RE: Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?
June 14, 2019 at 9:49 am
(This post was last modified: June 14, 2019 at 10:10 am by The Grand Nudger.)
You're making up another non rule. No, for normative content, functions, implications, imperatives, or dictives to be possible from nihilism, neither of those two statements need to be normative, any more than the statement "goodness is a natural property" needs to be normative for natural realism to possess normative content.
If you took the time to explore the dictive indifference of logic or jorgensens dilemma you would have immediately realized that any of those three statements, your two and my own, might actually have dictive equivalents for each descriptive suitable for the same types of truth inspection as any other proposition, though.
Non cognitive nihilism states that moral proclamations are not propositions. Not that they're meaningless, in any case. That they are not truth apt. This in itself cannot prevent the valid expression of normative content as propositions as blackburnes boo and hooray operators show.
It -may be- that nihlism is not a morality, or that it cannot possess or express normative content - but not for ny of the non rules you've been creating. It may also be that any morality or normative content from nihlism validly derived makes nihilism self defeating in some way - but that's neither of our problem. It may also be that normative content not only can be derived from nihilism, but that this content is not in any genuine contradiction with nihilism.
For example, the dictive equivalent from above "don't affirm the meaningfulness/truth of normative statements" is embedded in "normative statements are meaningless/false". That's a normative. It can be couched in imperative logic in what seems to be a valid form even though it's not a truth apt statement. Nihilism could produce an endless list of normatives, and so long as nihilism posits that these normatives are exactly like the others (a bunch of boos and hissing) then it's not in genuine contradiction on it's own terms. Normatives pose a much greater problem for cognitivist nihilism, in this context, than for non cognitivist nihilism.
Cognitivism doesn't have a strong theory for how a true statement could validly follow a false or non truth apt statement, which is pretty much the antithesis of cognitive truth evaluation, lol. Recall, also, that if non-cognitivist theories are true - then all moral normatives simply -are- non cognitivist.
If you took the time to explore the dictive indifference of logic or jorgensens dilemma you would have immediately realized that any of those three statements, your two and my own, might actually have dictive equivalents for each descriptive suitable for the same types of truth inspection as any other proposition, though.
Non cognitive nihilism states that moral proclamations are not propositions. Not that they're meaningless, in any case. That they are not truth apt. This in itself cannot prevent the valid expression of normative content as propositions as blackburnes boo and hooray operators show.
It -may be- that nihlism is not a morality, or that it cannot possess or express normative content - but not for ny of the non rules you've been creating. It may also be that any morality or normative content from nihlism validly derived makes nihilism self defeating in some way - but that's neither of our problem. It may also be that normative content not only can be derived from nihilism, but that this content is not in any genuine contradiction with nihilism.
For example, the dictive equivalent from above "don't affirm the meaningfulness/truth of normative statements" is embedded in "normative statements are meaningless/false". That's a normative. It can be couched in imperative logic in what seems to be a valid form even though it's not a truth apt statement. Nihilism could produce an endless list of normatives, and so long as nihilism posits that these normatives are exactly like the others (a bunch of boos and hissing) then it's not in genuine contradiction on it's own terms. Normatives pose a much greater problem for cognitivist nihilism, in this context, than for non cognitivist nihilism.
Cognitivism doesn't have a strong theory for how a true statement could validly follow a false or non truth apt statement, which is pretty much the antithesis of cognitive truth evaluation, lol. Recall, also, that if non-cognitivist theories are true - then all moral normatives simply -are- non cognitivist.
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