Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[DLJ]

...
I'd say that all worlds together might be a good model for reality-reality... or you could say (as per strict materialist theories) world 1 is reality reality and world 2 is merely some kind of artifact of reality reality. World 3 most resembles Plato's world of forms. I rather like Popper's distinctions and they might be a good set of categories to use when addressing relevant distinctions in our little morality debate. But that's what they are to me: distinctions of a single substance... a substance which we may call reality.

One thing that jumped out at me from Popper:
"There is, secondly, the mental or psychological world, the
world of our feelings of pain and of pleasure, of our thoughts, of
our decisions, of our perceptions and our observations; in other
words, the world of mental or psychological states or processes,
or of subjective experiences. I will call it ‘world 2’. World 2 is
immensely important, especially from a human point of view or
from a moral point of view. Human suffering belongs to world 2;
and human suffering, especially avoidable suffering, is the central
moral problem for all those who can help."

If we accept human suffering as objective fact, then (to me) we can begin to formulate a moral theory that takes human suffering into account. This doesn't mean that we give an "artificial weight" to it. At this point in our conversation, the importance of human suffering is yet to be determined. Perhaps we will find, after some investigation, that only world 3 is relevant to moral theory. (I tend to think that it is world 3 because world 3 makes sense of worlds 1 and 2, and it is only after having made sense of these realities, to some degree, that moral valuation becomes possible.) But the naturalists might disagree with me there.

I think Belaqua's suggestion to use Popper's categorizations is excellent. Plato is a bit old and musty. True, he gets credit for starting Popper's project and being an all around genius when it comes to moral realism, but Popper is much more clear and also informed by modern science. So, if you agree, I say we start with his three worlds distinctions scheme to get started in our ethical discourse.

Many apologies for the delay in responding. Internet down since Friday.

Sure, let’s go with Popper’s Worlds. We’ll need to update them (given the advances made in the 40 years since) and based on clarifying this:

... framework that is independent of opinion. I call it "reality." ...

... and agree on some terminology.

Wikipedia summarises the Worlds as follows:
World 1: the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities
World 2: the world of mental processes
World 3: objective knowledge
So we already have a problem in that knowledge can never be objective or independent of opinion.

The diagram is better but still contains the ‘objective’ problem.


The problem arises from the realisation that World 2 encompasses itself and Worlds 1 and 3.

So, I propose this variation for appraisal:
World 0: the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities that is “independent of opinion” (the world that would still exist if there were no minds with which to observe, process and experience it).  Thus, the inexperienceable world.
World 1: the experienceable world of physical objects and events, including biological entities; the phenotypic machine’s external ontological dashboard.
World 2: the world of psychological / cognitive / mental process; individual perception and interpretation of Worlds 1, 2 and 3; the phenotypic machine’s ‘mind’.
World 3: the world of the output of World 2 (minds); concepts, abstractions, creations, designs etc. which when in a physical form e.g. art, text, numerals are a subset of World 1.

Thus, only World 0 can be truly objective since it requires no experiencer (an experiencer prone to, indeed designed by natural selection to, be subjective). This leads to the realisation that there can be no experienceable ‘objective facts’ only that objectivity is one of many useful ‘information quality criteria’.

Regarding the comment about suffering: yes, agreed, “the importance of human suffering is yet to be determined”. But what we can determine is that suffering can belong to Worlds 1, 2 and 3 as follows:
World 1 suffering: data input; observation of pain etc.
World 2 suffering: data (and patterns of data; and patterns of patterns etc.) processing; experienced pain/suffering and processing of observed suffering.
World 3 suffering: data/information artefacts e.g. fiction, art, historical records about suffering; studies on the causes of suffering; plans to rectify or cause suffering.