Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[SenseMaker007]

I'll ask again, whats the difference in, say, moral realism..between the logically and the morally normative?

Why are you asking again as if I avoided your question when I directly answered your question? I've answered that question already, but you still haven't answered any of mine. You keep responding with irrelevance.

 How about relativism?  If three systems all present normative functions and all make use of the language of desert in fundamentally identically ways, implicitly or explicitly, in what way are the two of them moral systems that the third isn't or can't be?

So basically, if you are right then how are you wrong? The point is that you haven't actually supported that you're right. You're merely question begging here. The point is that you haven't actually demonstrated how niihilism can possibly be implicitly normative. And rambling on about what Nietzsche believed doesn't do that.

Stay on topic and address what you've repeatedly failed to address rather than just moving on to other things without addressing anything.

 
If nothing else, you could add this to the list of reasons why you think nihilism is self defeating.

Nihilism is incoherent, that's already enough reasons. And this still just you dodging. You repeatedly fail to answer my questions and you repeatedly fail to back up your claim that nihilism implicitly makes normative statements and your claim that I have made normative statements.

 Even as the attempted antithesis of moral positions it somehow manages to create normatives and provide assessments of desert.

This is just your assertion again, with zero backing. It's time to move on because you're a waste of time. You won't back yourself up because you can't.

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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.

But this is precisely why I said that error theory isn't nihilism, because it makes an evaulation. I now think that an evaulation of nonexistence doesn't really count. But an evaluation of nonexistence of X is a weaker form of nihilism than saying that X is too meaningless to even be evaluated in the first place.

But if you say X exists but it's mere feelings ... that's not nihilism.

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."

Isn't emotivism a form of relativism rather than a form of nihilism? Because emotivism says that when somebody makes a statement that is supposedly about morality they are just expressing their true feelings on the matter. In other words something might feel right or wrong for them.

Ethical nihilism is the view that nothing is normatively right or wrong. How is that normative? it can't be. And that's why ethical nihilism is not a morality.

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 agree that it's important for philosophers to criticise philosophy. Which is why I have no qualms about the fact that I think that philosophers sometimes miscategorize things because, in spite of their reputation for being pedantic, philosophers are sometimes not pedantic enough.

Finally, the fact that emotivism makes a qualitative evaluation is a better argument for it not being nihilistic than for it being normative. There's nothing about emotivism that implicitly says that you ought to do or not do anything ... so it can't be normative. It may not be nihilistic, because it's making a normative evaluation, but it isn't actually making any normative ought-statements. And if emotivism is normative simply because it isn't nihilistic then that can't be an argument for nihilism being normative.

If a metaethical viewpoint doesn't even allow norms to be true or false then it certainly can't express the truth or falsehood of any norms from an normative point of view.