What Ethical System Do Most Moral Nihilists Follow?

Assuming moral nihilists follow any ethical theory. I don't hear stories of jails and prisons filling up with them. So I assume they do.

In case you don't know, moral nihilism is the denial that there can be any moral facts. Or in any event, any moral directives that are intrinsically motivating (as one guy put it, I think on these boards in fact). (FYI, Wikipedia does a good article on the subject. Here: read.)

I mean, are they all or mostly utilitarians? Egoists? Communists? You get the picture. Feel free to include your own experiences too, if applicable.

 

Probably mostly utilitarian. I'm not sure many people would describe themselves as moral nihilists, it sounds dreary. But I think it's a hop and a skip from cultural relativism which I think alot of people online ascribe to.

 

I believe it's to be understood as a negation identity.

Like "I am a nihilist towards the notion that the framework(s) people have established for morality encompass anything fundamentally real."

Rather than "I am a nihilist and I ascribe to morality."

 

I had created a thread on the eastern philosophical perspective on nihilism and existentialism negating them.

Female enlightened master Rajini Menon on attaining enlightenment by adhering to virtuous conduct...

The nazis, fascists, communists adopted nihilistic theories shrewdly to support their doctrines for the violent overthrowing of the seemingly old or decadent or exploitative world order. For them nihilism as a tool was utilitarian as long as it served their ideological ends after which it was dumped or discarded.

Like everything else, moral nihilism as a tool may be correctly used in the right and proper context, provided there is sound and clear judgement behind it.

 

Existentialism, as alluded to in the previous post, easily extends into moral nihilism. Sartre explained, and I will take liberty with paraphrasing because I am too lazy to go down and dig around in my library for the book he wrote this in, that...

Wait, I just read AjayO's thread and it was filled with quotations, so let me quote what I remember of the passage, which will be in quotation marks, and the rest will be paraphrased:

"The..." fact that we have no proof one way or another that God does exist means that we may very well be in this alone. So it is imperative for the sake of all mankind that we do good and work to make the world better for everyone. ---Sartre

Ok, in all fairness, I don't even remember if that passage began with "The" but in keeping to scholarly authenticity, I am almost 99% certain that in that paragraph there was a sentence that began, "The..."

 

I'm not trying to detract here, but to me the term moral nihilist sounds like a label I would assign to someone rather than one that they would take upon themselves. & I don't know what it means..

EDIT: Oh, I see. There is a definition.

 

On a sidenote on just what is a Nihilist, people have called me a Nihilist because I profess that we are living in the Age of Nihilism, and that there is no more truth, value, meaning or authenticity in today's world at a cultural level. But my whole philosophy is about how to rediscover truth, meaning, value, and authenticity in this meaningless world. And not just at an individual level but at a cultural level. I think that many of those who are labeled nihilists, are really just trying to find a way to escape it, fix it, or to come out on the otherside.

A true nihilist that embraces it, is a joker that has completely given up on life and does not give a F#@! about anything.

 

For the 100th fucking time I'm sure..... Human beings are born with a built in sense of morality called sympathy and empathy. Everyone has this regardless of belief systems. Unless their brain is literally defective, like sociopath or psychopath disorders. Even if you are fucking brainwashed from childhood that morality is a limited gift from a fickle sky monster, and fed lies distorting the truth of morality, you still have sympathy and empathy. Even if you see religion as an organization of ignorant lies and manipulations, you still have sympathy and empathy. Even if you come to the belief that life has no meaning, you still have sympathy and empathy.

 

Let's go with the statement: Stealing is immoral

What if someone starving steals food from someone with a surplus of food?

If you are against the person stealing, than you're being unempathetic and unsympathetic to the starving person which is contradicting a built in sense of morality and if you think stealing is ok in this situation than the above statement is meaningless (if not false) as it's not true in all possible situations.

 

Stealing to not starve to death is not immoral, it's survival. If I was a Christian, I could easily self justify killing Mr Surplus and taking everything including his wife. Then all I have to do is repent and ask forgiveness and then I'm a golden righteous ass motherfucker.

 

Hedonists

 

You're proving the moral nihilists main premise, that what we generally deem as morality is entirely conditional and thus there are no such thing as logical moral statements, moral statements are utilitarian.

 

Well shit, I disagree. There would never be any known sociopathic disorder if doctors and scientists were not in acknowledgement of some kind of standard common morality behavioral traits. How could there ever be a diagnosis if there was no professional agreement in regards to 'LOGICAL MORAL statements' or behaviors.

 

If the notion that diagnosis met the barometer for deductive logical statements there would be no such thing as a misdiagnosis.

Are there sociopathic disorder diagnoses in remote villages in Africa?

The fact that people derive value from and utilize communally shared philosophies and/or ethics doesn't ensure they are inherently logical or valid. In the vein of your example, a religious person might ask since theologists and priests agree on set doctrine how would people speaking in tongues possibly occur if they weren't channeling the holy spirit?

Morality has this inextricable tie with emotion and thus I think it's a tricky abstraction to assess beyond utilitarian understanding.

 

Ummmmmm... what's wrong with utilitarian understanding?

Sure there's grey areas in the margins but there's also a clear logical area where reasonable scientific professionals can agree on what is and what is not moral behavior. Are you saying science has no right to use this word or what? "Killing babies for pleasure" is a clinically logical immoral behavior.

 

Nothing... No one is suggesting there is. But the objective is to go beyond that to demonstrate that morality is innate, a la Kantian Categorical Imperative, derived from God, or developed out of neurochemical complexity, to refute the nihilist's position.

I've been been trying to understand the position of the topic group in question... Philosophy 101. This is a complex topic which has been discussed for millennia and appealing to emotion rarely, if ever, demonstrates the faults in a position.

I'm not saying that scientists have no right to use the word but Is the word even used in the DSM?

A much more persuasive example than the previous ones.

 

I'm puzzled by the topic. I thought a "moral nihilist" by definition is a person who doesn't follow any ethical theory, because (s)he denies they have value. Is a "moral nihilist" different from a sociopath, in any other way than getting philosophical about it? As for jails and prisons filling up with them, they don't have the label tattooed on their foreheads so how do we know?

 

I think they base it on society's minimum common denominator of "normal" or acceptable behavior. I think human ethical systems are rooted in empathy and reciprocal altruism, which are survival-based emotions found in non-human as well as human species. Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson posits that in the course of human evolution, the brain became modularized early on to accommodate the competing pulls of self and society. He tends to agree with Thomas Huxley that humans were selected on the basis of co-operative, as well as competitive behaviors. In Freudian terms, this would be the struggle between id and superego, sorted out by the ego in ceaseless struggles. Psychologist Steven Pinker observes: "the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature , and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism and other versions of Blank Slate." Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals." (The Blank Slate, p. 40)

As the basis for a system of universal ethics, empathy and reciprocal altruism have their limitations, since both seem to apply most intensely to genetically related individuals or those who are perceived to be most like ourselves. As societies expanded beyond village and tribe, conquest and commerce provided incentives to include strangers--but universalism in ethics was a long time coming, coinciding with the so-called Axial Age as philosophers, ethicists and prophets reacted to the havoc of barbarian marauders. (8th to 3rd centuries BCE). Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History ; Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation.

So why should we be good? To please God? To avoid the loss of Heaven and/or the pains of Hell? To avoid social censure? Because it conforms to some societal or philosophical ideal we've internalized? Because it feels good, or conforms to some self-concept we have of ourselves? Depending on the individual, any or all of these motives may come into play. I think that whatever meaning my own existence might have is tied to love of God and neighbor.

And what is good? You've been talking about utilitarianism, which is a useful philosophical starting point: good is what promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in the long run. I tend to favor J.S. Mill's qualitative version over Bentham's hedonic calculus. Pushpin is not as good as poetry. It would be better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Mill argues that if two satisfying activites are in competition, and one is "by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account (Utilitarianism, II 5).

Mill and I give preference to the more altruistic, high-minded pleasures of peace, love and understanding over the baser ones like sex, drugs, rock n' roll, wealth, status and power. Viktor Frankl (Man in Search of Himself; The Quest for Meaning) argues persuasively that the latter are blind alleys in our quest for meaning. Not all would agree, which is one of the flaws in the utilitarian system. I also prefer to add a contractarian component to the utilitarian model to mitigate the majoritarian tendency to sacrifice minorities. Rawls' priniciple of the "least advantaged"--that all inequalities must work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society--should serve this purpose. Utilitarianism is also exclusively consequentialist in ignoring an actor's intentions and focusing solely on the results of the actions. Carried to its logical extreme, this could lead to an "end justifies the means", society over individual, orientation which I find dangerous. An approach balancing a utilitarian perspective with duty-based Kantian deonotological concerns could provide a needed corrective. Introduction of Kant's principle of universalizing maxims, which is similar to the golden rule, should work in introducing this dimension. Philosophical systems can clarify moral decisions, but I think intuition is also properly involved in mitigating the consequences of abstract systems.

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