicable.
But that doesn't mean there aren't moral facts. It could instead mean that either the humans or the lobsters are wrong, and there is a good argument that one of them hasn't considered as to why they are wrong.
If you disagree, then you must not believe that there are scientific facts either? After all, two separate people can disagree over which scientific theory is true/best fits the evidence (which is a process that boils down to asking which theories best comport with our raw sensory appearances, BTW). But if mere disagreement implies that there can't be truths in a domain, then this would mean there are no scientific facts, which is of course absurd.
It's a much more plausible position to think that there are controversial scientific theories which we are less certain of, that one (or both) parties to scientific disagreements are just mistaken, but that there are after all scientific facts. Similarly, it is much more plausible position to think that there are controversial moral theories which we are less certain of, that one (or both) parties to moral disagreements are just mistaken, but that there are after all moral facts.
I also side with the lobsters, BTW :)
Intuitively some moral claims are 'true' yes. But they're psychologically or socially true. All normative statements are only 'true' or 'false' to us in a cultural sense, they're not claims about facts in the world. That's simple to show. Proof to me that your moral claim is true in the same way you proof a scientific fact, you can't, in fact there's no way to even make sense 'where' that truth or false property of any moral claim is supposed to be located, or how one would go about proving it.
Moral nihilism is not the claim that authority or intuitive values or consensus does not exist, moral nihilism is the claim that there are no moral values as such, that there is no finality or meaning to them beyond the one we imprint on it.
The moral nihilist may be perfectly fine with accepting that boiling children is wrong the same way not paying your car insurance or cheating at chess is wrong, the world's a more orderly place if people aren't going around boiling kids. What the moral nihilist denies is that this has any meaning beyond that conventional sense, that it is simply a useful fiction.
Well, just to be clear: I for one am claiming moral language is not just conventional talk. When I say it's wrong it boil someone's child alive for pleasure, I'm asserting it as a propositional fact, with the same truth-status as a statement like "there exist red cars", or what have you.
Maybe you think I am the only one who does this, and that most other people don't think of themselves as asserting truths when they speak morally. But there's a mountain of linguistic evidence to the contrary:
1. Moral statements take the form of declarative sentences (as opposed to imperatives, questions, or interjections). Statements like "pleasure is good" have the same grammatical form as "weasels are mammals", and sentences of this form are those used to make factual assertions in other domains.
2. Moral predicates can be transformed into abstract nouns, suggesting they are intended to refer to properties. We talk about "goodness", "rightness", and so on. Again this points to moral realism in our language usage.
3. We ascribe to moral statements the same sort of properties that we do to other truth-bearing propositions. You can say "it's true that I have done something wrong in the past", or "it is false that torture is morally good". Of course, "true", "false", and "possible" are predicates that we apply only to propositions. No one would say "it is true that 'ouch!'", "it is false that 'shut the door'", or "it is possible that 'hurray!'". Again: more evidence that moral talk isn't just some sort of conventional game, but is in fact propositional.
4. Propositional attitude verbs can be prefixed to moral statements. We can say "George believes that the war was just", or "I wish we had more moral laws", or "I wonder whether I did the moral thing". In contrast, no one would say that "Jon believes that ouch", "I wonder whether please pass the salt", or "I hope that hurray for the Broncos!". The obvious explanation is that mental states such as believing, hoping, wishing, and wondering are by their nature propositionally focued, and of course moral statements are propositional (in that they refer to things which take objective truth values).
5. Moral statements can be transformed into yes/no questions. One can can assert "is it true that it's bad to murder?", but one cannot assert "Hurray for the Broncos?", or "Shut the door?". Of course this is because yes/no questions require propositions, and moral statements are propositions that take truth-values.
6. One can combine imperatives and emotional expressions with things that are characterized morally. E.g. "Do the right thing!", or "Hurray for virtue!". Consider a more complex example even: "We shouldn't be doing this, but it feels good, so let's do it anyway". This is perfectly intelligible if you believe that moral statements are propositional, but it's not if, e.g. "We shouldn't be doing this" expressed merely an emotion towards a proposed action or an imperative not to do it.
Let's summarize. Each of the following sentences make sense:
- I am questioning this act's rightness.
- It is true that pleasure is good.
- I hope I did the right thing.
- Is murder wrong?
- Do the good thing.
- If pleasure is good, then cake must be good.
None of these sentences make any sense if moral statements aren't actually propositional/truth-bearing. Therefore, the idea that moral language is just a conventional way of expressing emotions, or encoding some sort of conventional social game is highly implausible.
I have to stop the conversation here, but I will end it with this: do you have an argument for why you think moral statements aren't propositional? If so, ask yourself why that argument couldn't be applied to other domains as well.
My main point is that it is really hard to be nihilist about moral facts without also being one about other sorts of facts as well. Most of the arguments for moral nihilism can be re-adjusted and applied straightforwardly to, e.g., scientific nihilism. (For example, what if I asserted that "scientists aren't actually speaking about true and false theories, they're just playing a conventional game with each other because it serves as a useful fiction"). But almost no one wants to be a scientific nihilist (because that's also insane). So either you should be a nihilist about everything, or a nihilist about nothing (broadly speaking).
"A horse has four legs" and "schmorgles are borgles" are both grammatically correct sentences but only one has discernable empirical value. I can go out and find you a horse with four legs, can't find you any schmorgles.
As to moral statements taking the form of true or false statements, again it does nothing to proof that they are in fact true. the reason for this is psychological. Saying "torture is wrong" has just the same semantic content as saying "Ewww, torture!", or alternatively the command "do not torture!". The reason why we frame it in the language of moral fact is obvious, because it's useful to frame commands as being embedded in a moral framework if one wants to universalize and impose them. The language of moral facts is a a way to rationalize moral commands.
This is completely equivalent to religious truth claims. Religions have elaborate epistemological concepts about heaven and hell, afterlife, even a sort of physics of supernatural spaces. Does that conjure them into reality, merely because they are able to talk about them? No of course not. Does it follow that the trinity has any truth or false value merely because someone talks about the concept? Does Middle Earth exist because I can make propositional statements about Hobbits of the same form I can make about particle physics? No.
And as to the last part, yes science is to some degree a game of this very same sort, although it varies drastically by the kind of science you're doing. There's non-normative science largely concerned with making empirically verifiable claims. Science that tries to make normative claims does not progress for this exact reason.
This seems like a weak argument. What do you mean by "make sense"? For example, "Santa leaves presents under the tree" or even "Harry Potter attends Hogwarts" are also statements that make sense to a great majority of people - and if everyone were acquainted with knowledge of Santa or the Harry Potter universe, we could make the same statements you describe we make for moral claims too. Logical or grammatical sense does not get to the root of the issue which moral anti-realists are arguing is the actual problem. Of course you can make statements about what people commonly believe. However, you can also make statements against what people commonly believe; most moral discourse exists on denying one or more of the ways-of-speaking you claim.
The fact that moral claims are interpreted and parsed is not an argument against moral anti-realism, it seems like more of an argument ontly against moral non-cognitivism. It's entirely possible for a moral anti-realist to say either:
(a) Moral claims posit truth and falsity in terms of the fiction those claims pertain to - i.e. "Harry Potter attends Eton" is false.
(b) Moral claims aim to claim truth and falsity, but consistently fail to do so, due to lack of a strong enough epistemological grounding - i.e. "There are N planets in the universe", in which we don't have (and maybe may never have) access to the whole universe.
(c) Moral claims are neither true nor false, the epistemic grounding on which the arguments of truth or falsity is simply missing, and if it exists, its relation to other facts about the world is strange and strained.
(d) Moral claims are both true and false - perhaps this implies moral relativism, or a more generous form of (b).
The fact that we have, gramatically, accustomed ourselves to speaking as though moral claims are facts about the universe says nothing about the facts of the universe. In fact, this problem is well recognized by moral abolitionists as to what we should do, if moral fictionalism is not ideal.
By the logic layed out in your comment, we must also necessarily say that aesthetic realism is true, in which case "This food sucks" or "This painting is gaudy" are just as much valid claims as moral claims, and a relevant expert could shut down anyone who disagrees. Aesthetic realism is significantly less popular than moral realism. I don't have a link at the moment, but I read a paper a while ago which explained how attempts to distance moral realism from aesthetic realism are doomed to fail. They're a package deal. It turns out, vanilla ice cream is just bad, and if peope were equipped with knowledge of culinary aesthetics, they'd realize that chocolate ice cream is best.
>My main point is that it is really hard to be nihilist about moral facts without also being one about other sorts of facts as well.
This is the "Companions in Guilt" argument, but I think prominent moral anti-realist philosophers such as Richard Joyce have offered at least reasons to doubt that it's such a successful argument. That is, he has identified several reasons why moral claims are different from other epistemic claims. Nevertheless, he's also argued from another point of view - that is, the fact that one is unable to counter every single argument for a Christian god, does not mean that the Christian god exists. On the balance of arguments between atheism and a Christian god, for most peope who think about the problem, the case tends to fall on the side of atheism, despite the fact that there are rebuttals to certain aspects of atheism, and there are good arguments for the existence of a Christian god. When you consider the whole case for a Christian god, including many arguments, most philosophers fall on the side of atheism, due to the balance of the argument.
The moral nihilist thinks that the notion of truth or falsehood in regards to moral statements doesn't make sense. Moral assertions make only sense if objects have moral properties, and we have no reason to believe that moral properties exist, of what nature they are, how someone were to measure what is morally good or bad, that they're not even necessary to explain the world as it is, or similar arguments along those lines.
The moral nihilist thinks that a statement like "torture is wrong" is like saying "the king of france is bald". There is currently no king of France, the statement is neither really true or false, it simply does not refer to anything in the world.
2. If thing is true, thing #2 is true
3. But clearly I don't like (2), and neither do you
4. Therefore (1) is false
I'll get decompression sickness from coming up for air from such deep philosophical fathoms.
So let's correct the argument from its straw-manned form:
1. Suppose scientific theory T is true.
2. If T is true, then S is also true.
3. But clearly it seems to both of us that S is not true.
4. Therefore, (1) is false.
This sounds like a perfectly normal (and rational) scientific discourse. Problem for you: this sort of discourse also applies to moral theories as well.
1. Suppose moral theory T is true.
2. If T is true, then S is also true.
3. But clearly it seems to both of us that S is not true.
4. Therefore, (1) is false.
Both are perfectly reasonable/rational sorts of discourses, because there are both moral facts and scientific facts, and the way that we come about both of them is ultimately rooted in appearances (whether those appearances be sense data or moral intuitions).
People often find the term nihilist detestable though. It seems like most people get frustrated or anxious thinking this way.
That said it is mildly frustrating to talk about. The arguments on both sides are very unconvincing to the other.
"Ulle doesn't care about anything, he's a nihilist." "Ooh, that must be exhausting."
Definitely a good movie to watch if you are interested in nihilism. (Spoilers) Nothing matters in that movie.
EDIT: Also, thank you for pointing that out, I would not have caught that reference otherwise. I think it's a sign I need to re-watch The Big Lebowski again.
1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nihi
I like the following take on infinity
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html
>P.S. Writing this post made me much less likely to pick “infinity” as my answer to this week’s dinner table question. Imagine living a Graham’s number amount of years.8 Even if hypothetically, conditions stayed the same in the universe, in the solar system, and on Earth forever, there is no way the human brain is built to withstand spans of time like that. I’m horrified thinking about it. I think it would be the gravest of grave errors to punch infinity into the calculator—and this is from someone who’s openly terrified of death. Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.
No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything is meaningful.
Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow, we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our favorite ice cream etc.
A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe. Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will); we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this information very accurately (yet).
At that point some folks show up with their propositions that are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe. They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple organizing principles can share the same space if they are not bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore the physical reality we have been conforming to through evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles; that we can compress reality into formulas, while noise really wouldn't compress. They have no good idea on how to relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of such cognitive distortions at this level.
The problem is not actually about being at the top of the scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it; it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above practices.
In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without proper grounding in what have been tried before. Throw some McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively worship the god of market normativity and you're already confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.
UPD: I tried reading further, and it did not take long for the author to convince the readers that he is an idiot.
Quote: "Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal." No, it's not. Most people in this world are in search of meaning: it is probably the most common source of suffering in the modern times - feeling lost, not having a purpose, etc. The fact that people don't brand themselves as nihilists doesn't mean that they aren't.
Cue the downvotes from pseudo-intellectuals.
You’re getting downvotes because you yourself put out a surface level thought that is easily demonstrably wrong with half a second of thought and then insulted people, nothing to do with pseudo intellectualism.
… Not a rebuttal to:
> Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal.
Do you see how these are different? You're talking past the author.