Against Moral Nihilism
Video version of this article here: https://youtu.be/OExAQkmBBkU
Consequentialist: Whether an action is good or evil depends only on the consequences of that action.
Deontologist: Not true. Sometimes bad actions can have good results, or vice versa. For example, should a doctor kill one healthy patient, cut his organs out, and redistribute them to the five sick dying patients who would be saved by those organs? Obviously not. This would have good results on net—four lives saved! But it's still murder, and therefore evil, so morality isn't determined by consequences.
Consequentialist: That action may not have good results. You're leaving out the possibility that I'll be caught and the damage that will do to trust in the medical profession. You're leaving out the chance that I will screw up one or more of the requisite surgeries resulting in more death. You're leaving out the question of how many years of life the healthy patient would have had compared to how many years of life the sick patients will get on their stolen organs—not to mention quality of life.
Deontologist: You're just fighting the hypothetical. Assume that all of those risks are negligible and their lives are otherwise identical.
Consequentialist: Now you're making the hypothetical totally implausible and therefore unintuitive, which is a problem because your argument relies on my moral intuition that the doctor did something wrong. Of course my moral intuition will give me the wrong answer when you ask me to assume away factors that are too obviously important to ignore. But there is a famous hypothetical that resolves this—the trolley problem. There's a trolley hurtling down some train train tracks. There are five people tied to the tracks in front of it. You can pull a lever that diverts it down another track where only one person is tied up, however then you will have caused one persons death, rather than simply failing to prevent the deaths of five. Now that we have a situation where the obvious and intuitive risks are absent in the hypothetical (rather than present, but supposed to be assumed away) it becomes obvious what the right choice is: pull the lever for consequentialism.
Deontologist: I don't agree that the answer in that situation is so obvious. I don't actually think you should pull the lever.
Consequentialist: All I need to do is raise the stakes. Let's say that instead of five people tied to the tracks ahead there is a button on the tracks ahead. When the trolley runs over this button everyone on earth except the person tied to the alternate track will be killed.
Deontologist: Now whose hypothetical is becoming contrived and unintuitive? In any case, I still don't think the answer is so clear.
Consequentialist: I can't believe you're actually thinking about biting the bullet on this one. Basically nobody would say that you should accept the extinction of humanity in order to follow some contrived ethical maxim.
Deontologist: I don't know about that. Let's ask that guy over there, hey buddy, what do you think?
Nihilist: Your prattle amuses me. Good? Evil? These are meaningless constructs that humans bicker about incessantly, never willing to consider the obvious truth: there is no morality. ["Crawling" by Linkin Park begins to play in the background] The universe is cold and indifferent to your meaningless gibbering about what "ought" to be. There is only what is in this vast and uncaring world. Reason will not save you from the blunt impact of reality. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger!
What Is Moral Nihilism?
A moral nihilist is someone who sees morality as a silly superstition. Someone who thinks that ultimately nothing is really right or wrong. When the moral nihilist hears two people arguing, one trying to convince the other that some act is "morally wrong", he scoffs.
Sometimes the scoffing will come along with a caveat that morality may be useful in some sense, but that there is still something fundamentally irrational about it. At the extremely moderate end, a moral nihilist may even say that while moral nihilism is technically true, he acts as though morality were real.
I'm going to argue against this view. There is a real aspect of reality that conforms to our intuitive concept of "morality" so well that it would be absurd if we did not call it "morality".
First, I'm going to broaden my attack. I want to make sure I'm responding to all moral nihilists, even the moral nihilists who don't know they're moral nihilists. If you would describe your opinion of morality as "might makes right", you are also a moral nihilist. If, when confronted with a question of morality, you simply brush it off with "morality is subjective", you are also also a moral nihilist.
I am now telling people what they are, which people tend not to like, so I had better justify myself quickly.
Might Makes Right
To be fair, this statement is sometimes used for purposes other than moral nihilism. Sometimes it's meant to make the point that whatever your idea of morality is, it's pretty inconsequential if you don't have the power to enforce it. If you're using it this way, make sure you're not using it to respond to a moral claim. If I say "I think this thing is immoral" and you chortle and say "the only morality is might makes right. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." then despite how cool you think that makes you sound, it's off topic. You may be correct (my understanding of morality may be impotent if I'm without might) but that says nothing about whether or not an act is in fact moral.
But this is all with respect to a non-literal interpretation which doesn't actually make a direct statement about morality at all. If we instead interpret the statement "might makes right" literally, then it actually carries an implication of moral nihilism. Taken literally, the claim "might makes right" means that whatever the mighty do is necessarily right. Presumably might in this context is not just physical strength, but whatever ability you use to manifest your will in reality. Intelligence is a kind of "might", popularity is a kind of "might", and so on.
By this definition nothing can be done that is not an example of might prevailing. If anything happens that you didn't want to happen then you were not the one with the might, and so "what the mighty determine" is indistinguishable from "what happens". Instead of "might makes right" you may as well just say "whatever happens is right".
Furthermore, if might really is right then nothing can ever happen that is not right either. If everything that happens is necessarily right, then "right" (in a moral sense) is also indistinguishable from "what happens".
If you enter a discussion of morality and you effectively say "what happens is what happens", you're either failing to make a relevant comment, or you're trying to say that you don't believe in morality at all. Therefore, to the extent that it's even relevant to a conversation about morality, the statement "might makes right" is just a way of saying "there is no right" that manages to sound even more like teenage angst.
Morality Is Subjective
This is another way that people try to say that they don't believe in morality without actually saying it.
First of all, I want to get this out of the way because it's bafflingly common. Whether morality is subjective has nothing to do with whether we disagree on it. Often people will say "this one guy, or this one culture considers this act to be immoral, while this other guy, or this other culture considers it to be perfectly fine, so morality is really subjective." That doesn't logically follow at all. Cultures and individuals disagree on scientific claims as well. Not all cultures realized the earth was round, but that didn't make the shape of the earth "subjective". It's still objective, it's just disputed.
"Subjective" means relating to a specific person or "subject". For example, let's take the statement "steak is delicious". The most common definition of the word "delicious" is basically equivalent to saying that you personally like the taste. In that sense, deliciousness is subjective. If I say "steak is delicious", it's true. When people who don't like steak (communists probably) make that same statement then it is false. Perhaps there would be some other implied subject for deliciousness to apply to in different contexts. Perhaps a chef might mean that the average person who he's likely to serve likes steak. The point is that "deliciousness" can be described as "subjective" because it describes not an aspect of the thing itself, but rather something that happens in a subject's mind in response to that thing.
This is in contrast to a term which is objective, which describes something about the object in question rather than how in interacts with a subject. For example, "squareness" is an objective property. If we're both looking at a shape which has four equal sides and four equal angles, then it doesn't matter who says it's a square, it simply is one.
As you might have noticed, this is a purely linguistic distinction. So, to say that morality is subjective only says something about the word. Not that that's unimportant. We need to understand words. So, what would it mean for "morality" to be subjective in the same way that "deliciousness" is?
It would mean that "morality" simply describes a reaction we have to something, rather than the thing itself. To say something is immoral in this sense is to say that it offends our moral sensibilities. We see someone drop kick a baby, we feel a bad feeling. Not just any bad feeling, mind you, (this is not the idea that immorality is just when we dislike something) but a specific bad feeling—the feeling of being morally offended.
We can all intuitively distinguish between different kinds of bad feelings. When we see someone eat something off the floor we feel disgust, when we see a dangerous animal we feel fear. We have no problem telling the difference between the feelings.
Similarly, you probably have no problem distinguishing the feeling you had when I mentioned someone drop-kicking a baby. I mean, this is being written for the internet so I bet some of you laughed, but you probably still feel at least a little of the negative feeling called "moral offense"—which you can tell is different from other negative feelings like disgust and fear.
But hold on, aren't I supposed to be arguing that moral subjectivism is moral nihilism? So far it sounds like our subjectivist believes that morality is as real as deliciousness and scariness. In what sense is that moral nihilism?
Well, when two people are having a moral argument, they're trying to convince one another through arguments. Appeals to consequences and principles that are supposed to convince their interlocutors that what they thought was moral was in fact immoral (or vice versa).
This would make no sense for deliciousness. I wouldn't try to tell you that the meal you thought you enjoyed eating, which you thought was delicious, actually tasted bad and you didn't enjoy it at all. This is because your direct experience is the only determining factor that decides whether something is, to you, delicious.
For moral arguments to make sense there must be something other than our subjective experience that we're talking about. If you're saying that morality is purely subjective, you're saying is that there is no external aspect of the world which we are referring to when we talking about morality. So the moral subjectivist is a moral nihilist; at least with respect to the kind of morality we refer to when making moral arguments.
Refuting Moral Nihilism
Having corralled "might makes right", moral subjectivism and explicit moral nihilism into the same spot, I can now take out all three in one fell swoop.
In step one I point out that moral nihilists do things.
Not only do they do things, but they do things for reasons.
That is to say, they have things which they value more highly than other things and they take actions which they believe will result in a net gain in the fulfillment of those values. For example, they value eating a sandwich more highly than they value being lazy and sitting on the couch, so they make the trade. They expend the time and effort and get the sandwich to eat.
In step two I concede to moral nihilism completely. A bold strategy when arguing against something, but actually it's surprisingly effective against a lot of hard-to-analyze positions.
That's right nihilists, there is no morality. Your hard-nosed realism has won out against us silly romantics who believe in ethics[1]. Now we're ready for step three: analyze the situations we used to apply morality to, without such foolish superstitions.
How would a nihilist doctor decide whether to steal the organs from a healthy man in order to save the lives of five dying patients? Of course he'd just go with his preferences—as we discussed before, despite being a moral nihilist, he still personally values some things above others. So, it depends on preferences such as whether he would rather one person to die or five.
It might sound obvious which he'd prefer, but there's no reason to prefer fewer people dying to more. As the rational, realistic nihilists we now are, we know that reason can not tell us what to value. After all, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger[2]. That being said, do you prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger? I don't think that I do. I also would prefer, all else equal, for my actions to cause fewer people to die rather than more. So, maybe I would kill the man and redistribute his organs.
Then again, I would also prefer, all else equal, to not be caught killing people. Not just for my own sake, but if I damaged the reputation of the medical profession (or even just my own reputation as a doctor) and as a result people didn't get medical treatment that they needed, I would feel really bad about that.
Also, let's not forget that I might screw up the surgeries. I'd really rather not have the whole lot of them die on me. That's also ignoring the question of how many years of life the healthy patient would have had compared to how many years of life the sick patients will get on their stolen organs—not to mention quality of life.
That's right, quality of life. I would personally prefer that people have better lives rather than worse ones (all else equal). In fact, that's kind of the reason I would prefer people to not die in the first place. If people die then I feel like their quality of life has effectively dropped to zero.
But how to weigh up the quality of life brought on by a longer life against the quality of life from not having painful surgery complications? More pressingly, how to weigh up any of these benefits interpersonally? A year to one man is not necessarily the same as a year to another.
The question of how to compare values interpersonally—to weigh up the values of one man against the values of another—is a tough one. It isn't entirely unanswerable though. We seem to manage interpersonal value judgements all the time. If I have a spare concert ticket to give to one of my friends, I will probably give it to the one who likes the band more. That is an interpersonal value comparison and it seems to make intuitive sense.
There are more questions I could ask, but let's pause and take stock of what we've got so far. You might have noticed that all of these questions come from the same source: the fact that one of the things I value is the fulfillment of values. If I imagine a world in which more people have their values fulfilled vs one in which fewer people do, then all else equal, I prefer the former.
This is sounding dangerously like consequentialism, but of course, I have conceded nihilism, so it can't possibly be that. This is all just based on my own personal values, not on morality... right?
Besides, when I think about what might happen if everyone acted on that simple value fulfillment maximizing basis, it doesn't sound too good. Imagine that every time you went to the doctor there was the danger that he'd kill you and cut out your organs. I don't think too many people would go to the doctor, and paradoxically, that would result in fewer values being fulfilled. Now, I'm not "everyone" so me acting on a simple value-maximization basis like that isn't necessarily going to result in that awful world I'm worried about... but I would be contributing to such a world, and I'm not sure I even want to do that. I suppose what I really want to do is to act in a way such that I'm contributing to a world in which values are maximally fulfilled.
This is sounding dangerously like deontology, but of course, I have conceded nihilism so it's can't possibly be that. This is all just based on my own personal values, not on morality...
But hold a second, what exactly is morality? Because the reasoning I'm doing here sounds a heck of a lot like it. The reasoning is not broadly about how to fulfil my values, but specifically about how to fulfil those values that pertain to the fulfillment of values. One might call that the analysis of the fulfillment meta-values. It does start from my subjective preferences, but it's an objective fact that some actions I take will fulfill these meta-values more effectively than others.
What if we were to define morality as "the analysis of the fulfillment of meta-values"? We've already seen that both deontology and consequentialism fit nicely with that definition, and most moral theories can be thought of as variants of one of those two. Perhaps the most prominent exceptions are theological theories of ethics, so what about those? Well, those determine good and bad based on what God wants. Or in other words, the fulfillment of God's values. My definition appears to handle that too.
An obvious criticism at this point is that I'm just redefining morality in order to be able to say it's real and objective. But am I redefining morality?
I don't think so.
Merriam-Webster defines morality in a number of ways, but all of them pass the buck to another word. For example: "Conformity to ideals of right human conduct."
This just passes the buck to "right". What does "right" mean in this context? Well, "right and wrong" need to be defined in terms of a goal. There is an objectively right and wrong way to build a table... assuming that the goal is to have a table which succeeds in standing up. But in a moral argument, "building a table which stands up" is probably not the assumed goal by which we are judging right and wrong. If I said "your action is immoral because it does not result in a table which stands up", you would probably say that it is bad carpentry, but is not necessarily bad morally. On the other hand, if I said "your action is immoral because it prevents people from fulfilling their values" then that might sound a bit more sensible.
That is my conception of morality: The analysis of the fulfillment of meta-values.
Taking Morality for a Test Drive
This might sound like it's wheeling its way back to moral subjectivism. If we all have different meta-values, then surely what is moral to me will depend on my meta-values, what's moral to you will depend on yours, and these will surely differ.
There's some truth to this argument. Like all concepts there are aspects of subjectivity and objectivity involved. However, I have three counter-points:
My conception of morality is the analysis of how to fulfill meta-values, not simply the meta-values themselves. Your meta-values may be subjective but it is an objective fact whether a given course of action will or will not successfully fulfill them. For example, you may value your friend fulfilling his values. That is a meta-value. If your friend likes beer and hates getting stabbed in the neck it would be moral for you to get him a beer and immoral for you to stab him in the neck.
There are commonalities between values of people. Therefore the same objective analysis of how to fulfill these values will often be the same between people.
Most importantly, there are important objective statements we can make about the fulfillment of values irrespective of what those values are.
In the example for this third point will be taking our new morality for a test drive to see if it can produce moral standards that we recognize as such. My favorite moral standard comes from our good old friend voluntarism. A concept which I will never tire of repeating until everyone starts realizing how indispensable it is. If two people voluntarily engage in an interaction, each person must value what he got out of the interaction more than what he gave up to engage in it—otherwise he would not have engaged in it.[3] If you trade your apple for my orange you must value my orange more than your apple. If you play a game with me you must value the enjoyment you get from the game more than the time you give up to play it. This tells us that to the extent that we place a positive value on people fulfilling their values, we have some reason to expect voluntary interactions to be good—no matter what those values are.
We just derived something that sounds suspiciously like a moral principle starting from simple and obvious premises. That's a big deal when trying to refute moral nihilism, so let's run through it again.
If you care about the fulfillment of people's values (which is to say, if you have meta-values) then you have some reason to favor voluntary interactions.
You objectively do care about the fulfillment of people's values (wh.
Therefore:
You have some reason to favor voluntary interactions.
We have established a moral principle and it is objectively true that you should use it, given goals which you actually have. It is only a general principle. I have only said that you have some reason to favor voluntary interactions, not that all interactions must be voluntary. But general principles are still very useful. If a general principle is sound then you should go with it unless the reasons to do otherwise outweigh the reasons behind the principle. Perhaps there are other principles which will outweigh our voluntarist principle in certain situations, but the voluntarist principle still provides an objectively right and wrong way to act in the absence of other reasoning.
Let's apply our moral principle to the hypothetical from earlier. Should you harvest the organs from the one healthy patient to save the sick patients? Well, according to our general voluntarist principle, no. The healthy patient does not agree to it, and so it is not voluntary. Unless and until we have a countervailing principle, you have an answer to the question. You have meta-values. A general principle which helps you fulfil those meta-values is the voluntarist principle. Killing the healthy patient for his organs violates the voluntarist principle. Therefore you should not kill him. Perhaps you would argue that whether someone agrees to things is not the only way we can determine what people value, and so there is some other countervailing principle that would tell us that in fact we should butcher the innocent man. I will not comment on whether you are right about that, because by making that argument you're already conceding that there is an objectively correct way of achieving the goal of fulfilling meta-values. That is to say that by our working definition of morality there is an objectively moral course of action. You are just disagreeing on what that course of action is.
So, after our test-drive, what do you think? Morality as the analysis of how to fulfill meta-values seems to handle pretty well on the road, no?
I have found that at this point, skeptics of this model of morality will usually assert that this doesn't count as morality, even though this model allows us to engage in all the arguments people usually call moral arguments, and even produces principles that sound indistinguishable from moral principles. Sometimes they'll say "it's not morality because it doesn't give a reason that you ought to be moral". Except it does. Once again, "ought" must be in reference to a given goal ("You ought to do x to achieve y"). You do have the goal of fulfilling people's values. That is a reason you ought to analyze how to fulfill people's values. To me it seems that some people just feel like it doesn't count as morality as soon as you define it to clearly. Unfortunately for those people, facts don't care about your feelings.
Another critique is that my conception of morality is redundant because it simply describes fulfilling your own values, and we already have a way of describing that. But that's not what my conception of morality is. My conception of morality is the methodology for fulfilling a specific subcategory of our values. Specifically, values which pertain to other values. Carpentry is also about a methodology for fulfilling a subcategory of our values, specifically values which can be fulfilled by wooden furniture. Good carpentry is a good methodology for producing (among other things) tables which stand up, because those are the kinds of tables we value. Good morality is a good methodology for fulfilling meta-values, because we do in fact hold meta-values. If my conception of morality is redundant, then so is our conception of carpentry.
It's also worth clarifying that my conception of morality does not necessarily advocate self-sacrifice. You are interested in other people fulfilling their values, but you are also interested in fulfilling your own. A good meta-value analysis will include your own values as well. A good way to illustrate this is to point out that a man who does nothing to help or hurt anyone else, but does make himself happy, is a good man.
Conclusion
This does not mean that morality must necessarily be defined in terms of the fulfillment of meta-values. Please don't go away from this article thinking that I think I've just solved morality—I am aware that I have not. Perhaps there is some other valid conception of morality which is not defined by meta-values at all. After all, definitions are always imperfect simplifications of the intuitions and associations that a word actually provokes in people's minds. However, the fact that my definition seems to work seamlessly in every argument about the morality of any given action, it's hard to argue that it's not a valid conception of morality.
That is all that is necessary to refute moral nihilism—one valid conception of morality which is objectively determinable and provides a prescriptive "ought" for you to fulfill. You objectively do hold some meta-values and there are objectively right and wrong ways to fulfill these meta-values. Therefore, morality is a real thing that you should consider in your life; and even if you're a moral nihilist, you undoubtedly already do.
Yes, I use "morality" and "ethics" interchangeably. I'll leave the question of whether that turns my writing into incomprehensible gobbledygook up to you.
...To quote a man who, curiously, was not a nihilist.
Yes, this does assume some level of rational self-interest. However, this assumption usually sound. Consider a man who feeds you when you're hungry, clothes you when you're naked, entertains you when you're bored, etc. That man would be absurdly altruistic towards you. This is why economists generally use the assumption of rational self-interest. We sometimes fail to make the best decisions for ourselves, however we do things for ourselves more than we do things for others, and more than others do for us, so the assumption works most of the time. Compounding this is the fact that many social systems (the stock market, for example) select out those who fail to act in their rational self-interest. An investor who fails to make a profit ends up with less money to invest in the stock market, meaning that the assumption that stock markets consist of people acting in their rational self-interest is even stronger. Many, perhaps most social systems have this filtering effect to some degree, further justifying the rational self-interest assumption.
