Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

That's the thing. Since I've been debating moral skeptics online, one thing has occured to me: moral naturalism is WAY easier to argue to skeptics than non-naturalism. And it gives me pause.

On one hand, the fact that a position can be successfully argued lends it credibility. After all, aren't the GOOD arguments also the most convincing? (Not that any moral skeptic has ever admitted to being swayed by my arguments, but when I'm arguing moral naturalism I get the sense that the arguments "sink in" and are at least felt by my opponent.) Also, the ease in arguing a position (the fact that so many reasonable and sound arguments come easily to mind) seems to suggest that there's something there.

The reason I'm not a moral naturalist comes from when I'm NOT trying to convince a moral skeptic. The thing about moral naturalism is, all the theories that fall under it are lacking, insufficient, or incomplete. Non-naturalism, such as Moore's, does not suffer from this deficit. Even Plato... let no one say Plato's ethics is incomplete or lacking in wholeness.The most obvious advantage that non-naturalists have is not having to answer Hume's is/ought dickery. 

-wall-of-text follows, lol

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Platos virtue ethics are very much at home in contemporary realism.  Quantifying virtue and well-being in our universe, if you really boil it down, is the whole enterprise of natural realism.  If you think that virtue ethics is complete and whole, and moral naturalism contains those virtue ethics (but also a bunch of stuff outside of platos virtue ethics) then it would seem as though Plato were the one lacking, and, not for nothing, pervasively wrong about alot of things relevant to his thoughts, or that were products of the same.  Humes dickery (lol), for it's part, hits every moral theory equally.  Every ought is derived from some is in conjunction with at least one evaluative proposition.  IDK how to "answer" that other than to say that all moral theories contain many is-es and many evaluative propositions.  Regardless of the meta-ethical moral theory, theories of compulsion and desert are universal.  Any of them can be applied to any moral system.  Kagans geometry of desert, for example, is meta-ethically neutral.  You could apply it to platos morality, or to cornells.  Similarly, his natural realism accommodates the christian concept of "sin" and humes notion of desire driving compulsion.    

Ultimately, contemporary realism subsumed previous moral theories and sought to explain what it was about some x that made us call that thing bad, and perhaps as a tick of logical thought, it focuses specifically on those things for which an objective rational proposition can be offered..which by virtue of the requirement of sound assertions and our current overriding methodological commitments, invariably swirl the naturalist drain, lol.  Plato said that human wellbeing was the goal of morality, and virtues were those tools we needed to attain it.  Naturalism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said.."and this is what we seem to mean by well-being and this is why those tools work".  Hume contended that moral compulsion was not solely derived from reason.  Naturalism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said "and here are the very natural reasons that we desire moral conformity, as well as the very natural reasons that we should and when/why those reasons work at cross purpose to our motivations and interests."  Moore posited that we comprehended moral nature non-empirically, but that we apprehended a given state through empirical prompts.  Natural realism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said "and these are those prompts, and the mechanics by which we can perceive them".  

Now, I'm not sure exactly how you define completeness, but those moral positions which have the virtue of placement in time after people like plato, hume, and moore, would seem to have the benefit of hindsight and increased knowledge.  A moral theory that comes out tomorrow may not be more accurate, but it has the potential of being so in that it can incorporate whatever we may learn today.  I'm assuming that by completeness, you mean something like self containment.  I think that's an impressive attribute.  It shows that the advocate spent alot of time on the propositions.  I'm not sure that there aren't contemporary moral theories that are similarly complete....but even so, it would still be the case that completeness as self containment is intuitively satisfying, but no more accurate or thorough than what was contained in the first place.  There were things about the world, and man, and our moral nature, that plato et al simply didn't know and therefore could not have included despite however well circumscribed their moral theories may have been.  Their self containment, seen as a virtue by cause of our intuitive satisfaction, put in this context, necessarily excludes true and relevant things - unless we believe that no additional true or relevant fact about morality has presented itself in all of the intervening years.  OFC, some -other than natural realist- theory could also come out tomorrow, incorporating all of what we learned today....that just isn't the direction that the worm of contemporary ethics has turned.  

It may be that natural realism is not the most accurate meta-ethical theory.  Part of the fundamental basis of moral naturalism is to identify some quantifiable proposition in common to the many descriptive relative and subjective moralities.  Not to show that by virtue of commonality this or that set is the true set, but more to establish what it is we're all talking about.  So we might ask "why do christians believe that homosexuality is bad" - and the easy and superficial answer is that there's something that magic book said, or that god said.  That's not a good faith exploration of the subject, though, if we stop at the final deontological product of the moral system.  At the base of this ethical pillar, there is the contention that some property of a natural act will cause specified harm.  In this case harm to ones soul (lol), or in some broader sense, a calamity in this life.   Now I think it's amusing that we imagine these non natural souls as things that can be harmed in pretty much the same way our bodies can.  Hell isn't full of fire for no reason, lol....but what this does show is that right or wrong about the object of their moralizing, the object does exist in the natural world, and they do imagine themselves to be advocating against some harm it causes.   This moral proposition doesn't fail in a natural realist schema on account of it's underlying propositions, but on the basis of the soundness of the assertion of harm.   We might ask "whats wrong with murder?" - and again get some explicitly cultural answer ala "ten commandments" but the same literature which contains the deontological product is also rife with stories about the misery, deprivation, and cycles of violence which ensue when one man sets out to kill another.   This was the stoic basis of turning the other cheek.  Whatever wrong has been done to you, and however justified retaliation may be, the totality of consequence in our own retaliation can far exceed whatever limits our justification might posses.  They're assholes, but that doesn't mean we need to make ourselves assholes, or diminish our own character in the slightest way.  While we reject one today we still accept the other, even as we understand the problems with that course of action.   On some level, we imagine that as a general rule it could lead to betterment.  There would still be the one set of initiating face slappers and whatever ill they may do....but their won't be any secondary or chain-slappers to add to that pile.  

They're -trying- to do natural realism.  They're just failing at it for reasons we know a hell of alot more about now than we did when we came up with them. 

Natural realism, if meta-ethically false, still has the potential to be the unifying theory of descriptive moral positions.   That's probably why it's easy to argue once a person has command of the terms.  That ease doesn't make it the true™ meta-ethical position, but it does say something.   Personally, I think the ease of the argument is exactly why so many people find it unsatisfying, or lacking, in some way.  The constant "is that all it is, well, what about this and this, I thought it said more" - the implication being that if it doesn't say that more™, it;s somehow diminished relative to other propositions or the expectations of people.   

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All these things drive me towards accepting non-naturalism, but non-naturalism has its difficulties too. For one, it's vague, while naturalism is precise. Your typical naturalist, say a utilitarian hedonist, can rattle off at an instant what is right and what is wrong. You may have to spend some time at the abacus, but (ultimately) the answer is easy.

For the non-naturalist, there is no easy answer. And there is no concrete answer either. You must be motivated to look at a given situation and determine "the good" without reducing "the good" to something that is easily quantifiable. To me, that sounds like the real ethical predicament. And that's one reason I favor non-naturalism.

I think that you're downplaying the difficulty of moral conclusions from the natural realist POV. It doesn't provide easy answers, though it does at least provide the potential for the use of an abacus, lol.  The utilitarian hedonist is reciting a deontology with thousands of years of moral reasoning behind it.  All that natural realism provides a utilitarian hedonist is access to metrics, so that;s the only thing they have to play with or change as information becomes available.  That doesn't mean that whatever moral calculus they're doing isn't difficult.  I think we've all sat there and stared at a math (or moral, lol) problem for what seemed like an eternity before throwing our hands up in the air.  Some problems may be easy, the moral equivalent of basic addition or subtraction - but I suspect that the more difficult set is the larger set.  The things you think about non-naturalism seem to apply equally well to naturalism, with one caveat - being willing to reduce "the good" to something easily™ quantifiable doesn't mean that a complex composite is easier to resolve. It can make it orders of magnitude more difficult, with more moving parts that need to be more accurately quantified. More interrelationships accounted for. The importance of the value of any given component being able to massively effect the deontological product. Utilitarian hedonism didn't get easier, for example, when naturalist metrics become more available and sophisticated.

Try giving a utilitarian hedonists summary of the moral relationship between drowning someone, and watching them drown -from a natural realists metrics- for example.

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-as an afterthought, we've discussed before our mutual appreciation for moral pluralism.  Pursuant to some comments I made about the potential for any realism to be a unifying descriptive theory even if it;s not an accurate meta-ethical theory, here;s a fun one for you.

Perhaps we're natural agents employing moore-style non natural operations to virtue problems involving empirical properties, lol. Or, you know, maybe properties and parts and wholes don't exist as described at all, to bring it back round to compelling forms of nihilism.