RE: Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?
June 11, 2019 at 1:01 pm
(This post was last modified: June 11, 2019 at 1:24 pm by SenseMaker007.)
(June 11, 2019 at 12:55 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: I don't disagree with you. We're just talking past each other, I think.
Well, to be clear, I'm not saying that it's impermissible to label things permissible and I'm not making any normative statements.
To get back to the question of the thread: Is moral nihilism a morality? No. Moralities are normative positions and moral nihilism is a metaethical position.
For moral nihilism to be a morality it would have to implicitly be claiming that you ought to do or avoid doing something ... but moral nihilism doesn't do that. if it did ... it wouldn't be moral nihilism.
I have thought about it and I have altered my view on one matter now, though: I now do think that the denial of the existence of something can be to be nihilistic about it. I just think it's nihilism in a looser sense. I think noncognitivism is the ultimate form of nihilism. To say regarding X that "X is completely meaningless", I would consider to be strongly nihilistic about X. But to say, regarding X, that "X does not exist" is to be nihilistic about it in a weaker sense. So I guess I consider noncognitivism about moral issues to be strong ethical nihilism and error theory to be weak ethical nihilism. Why? Because if you deem ethical statements to be completely without meaning then your view is more empty, and hence more nihilistic, than if you view them to be false.
