Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

It would be (could be?) incoherent, but perhaps nihilism is incoherent.  That doesn't mean it's impossible for it to do so or be so..and again, you're arguing that it's impossible for nihilism to contain an explicit or implicit set of normative functions. 

Noncognitivism is the form of ethical nihilism that is incoherent and it's incoherent because it says that moral statements are neither true nor false and nothing can be neither true nor false. Clear?

The overall coherence or incoherence of a position on morality and it's implications does not determine the presence or absence of normative functions, implications, or content, in my view.  It may in fact be that the presence of that content is part of what makes the position self defeating or incoherent.  This could certainly be argued in the case of nihilism (and your comments earlier about relative emptiness are a variant of that line of thought).  That nihilism may fail on it's own grounds if it succeeds at being a moral system (even if it's a relatively minimal one).  Still, an incoherent position can possess these characteristics of normativity and desert just as easily as a coherent one.  

I have no interest in debating the coherence of the positions in any general sense.  It's not required for the existence, the sheer presence, of normative functions implications or content that can be and are derived from those positions.  If those characteristics are present, if that position succeeds as a morality, it doesn;t matter that this success might make it a failure fundamentally.  Oh well, maybe some moral positions are failures.  Ultimately self defeating.  

If there is a list of what a nihilist can or can't do while correctly being a nihilist, there is a list of normative content.  We can assert that this list is logically normative, rather than morally normative - but when/if other things we accept as moral systems assert that their own logical and moral normativity are interchangeable - does this really rule out nihilism as a morality or nihilism's logical normatives as moral normatives?  IDK that it does.  

It's impossible for ethical nihilism to express anything normatively from the point of view of ethical nihilism because from the point of view of ethical nihilism there are no normative expressions. Clear?

Until you are able to grasp these very basic points I'm not going to waste my time responding to the rest of what you say.

Like I said, you decide what you respond to and what you don't.  I'm not going to take any offense, lol.  

Sure, let's talk basics.  You wanted to approach nihilism above through noncognitivism.  An utter lack of truth aptness.  Is a lack of truth aptness the determining factor in the sheer presence of normative expressions?  Must a statement be truth apt, for a normative expression to be derived from it? You can help me to get to where you are from the bottom up.

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I'll provide an example for you to work with and school me.

Vanilla icecream is the best icecream.  You should only eat the best icecream.  Therefore you should only eat vanilla icecream.  

This is a normative expression.  Which parts of it, if any, are truth apt?

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...I'm not going to waste my time responding to the rest of what you say.

As far as I can tell you guys think moral nihilism is unintelligible for different reasons. Big whoop.

Why don't you guys just take a break from ethics? How about some metaphysics. We have a Christian pushing dualism here... with a video featuring a neuroscientist failing at logic.

Hehehe, I have alot more faith in this conversations productivity than I have in dualism or any discussion of dualism. 

Ironically, we don't disagree on the things that make moral nihilism in some sense unintelligible.  I'm only adding another to the list.  The embeddeding problem.  

You'll probably get a huge kick out of this, courtesy of S. Blackburn(1984) 

(a) H!(B!p --> B!q)

H! is the hooray operator.  B! for boo.  The relationship between p and q demonstrates attitudes or beliefs.  

Noncognitivist nihilism posits that moral operators aren't actually talking about what they're about, as opposed to cognitivist nihilism which asserts that they are - but get it wrong.  Above we can see that expressivism as a noncognitivist theory could, at least in principle, be a logical product - and thus we're back to wondering whether there is any valid distinction between logical and moral normatives.....even in a noncognitivist framework.