There are several philosophical positions known as nihilism. I’ll take a quick crack at the moral dimension. I will first give reference to the doctoral thesis of Richard Volkman, “Why be Moral? The Ethical Individualist Response to Alienation from Morality”, conveniently available in closed stacks at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The fully general solution starts with understanding morality as simply asking, “What do I have the most reason to do or want?” (credit to Sidgwick). Then, in noting regularities in my own behavior I should be forced to admit that I actually do act as though there’s a fact of the matter here. Even when pretending to take nihilism seriously, I eat food instead of scrap metal or drain-o; I say, “I am a nihilist” instead of “Unrepentant the fish ba-zoop whirrr gharble!”
Now that it’s apparent that even the supporters of nihilism necessarily regard nihilism as false, one can proceed to ask “What do I care about?” and work from the obvious things like food and TV up to more complicated notions such as friendship and awesomeness. Along the way one might notice that one must develop good habits of behavior (what we call ‘virtues’) in order to actually succeed at things like having friends and consistently acquiring food.
There are several philosophical positions known as nihilism. I’ll take a quick crack at the moral dimension. I will first give reference to the doctoral thesis of Richard Volkman, “Why be Moral? The Ethical Individualist Response to Alienation from Morality”, conveniently available in closed stacks at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The fully general solution starts with understanding morality as simply asking, “What do I have the most reason to do or want?” (credit to Sidgwick). Then, in noting regularities in my own behavior I should be forced to admit that I actually do act as though there’s a fact of the matter here. Even when pretending to take nihilism seriously, I eat food instead of scrap metal or drain-o; I say, “I am a nihilist” instead of “Unrepentant the fish ba-zoop whirrr gharble!”
Now that it’s apparent that even the supporters of nihilism necessarily regard nihilism as false, one can proceed to ask “What do I care about?” and work from the obvious things like food and TV up to more complicated notions such as friendship and awesomeness. Along the way one might notice that one must develop good habits of behavior (what we call ‘virtues’) in order to actually succeed at things like having friends and consistently acquiring food.