Talk:Moral nihilism

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Contents 1 Clean up and expansion 2 Irrelevant 3 Quote 4 Moral nihilism and ethical nihilism 5 Panagiotis Kondylis?

[edit] Clean up and expansion

Hi all. I recently went through and tried to add some to this article and clean up a bit. But it still needs work of course. I think it's important to keep the article clear and to cite sources. There's a lot of useful stuff on the web (like on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) to help keep the article on track. -- Jaymay 18:09, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I like the edits, but can I ask why we are talking about Mackie's error theory under the name "global falsity"? I mean, it's called "error theory." But maybe I'm missing something. Postmodern Beatnik 16:19, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I also just noticed that moral nihilism is being erroneously conflated with error theory. Non-cognitivists are also considered moral nihilists since both agree that there are no moral facts. They just disagree over why this is so. (I have encountered a defense of a "realist non-cognitivism" in which moral statements don't express propositions, but moral facts exist, but the author admitted to the idiosyncratic nature of the position.) Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 01:49, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I have made significant changes to the article to address the concerns I raise directly above. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 14:07, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Irrelevant

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)

I agree that the Machiavelli, Thrasymachus, and Turgenev stuff is not very important. However, since there's not much in this article, I kept it in even after I added some stuff. Maybe once we have some more in the article about the arguments for and criticisms of moral nihilism it would be good to take that more irrelevant stuff out. -- Jaymay 18:02, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quote

"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)

You are correct that not all non-cognitivists are moral nihilists, but all moral nihilists are /either/ non-cognitivists or error theorists. Another important issue is that there is currently no real terminological distinction for nihilism at the metaethical and normative level. The terms "metaethical nihilism" and "moral nihilism" suggest themselves, and I typically use them in my own work, but this is not as yet an accepted set of terms (at least not to my knowledge). So while Mackie is a moral nihilist in the metaethical sense, he is not a moral nihilist in the normative sense (insofar as he develops a positive project for first order normativity). It's a terminological mess that we need to clean up before we can get anywhere with these articles.

By the way, I am the author of the anonymously time-stamped comment above. At this point, though, I recant on the issue of merging articles. The topics are important enough to deserve their own pages. Postmodern Beatnik 18:25, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Okay, that's good. So we stay with two articles? I'm happy about that, whatever I thought a year ago.

I like your terminology - "moral nihilism" as some kind of rejection, or radical critique, of first order normativity and "metaethical nihilism" as something more like Mackie's position (and perhaps also some non-cognitivist positions). But I also agree that it's not especially standard - there really does seem to be a terminological mess out there in the literature at the moment and I can't see any NPOV way of easily solving it. I see Richard Garner wanting to call himself an "amoralist", Joshua Greene talking about "revisionism", Richard Joyce saying all sorts of interesting things. None of those are "moral nihilists" in your sense, but they are all error theorists, and "metaethical nihilists" in your sense. I seem to recall Ronald Dworkin somewhere using the expression "internal scepticism" and "external scepticism" in senses that roughtly correspond to your "moral nihilism" and "metaethical nihilism" but I don't know that it particularly caught on. We almost need to write the book on all this, to sort it out and give us something to cite, before we can make much progress with the articles, dammit. Metamagician3000 00:54, 22 May 2007 (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)

I took out the following sentence from the entry: "Nihilism is perhaps most strikingly defended by the fictional character Bazarov, in Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons." Turgenev's Bazarov is never portrayed as a moral nihilist. In fact, Turgenev use of the term "nihilist" for Bazarov is misleading; as Bazarov himself explains in the novel, his aim is to uproot existing institutions in Czarist Russia. Nowhere in the novel does he pontificate on moral values such as to deny their existence. Thus, he does not defend moral nihilism, but something quite different that he refers to as "nihilism". (saadanis; December 15, 2007; 2155 hrs PST)

[edit] Moral nihilism and ethical nihilism

A question that comes up is: Are moral nihilism and ethical nihilism the same thing? The same question could be asked about: moral absolutism versus ethical absolutism and moral relativism versus ethical relativism. Gringo300 22:44, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

They are the same thing. And in most contexts "moral" and "ethical" are interchangeable. For example, moral egoism and ethical egoism (as opposed to psychological egoism) are the same view. -- Jaymay 18:04, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Panagiotis Kondylis?

I just removed the following text from the article:

Value Nihilism and Panagiotis Kondylis

One of the most prominent nihilists in later years in German cyrcles of thinkers. Continuing the tradition of Weber, Marx, Nietzche he formed his own theory of description as the main scientific goal (contrary to normative claims of humanism) and described human condition in the basis of moral indifference, constant conflict between Friends and Enemies and the use of Ideology as a mean to the fundmental anthropological state of war.

In Power and Decision, one of his most famous books, he claimed that all human ideologies, perceptions and beliefs were nothing more than an effort to give to our personal interests a normative form and an objective character, deriving from our "decision" on what means we should use, who should be our friends and who our foes in our big Hobbesian struggle for -what was the most primitive and common goal among all humans- self-preservation. Ideologies are nothing more than a part of our personal "world-construction" (κοσμοκατασκευή) and our world-construction is a subjective view of the world deriving from our interests and Hobbesian survival instincts. From this point of view, he claimed that ideology and opinion in general are used as a weapon in our everyday struggle for "power" which will allow as to self-preserve ourselves.

While the information may deserve inclusion, it was poorly written, incorrectly formatted, and improperly placed. Perhaps we need to think about changing Moral Nihilists in History into two sections, one on moral nihilist philosophers and and the other on moral nihilists in literature/popular culture. But is that even an appropriate way to expand this article? I don't know. I think it is worth noting, however, that Panagiotis Kondylis' moral nihilism is not even mentioned in his own Wikipedia article.

Thoughts? Postmodern Beatnik 19:23, 7 October 2007 (UTC)