Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[SenseMaker007]

You haven't heard my reasoning for rejecting nihilism  or what I think it's most damning potential incoherence revolves around, to know if it was full of contradictions in need of your correction, in the first place.

It was hard to make sense of anything you were saying because it wasn't clear. When are you going to address the fact that a non-normative theory doesn't express anything normative from its own non-normative point of view?

The thing about this truth-apt conversation is ... you've merely moved onto it because you couldn't defend yourself on the other matter. Is that what you do? When you can't explain X you move onto Y and when you can't explain that you move onto Z.

If you're struggling to explain X you should stick to trying to explain it or admit that you're unable to rather than moving onto something else. Just because you want to move on without addressing your mistakes doesn't mean I do.

  I've told you umpteen times that I'm not giving you one or arguing for or against the coherence of nihilism and yet here you are fixating on whether or not an argument you've never heard that I have no interest in making is adequate.

You told me a few times at most. I've told you far, far more times that I'm not making any normative statements and yet you still insist that I have without demonstrating it. You have also insisted that ethical nihilism implicitly makes normative statements but you haven't demonstrated it (because you can't).

This is a direct reassertion of the non rule we already demonstrated to be false with Blackburnes Hooray and Boo. 

You've demonstrated absolutely nothing.

Non truth apt statements and positions can and do express normatives and imperatives.  Even more to the point and additionally-

You can't just assert things and expect them to fly. You have to back them up. Especially when you contradict yourself.

One of a logic's principal concerns is logical validity. It seems that arguments with imperatives can be valid. Consider:
P1. Take all the books off the table!
P2. Foundations of Arithmetic is on the table.
C1. Therefore, take Foundations of Arithmetic off the table!

I am well aware that imperatives can be valid and getting from that to the conclusion that something can be meaningful without being truth-apt is a non-sequitur.

However, an argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises. This means the premises give us reason to believe the conclusion, or, alternatively, the truth of the premises determines truth of the conclusion. Since imperatives are neither true nor false and since they are not proper objects of belief, none of the standard accounts of logical validity apply to arguments containing imperatives.

And you honestly think that this means that imperatives can actually be neither true nor false?

Are you not aware that there is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to theory of truth? This whole matter is in dispute among philosophers. It's not settled because you can quote part of one article from Wikipedia.

Can you explain how the statement above doesn't or can't express anything normative on account of how it isn't truth apt?  How about this similar statement.

Well, you made your whole post extremely awkward to quote by messing it up with a bunch of completely unnecessary color and font tags and I have to remove each one manually in order to respond without your post looking like a complete mess. It's really not worth my time or energy to clean up that mess for you when I'm still wondering if you're completely beyond hope when it comes to having a discussion.

Don't hit your brother!
Steve is your brother.
Therefore don't hit Steve.

This is not an example of something that isn't truth-apt.

Something is only ever not truth-apt if it is incoherent and coherence and meaning are the same thing.

Vanilla icecream is the best!
You should only eat the best icecream!
You should only eat vanilla icecream.

You completely ignored my response to this one already. As I said, saying that X is "the best" has no meaning without saying in what way X is the best.

I think that it can be.  That it possesses normatives, and possibly even considerations of desert.

And I'm not interested in your mere assertions that appear to either be completely faith-based or, if they have support, you're completely incapable of explaining what that support is.

Yes, we know. You think ethical nihilism, despite being a non-normative theory, expresses something normative even from its own point of view where statements aren't normative. Do you also think squares have 5 sides?

As before, I think that it can be.

It's absurd. Unless you mean something other than what I mean, but I've been very clear about what I mean ... and you have not only failed to address me ... but you've also said I've said things I haven't.

Do you at least retract your assertion that I stated something normative? If you're unwilling to retract your assertion that a non-normative position can be normative then you could at least retract the one where you said I said something that I didn't say, and you insisted that I did, but never backed it up.

Disagree.  My simply saying "Yuck" is meaningful...there isn't anyone reading this that doesn't know what yuck means.....but it's not truth apt. 

It's only meaningful if you assume it means, for instance, something like "That's disgusting!". And "That's disgusting!" is truth-apt.

It's only not truth-apt if we don't assume that it has any meaning similar to the one above ... and that's because meaning and truth-aptness, in this context, is the same thing. 

Disagree.  An incoherent statement is a statement that doesn't follow.  Statements that don't follow can be truth apt.  

That's not what an incoherent statement is.

Mammals have hair.
John has hair.
Therefore John is married

is incoherent...

That is not incoherent. The conclusion merely doesn't follow. There's nothing about that that we can't make sense of. It's perfectly coherent.

"Squares have 4 sides but also have 5 sides at the same time, to the same degree and in the same way" ... now that's incoherent.

"X is neither true nor not true" ... that's incoherent.

So contradiction is one way for something to be incoherent. Another way is for a concept to be incomplete. For example, the libertarian concept of free will fails to map onto reality even in an illusory way.

When a statement is incoherent it isn't stating anything meaningful.

"Mammals have hair, John has hair, therefore John is married" just means "because mammals have hair and John has hair it means that John must be married". It's perfectly meaningful ... it's just that the argument is invalid.

but every single statement there is truth apt..and..if john is married, true.  This is another attempt to create a non rule, as with non cognitivism and it's inability to meaningfully express normatives.

It wasn't incoherent.

Rather than jumping in with more fallacies and nonsense why don't you explain how a theory that denies normative expression can express anything normative from its own point of view where it denies normative expressions?

Can a position that, from its point of view, doesn't acknowledge the existence of anything normative, express anything normative from its point of view where such normativity doesn't even exist? No.

In fact it can, and does, -and neither of us disagree that it does..

Okay, I give up. If I clearly express how you're holding a view akin to a square circle, jumping in and saying that I also hold that same square-circle view and that I don't disagree with you is just the final straw of nonsense. You are completely incapable of having a discussion because you are completely incapable of addressing another person's point of view accurately, it seems.

remember, you contend that the normativity is logical rather than moral..not that it doesn't exist or can't be expressed. 

I never said that normativity is logical rather than moral ... I said that just because I say that ethical nihlism logically incorrect it doesn't mean that I'm saying it's normatively incorrect. I contrasted normative incorrectness and logical incorrectness ... rather than conflating them. To say X is logically wrong is not necessarily to say that X is morally wrong. That is all that I was saying. It's an absolutely basic point and you can't even seem to grasp it.

Why is it so extremely difficult to communicate with you? You're the problem because I don't have this problem with other people I discuss with. Some people misrepresent what I say or fail to address what I say sometimes ... but they often get it right as well ... and I am able to explain myself and they listen to and understand my explaination even if they don't agree with it. You can't seem to get it right even once and yet you continue to insist that I agree with you. No, I don't agree with your claims that go completely against mine and are akin to saying that squares are circular. You are not worth my time unless when you come back you actually either retract or give an argument for your claims or you actually address what I actually said for once.