Can Nihilism Be Your Morality?

Great Debates
41

Nothing you noted has an absolute value to it though. Being kind may indeed get people to be kind to you, OR it may cause them to punch you in the face because they see you as weak.

Being cruel may indeed have the effect that no one wants to be around but others might find it attractive to be around, as a protective measure.

At the end of the day, most of our moral codes are based upon what society deems they want. Murder to be illegal, people don’t murder. Whether that is based upon what they feel to be right or just because it’s against the law. It originated from what society deemed important or needed for society to thrive, or survive.

42

Who are you, that you get to define “true nihilist” and others do not? :dubious:

43

It’s becoming really, really clear that we’re not all on the same page as to what we all think the word “nihilism” means.

44

I hope you don’t think that was a gotcha moment or something. I mean, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote.

45

Aye. The key is “inherent”. There is not inherent meaning, no inherent morality in the universe, in existence. Any definition that doesn’t contain that concept is incorrect.

46

Don’t get me wrong; I agree that it is absurd to have to justify valuing “enjoy”. I’m just noting that it is, in fact, a valuation. It is nihilism that strikes me as absurd.

yeah, that.

47

Nihilism doesn’t say we can’t ascribe value and meaning to things, tho. It doesn’t say that there cannot be value or meaning. It just says that there is no inherent value or meaning to anything.

48

If (for example) pleasure, or happiness, are not inherently valuable, and yet we choose to ascribe value to them anyway, we do so for… random reasons? Arbitrary ones? Reasons other than “yeesh, don’t be absurd, it’s bloody obviously inherently valuable, anybody knows that”, at any rate, yes?

There’s nothing keeping us from doing so (placing a value on something even though it has no intrinsic value). But if you have done so, you can’t readily engage with other people and argue for the goodness of what you value. You’re basically on record as stating that you assigned a value to it based on its correspondence to other things to which you assigned value, all the way back to pleasure or happiness which aren’t intrinsically valuable. Might as well chuck a dart at a dart board blindfolded and wherever it lands, that’s what you’ll value.

49

Making certain assumptions about what the terms “value” and “meaning” mean, I suppose that means I’m probably a nihilist. (By your understanding of the term, anyway.)

The “certain assumptions” I’m making are that “value” and “meaning” are, er, value judgements, which require that there be a sentient entity doing the valuation. Or put another way, value and meaning are inherently qualities that must be some intelligent entity’s opinion - there aren’t “value particles” that can be embedded in an object’s substructure or “meaning waves” that are generated when an act is carried out.

As an atheist, I don’t believe that there’s any outside sentient force that has the authority to assign “objective” or “inherent” value/meaning to things. (As an armchair linguist, I note that even if there were a god making such judgements, they’re still not objective or inherent - they’re just subjective to an entity that’s in a position to enforce its will on others.)

Or put another way, I think the very notions of “value” and “meaning” are inherently incapable of being objective or inherent, by definition. Value is always in the eye of some beholder, even if the beholder is a god.

This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for individuals to hold value or find meaning in things, of course. But it does mean that value and meaning only exist as long as there’s a person to espouse the opinions. Once Earth drops into the sun and everybody’s dead, value and meaning vanish too. (Until the aliens arrive and decide that the space debris left over from humanity’s reign are the most awesome and important collectibles ever, anyway.)

And holding the above opinions makes me a nihilist…? Yes? No? I don’t know.

In any case, if all value is subjective, then morality based on value must also be subjective - though it can, as noted, be imparted to or forced upon others via trying to teach them to share your opinions or by promising/threatening rewards or punishments depending on how well their behavior conforms to your own morality. So if there really was some god out there sending everyone who annoys him to hell, then that wouldn’t really be objective morality, but it would be morality that everyone has to deal with and (if they knew about it) account for nonetheless.

50

That’s not the axiom. The axiom is “whatever you like has moral weight”.

Regards,
Shodan

51

I liked Robert Pirsig’s take on it: quality is neither objective (located in the object of interest intrinsically) nor subjective (located only in the mind and feelings of the observer making the evaluation) but instead is intrinsic to the relationship between the observer and the object of interest.

Among other nice things that I like about that formulation, it allows for us to discuss an observer having an inaccurate understanding of the value of something. If it were subjective, that’s rather difficult to explicate. But because the quality is in the relationship, the observer can misconstrue it and come to realize that later.

52

About as close as value gets to “inherent” is “I enjoy the taste of strawberries” and “I dislike pain”. This is not random; it is hard wired; there are physical and chemical reactions that nudge the brain activity in a way that the brain activity mechanically interprets as a positive or negative thing.

Such reactions are definitely not arbitrary - they’re how the body/brain unit reacts to things at a physical level. However they are subjective - the physical effects occur only within the body and the mind containing it. Me eating a strawberry does nothing for you.

It is indeed difficult for me to convince other people of the glorious wonder of me, personally, eating a strawberry. Which doesn’t make my like of strawberries arbitrary, but it does make them subjective.

53

Works for me. No longer nihilism. Based on something. And can we build an entire moral-ethical structure from it? I think so, actually. (But see just above for “subjective”)

54

As noted, there’s significant disagreement in this thread about what “nihilism” means. I personally doubt you’ll find much agreement for the notion that people having bodies and brains disproves nihilism. (Maybe metaphysical nihilism, but not the other variants.)

And since you referred me to it:

I don’t see any meaningful difference between the observer’s subjective opinion of the thing, and the observer’s relationship between itself and the thing. By which I think the concepts are literally synonymous. And while I won’t disagree that valuation is intrinsic to the observer’s subjective opinion of a thing, that doesn’t make such valuation any less subjective.

And honestly, I’m not sure the concept of an “incorrect subjective valuation” even makes sense. People can disagree about the valuation of something, but if you convince somebody that they have ‘misconstrued’ the value of something, that’s just you just changing their subjective opinion to a different subjective opinion that matches yours. Their previous opinion wasn’t ‘wrong’ in any way except in that it different from the new opinion.

55

The poor and disenfranchised, mostly. It could have real scary implications. For instance, nihilistic car drivers tend to drive the way they live, meaning they trust to luck and treat traffic rules signals as mere suggestions.