Moral nihilism (also called ethical nihilism) is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality doesn't exist.[1][2]
Moral nihilism is distinct from moral relativism, which allows for actions to be wrong relative to a particular culture or individual. It is also distinct from expressivism, according to which when we make moral claims, "We are not making an effort to describe the way the world is ... we are venting our emotions, commanding others to act in certain ways, or revealing a plan of action".[3][citation needed]
Moral nihilism today broadly tends to take the form of an Error Theory: The view developed originally by J.L. Mackie in his 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Error theory and nihilism broadly take the form of a negative claim about the existence of objective values or properties. Under traditional views there are moral properties or methods which hold objectively in some sense beyond our contingent interests which morally obligate us to act. For Mackie and the Error Theorists, such properties do not exist in the world, and therefore morality conceived of by reference to objective facts must also not exist. Therefore, morality in the traditional sense does not exist.[citation needed]
However, holding nihilism does not necessarily imply that one should give up using moral or ethical language; some nihilists contend that it remains a useful tool.[4] In fact Mackie and other contemporary defenders of Error Theory, such as Richard Joyce, defend the use of moral or ethical talk and action even in knowledge of their fundamental falsity. The legitimacy of this activity is a subject of debate in philosophy.
Forms of nihilism
Moral nihilists agree that all claims such as 'murder is morally wrong' are not true. But different nihilistic views differ in two ways.
Some may say that such claims are neither true nor false; others say that they are all false.
Nihilists differ in the scope of their theories. Error theorists typically claim that it is only distinctively moral claims which are false; practical nihilists claim that there are no reasons for action of any kind; some nihilists extend this claim to include reasons for belief.
Ethical language: false versus not truth-apt
J. L. Mackie argues that moral assertions are only true if there are moral properties, but because there are none, all such claims are false.[5] Under such a view moral propositions which express beliefs are then systematically in error. For under Mackie's view, if there are to be moral properties, they must be objective and therefore not amenable to differences in subjective desires and preferences. Moreover any claims that these moral properties, if they did exist would need to be intrinsically motivating by being in some primitive relation to our consciousness. They must be able of guiding us morally just by the fact of being in some clear awareness of their truth.
Other versions of the theory claim that moral assertions are not true because they are neither true nor false. This form of moral nihilism claims that moral beliefs and assertions presuppose the existence of moral facts that do not exist. Consider, for example, the claim that the present king of France is bald. Some argue that this claim is neither true nor false because it presupposes that there is currently a king of France, but there is not. The claim suffers from "presupposition failure". Richard Joyce[6] argues for this form of moral nihilism under the name "fictionalism".
The scope question
Error theory is built on three principles:
There are no moral features in this world; nothing is right or wrong.
Therefore, no moral judgments are true.
However, our sincere moral judgments try, but always fail, to describe the moral features of things.
Thus, we always lapse into error when thinking in moral terms. We are trying to state the truth when we make moral judgments. But since there is no moral truth, all of our moral claims are mistaken. Hence the error. These three principles lead to the conclusion that there is no moral knowledge. Knowledge requires truth. If there is no moral truth, there can be no moral knowledge. Thus moral values are purely chimerical.[3][7]
Applied ethics
A pressing question is how one might apply the belief that there are no objective morals. Perhaps the most common response, and the position which Mackie adopts, is to view moralizing as an inherently useful practice, and that everyone is better off behaving in a moralistic manner.[8]
On the other hand, Richard Garner advocated for the idea of “moral abolitionism”. He argues that, if one were to believe that there are no objective morals, then to engage in moralism is a deceptive behavior. It is wrong because it harms one’s epistemological integrity. Furthermore, by refusing to make moral judgements generally, people would be more likely to engage with others in a more genuine fashion. The social benefit is that “we will find that there will be less to argue about, and that our conflicts and disagreements with others, at last seen for what they are, can be addressed and resolved”.[8] Garner encouraged people to adhere to an alternative to traditional normative morality: "informed, compassionate amoralism," a blend of compassion, non-duplicity, and clarity of language that he believed would nurture our capability for tolerance, creation, and cooperation.
Arguments for nihilism
Argument from queerness
The most prominent argument for nihilism is the argument from queerness.
If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.[9]
For all those who also find such entities queer (prima facie implausible), there is reason to doubt the existence of objective values.
In his book Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (1999), Mark Timmons provides a reconstruction of Mackie's views in the form of the two related arguments. These are based on the rejection of properties, facts, and relationships that do not fit within the worldview of philosophical naturalism, the idea "that everything—including any particular events, facts, properties, and so on—is part of the natural physical world that science investigates" (1999, p.12). Timmons adds, "The undeniable attraction of this outlook in contemporary philosophy no doubt stems from the rise of modern science and the belief that science is our best avenue for discovering the nature of reality".[10]
There are several ways in which moral properties are supposedly queer:
our ordinary moral discourse purports to refer to intrinsically prescriptive properties and facts "that would somehow motivate us or provide us with reasons for action independent of our desires and aversions"—but such properties and facts do not comport with philosophical naturalism.[11]
given that objective moral properties supposedly supervene upon natural properties (such as biological or psychological properties), the relation between the moral properties and the natural properties is metaphysically mysterious and does not comport with philosophical naturalism.[12]
a moral realist who countenances the existence of metaphysically queer properties, facts, and relations must also posit some special faculty by which we have knowledge of them.[12]
Of course there are entities that meet these criteria. It's true that they are queer sorts of entities and that knowing them isn't like anything else. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. ... For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals.[13]
Other criticisms of the argument include noting that the very fact that such entities would have to be something fundamentally different from what we normally experience, therefore assumably outside our sphere of experience, we cannot prima facie have reason to either doubt or affirm their existence. Therefore if one had independent grounds for supposing such things to exist (such as a reductio ad absurdum of the contrary) the argument from queerness cannot give one any particular reason to think otherwise. An argument along these lines has been provided by e.g. Akeel Bilgrami.[14]
Argument from explanatory impotence
Gilbert Harman argued that we do not need to posit the existence of objective values in order to explain our 'moral observations'.[15]
Shafer-Landau, Russ (2010). The Fundamentals of Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-063139-0.
Shafer-Landau, Russ (2018). The Fundamentals of Ethics (fourthed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-532086-2.
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (2019), "Moral Skepticism", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2020-05-28
Timmons, Mark (1999). Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press..
Further reading
Garner, Richard T.; Bernard Rosen (1967). Moral Philosophy: A Systematic Introduction to Normative Ethics and Meta-ethics, New York: Macmillan.
Garner, Richard T.; (1994). Beyond Morality. Temple University Press.
Shafer-Landau, Russ (2003). Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, Oxford University Press.
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (2006a). "Moral Skepticism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (link)
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (2006b). Moral Skepticisms, Oxford University Press.
van Roojen, Mark (2004). "Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (link)
About the queerness argument
Brink, David O. (1984). "Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62(2): 111–125.
Garner, Richard T. (1990). "On the Genuine Queerness of Moral Properties and Facts", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68(2): 137–46.
Mackie, J. L. (1946). "A Refutation of Morals", Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 24: 77–90. doi:10.1080/00048404608541486
Rosati, Connie S. (2006). "Moral Motivation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
The argument from morality is an argument for the existence of God. Arguments from morality tend to be based on moral normativity or moral order. Arguments from moral normativity observe some aspect of morality and argue that God is the best or only explanation for this, concluding that God must exist. Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it. The argument from morality is noteworthy in that one cannot evaluate the soundness of the argument without attending to almost every important philosophical issue in meta-ethics.
In ethical philosophy, ethical egoism is the normative position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.
Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world.
These moral features of the world are reducible to some set of non-moral features.
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false. A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world". If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.
Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.
Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory, and non-cognitivism. Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered.
Moral skepticism is a class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is particularly opposed to moral realism: the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false, which noncognitivists deny. Cognitivism is so broad a thesis that it encompasses moral realism, ethical subjectivism, and error theory.
The is–ought problem, as articulated by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, arises when one makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between positive statements and prescriptive or normative statements, and that it is not obvious how one can coherently transition from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Hume's law or Hume's guillotine is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements.
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the attitudes of people.
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In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.
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Moral sense theory is a theory in moral epistemology and meta-ethics concerning the discovery of moral truths. Moral sense theory typically holds that distinctions between morality and immorality are discovered by emotional responses to experience. Some take it to be primarily a view about the nature of moral facts or moral beliefs —this form of the view more often goes by the name "sentimentalism". Others take the view to be primarily about the nature of justifying moral beliefs —this form of the view more often goes by the name "moral sense theory". However, some theorists take the view to be one which claims that both moral facts and how one comes to be justified in believing them are necessarily bound up with human emotions.
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is a 1977 work of ethics by J. L. Mackie known for its espousal of moral skepticism and the argument from queerness.
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