But there’s that language again that people use when they talk about moral nihilism, where I can’t tell if they’re just using different words, or if they really think that morality can be whatever we want it to be, or that it doesn’t mean anything to say that moral propositions are true or false.
Okay. Correct me if any of this doesn’t sound right. When a person talks about “morality”, you imagine a conceptual framework of some sort—some way of distinguishing what makes actions “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, etc. Different people will imagine different frameworks, possibly radically so—but there is generally a lot of common ground (or so we hope), which is why you and I can talk about “morality” and more or less understand the gist of each other’s arguments. Now, I would claim that what I mean when I say “morality”, or what you mean, or what a reasonable third party may mean, or any combination thereof—that each of these is entirely unrelated to ground truth.
Basically, moral propositions (e.g. “Murder is Bad”) contain unbound variables (in this case, “Bad”) which are only defined in select subjective frames of reference. “Bad” does not have a universal value in the sense that “Speed of Light” or “Atomic Weight of Hydrogen” or “The top LessWrong contributor as of midnight January 1st, 2015″ do. That is the main thesis of Moral Nihilism as far as I understand it. Does that sound sensible?
I wouldn’t ask people those questions. People can be wrong about what they value. The point of moral philosophy is to know what you should do.
Alright; let me rephrase my point. Let us say that you have access to everything there that can be known about a individual X. Can you explain how you compute their objective contingent morality to an observer who has no concept of morality? You previous statement of “what is moral is what you value” would need to define “what you value” before it would suffice. Note that unless you can do this construction, you don’t actually have something objective.
What you’re proposing sounds more like moral relativism than moral nihilism.
I think that you’re confusing moral universalism with moral absolutism and value monism. If a particular individual values eating ice cream and there are no consequences that would conflict with other values of this individual for eating ice cream in these particular circumstances, then it is moral for that individual to eat ice cream, and I do not believe that it makes sense to say that it is not meaningful to say that it is true that it is moral for this individual to eat ice cream in these circumstances. This does not mean that there is some objective reason to value eating ice cream or that regardless of the individual or circumstances that it is true that it is moral to eat ice cream. The sense in which morality is universal is not on the level of actions or values, but on the level of utility maximization, and the sense in which it is objective is that it is not whatever you want it to be.
What you’re proposing sounds more like moral relativism than moral nihilism.
Ah, yes. My mistake. I stand corrected. Some cursory googling suggests that you are right. With that said, to me Moral Nihilism seems like a natural consequence of Moral Relativism, but that may be a fact about me and not the universe, so to speak (though I would be grateful if you could point out a way to be morally relativist without morally nihilist).
I think that you’re confusing moral universalism with moral absolutism and value monism.
The last paragraph of my previous post was a claim that unless you an objective way of ordering conflicting preferences (and I don’t see how you can), you are forced to work under value pluralism. I did use this as an argument against moral universalism , though that argument may not be entirely correct. I concede the point.
Okay. Correct me if any of this doesn’t sound right. When a person talks about “morality”, you imagine a conceptual framework of some sort—some way of distinguishing what makes actions “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, etc. Different people will imagine different frameworks, possibly radically so—but there is generally a lot of common ground (or so we hope), which is why you and I can talk about “morality” and more or less understand the gist of each other’s arguments. Now, I would claim that what I mean when I say “morality”, or what you mean, or what a reasonable third party may mean, or any combination thereof—that each of these is entirely unrelated to ground truth.
Basically, moral propositions (e.g. “Murder is Bad”) contain unbound variables (in this case, “Bad”) which are only defined in select subjective frames of reference. “Bad” does not have a universal value in the sense that “Speed of Light” or “Atomic Weight of Hydrogen” or “The top LessWrong contributor as of midnight January 1st, 2015″ do. That is the main thesis of Moral Nihilism as far as I understand it. Does that sound sensible?
Alright; let me rephrase my point. Let us say that you have access to everything there that can be known about a individual X. Can you explain how you compute their objective contingent morality to an observer who has no concept of morality? You previous statement of “what is moral is what you value” would need to define “what you value” before it would suffice. Note that unless you can do this construction, you don’t actually have something objective.
What you’re proposing sounds more like moral relativism than moral nihilism.
I think that you’re confusing moral universalism with moral absolutism and value monism. If a particular individual values eating ice cream and there are no consequences that would conflict with other values of this individual for eating ice cream in these particular circumstances, then it is moral for that individual to eat ice cream, and I do not believe that it makes sense to say that it is not meaningful to say that it is true that it is moral for this individual to eat ice cream in these circumstances. This does not mean that there is some objective reason to value eating ice cream or that regardless of the individual or circumstances that it is true that it is moral to eat ice cream. The sense in which morality is universal is not on the level of actions or values, but on the level of utility maximization, and the sense in which it is objective is that it is not whatever you want it to be.
Ah, yes. My mistake. I stand corrected. Some cursory googling suggests that you are right. With that said, to me Moral Nihilism seems like a natural consequence of Moral Relativism, but that may be a fact about me and not the universe, so to speak (though I would be grateful if you could point out a way to be morally relativist without morally nihilist).
The last paragraph of my previous post was a claim that unless you an objective way of ordering conflicting preferences (and I don’t see how you can), you are forced to work under value pluralism. I did use this as an argument against moral universalism , though that argument may not be entirely correct. I concede the point.