Talk:Moral nihilism

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Machiavelli, Thrasymachus, and Turgenev are irrelevant. The first two are not moral nihilists. The third is not a philosopher; writing that the view's best defense is proffered by a fictional character is insulting to many credible philosophers who have spent time on the subject. I propose that the other two paragraphs be deleted and the rest of the article address arguments for/against nihilism as they've been offered by JL Mackie and many others. 69.160.21.97 03:41, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

"it contends that moral statements are neither true nor false"

it appears to me that moral nihilists would label the statement "there is no such thing as right and wrong, and good and evil" as TRUE and the statement "there is such thing as right and wrong, and good and evil" as FALSE.

Gringo300 10:39, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

If moral nihilism includes modern forms of moral skepticism such as Mackie's, then some moral nihilists could even say that "there is such a thing as moral good and evil" is TRUE. What would be FALSE would be something like "there is moral good that transcends any actual interests, and is in that sense objective". Mackie would not have too much trouble with someone saying a knife is "good", bearing in mind that the goodness of a knife traces back to what interest we have in using knives - i.e. to cut things - so we want a knife to have a sharp blade, be strong enough to survive the resistance of whatever is being cut, etc. A knife that meets those criteria is a good one. A blunt knife or one with the blade insecurely connected to the handle, is a bad one. He'd accept that a person or an act can be "good" (or "evil") in a similar but much more complex and conflicted sense - we have complex interests in people's behaviour, character dispositions, etc., and can reach a lot of agreement on which of these are good, though it is much more complicated than with knives, etc. He will disagree with people who think that moral goodness is objective or transcendent (in the sense I'm using), and he thinks that that claim is commonly asserted or assumed in ordinary moral language. Therefore ordinary moral language contains a deep error. To that extent, we are justified in being sceptical about it. Metamagician3000 00:44, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

These two pages actually contain factual errors. Today, moral nihilism is seen as a type of moral skepticism, where skepticism refers to a denial of the belief in objective moral truths and nihilism refers to a denial of moral truths in general. Nihilism then splits into two categories: error theory and non-cognitivism. Error theorists, like Mackie, argue that all statements of the sort "x is right/wrong/obligatory" are false, while non-cognitivists, especially emotivists like Ayer and Stevenson, argue that statements of the sort "x is right/wrong/obligatory" are neither true nor false. Emotivists say this is because such statements are expressive of emotional reactions to the actions to which they refer. To address Gringo's comment above, neither of these theories hold that all statements about morality are false or neither true nor false. After all, that would be self-defeating as nihilists themselves are making statements about morality. It's only statements that try to attribute moral properties (like those mentioned above) that they are concerned with.

I think it would be good to merge the two articles under the title "Moral skepticism" and discuss the types of moral skepticism--nihilism, subjectivism, and relativism--under that heading. Only if these sections get fleshed out to an extreme degree should be separate them again.

I'm not a user yet, but I'm leaving a time stamp anyway. 23:36, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd be reluctant to classify all non-cognitivists as nihilists in any useful sense. It's plausible with the emotivist example of A.J. Ayer, who really does seem to want to debunk morality. But prescriptivists like Hare are also non-cognitivists (they believe that moral sentences prescribe conduct, rather than expressing beliefs as to moral facts). Such people are far from wanting to express scepticism about the guidance of morality, or wanting to debunk it. This seems far from what I understand to be the original sense of moral nihilism. I think Mackie accepted the term "nihilism", but perhaps my memory is faulty. In any event, even he was happy to make proposals about how morality should be developed. He just thought that there is a meta-ethical error built into ordinary moral thinking - not that such thinking is useless or without pragmatic justification, or whatever. If we are going to merge the articles, we'll need to be very careful. To me, moral scepticism is a meta-ethical position that may or may not have practical implications. It can be quite conservative (in the sense of protective) about ordinary moral norms. "Moral nihilism" seems to me to refer to something much more critical or debunking of whatever moral norms it historically confronts. Comments on this? I'm only offering impressions at this stage of the discussion. Metamagician3000 10:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I've cleaned the article up a bit, pending further developments. I also deleted this sentence: "Moral nihilism's denial of moral value is also distinct from moral skepticism's questioning it, just as atheism is different from agnosticism." I don't believe the sentence is true in its current form, as "moral scepticism" often refers to a position that really does deny the truth of (part of) the cognitive content of moral sentences. It is not always merely a matter of "questioning". OTOH, the issue with moral scepticism is not necessarily one of moral value at all, as long as the value concerned can be traced back to some interest, desire etc. The moral sceptic needs only to question whether, or deny that, moral value exists in a way that is independent of these things. Metamagician3000 11:20, 21 March 2006 (UTC)