Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

-and in case you don't, in the event that your pigheaded silliness just can;t be helped, let's try an entirely different angle for why and how nihilism could qualify as a morality.  

You can moan about something marginally different for awhile. 

The combination of gibbords thesis and hares dictive indifference of logic.  Roughly, Gibbord concludes that for any complex sentence containing normative predicates in embedded contexts, we can replace all normative predicates with equivalent descriptive predicates.  Hare, for that part, concludes that there is no fundamental difference between dictive and imperative logic.  

In this view, any normative statement has an equivalent descriptive statement, vv, and the same logical operations can be carried out with or on either. They are content and meaning equivalent, and equally suitable to truth inspection through rational thought.

IOW, when a person says something to the effect of "you can't correctly be a nihilist and believe x" they are considering whether to affirm or endorse the rationality of holding some set of statements to be true with respect to their logical connections to nihilism. The equivalent normative statement from this would be "If you are a nihilist, don't believe x", or "if you are a nihilist, you shouldn't believe x.".

Let's try to rope Vulcan in again with his much more succinct description of nihilism and see what sort of crazy shit we can find. Moral nihilists assert, one way or another, that these moral features we refer to as being "out there" in the world simply aren't out there. That the world lacks moral features. Well, okay, but if that's so, it doesn't entail that nihilism lacks moral features anymore than the nihilists saying that there are no moral features in the world is a rejection of those moral features residing within us. That they exist as props in our head... but we're essentially making them up.

Is it consistent with nihilism to state that people and positions can possess moral features without those moral features being "out there" in the world. I think so. Hell, that's the central contention of nihilism in so many forms as it apprehends the moral landscape!

If that position happened to be nihilism, that wouldn't even be surprising from the perspective of nihilism, just another example of us making shit up. Nihilism is, at least, suitable for the same kinds of normative semantics that any other rational position would be. Even if it happens to have some metacomment on them.