Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[vulcanlogician]

Cheers. I still can’t login using my laptop but your topic was irresistible so my phone had to do.

Yes, Britannica all the way.

Looks like the lawyers are on to something. There has to be a reason why philosophers haven’t sorted this out yet.

I’ll have a word with them next time I see them down the pub.

Making a distinction is not only useful it’s essential to really getting to the root of it all.

I’ve got a feeling though that I may not be able to shift such entrenched semantics and may have to do a Heidegger and invent some terms to represent different inputs and outputs of the ‘morality system’.

Lawyers want to differentiate whether someone can be held legally responsible for a given action. To a philosopher, this doesn't matter. Wrong is wrong whether one can be held legally accountable or not.

But back to your original point: if we can find a framework that is independent of opinion, we can refute relativism (that's easy)... But to refute moral nihilism, we need to show that this framework is not just "some shit we made up." That's a bit more challenging. My first strategy in arguing against nihilism is to suggest that it is "runaway skepticism." Things like math and science can't hold up to nihilistic scrutiny either. They both could be said to be "useful fictions" without any truth value at all.

So if someone is going to argue moral nihilism, I first establish that moral realism is as objective as math and science. Any skepticism so robust as to render something like math a "useful fiction" ought not be leveled at moral realism. To say, as the wiki quote in the OP says that giving value to human life is arbitrary is just such a skepticism.