@Gae Bolga @SenseMaker007
I haven't been tracking the discussion between the two of you, but there IS something that rings somewhat true to me in the statement "in the broadest sense of the term, moral nihilism is a morality."
Keeping in mind the qualifier "in the broadest sense of the term" let's look at emotivism. When an emotivistic nihilist says, "moral judgments are nothing but expressions of feelings," he is evaluating moral judgments in a qualitative way and in the broadest sense of the term performing a normative evaluation. Basically, nihilists criticize moral judgments for their lack of truth value or non-relation to facts. In that, there is a sort of ought statement... as in "we ought to take moral judgments less seriously" or "we ought not treat moral statements as fact."
But Jorm made a good point about that line of reasoning being fallacious.
As for Nietzsche, I'm hard pressed to shove his ethics into any tidy category. He was a creative philosopher as much as an evaluative one (he evaluated to create much of the time). Having a coherent ethics wasn't really his gig.
That being said, most of his philosophy is criticism of standard ethics and creation of an entirely new ethics at the same time. It's three dimensional too. From one perspective it appears nihilistic, from another perspective relativist or even realist.
I haven't been tracking the discussion between the two of you, but there IS something that rings somewhat true to me in the statement "in the broadest sense of the term, moral nihilism is a morality."
Keeping in mind the qualifier "in the broadest sense of the term" let's look at emotivism. When an emotivistic nihilist says, "moral judgments are nothing but expressions of feelings," he is evaluating moral judgments in a qualitative way and in the broadest sense of the term performing a normative evaluation. Basically, nihilists criticize moral judgments for their lack of truth value or non-relation to facts. In that, there is a sort of ought statement... as in "we ought to take moral judgments less seriously" or "we ought not treat moral statements as fact."
But Jorm made a good point about that line of reasoning being fallacious.
As for Nietzsche, I'm hard pressed to shove his ethics into any tidy category. He was a creative philosopher as much as an evaluative one (he evaluated to create much of the time). Having a coherent ethics wasn't really his gig.
That being said, most of his philosophy is criticism of standard ethics and creation of an entirely new ethics at the same time. It's three dimensional too. From one perspective it appears nihilistic, from another perspective relativist or even realist.
