Ah yes, the “Let’s say I have a gun. And I am pointing the gun at you right now.” argument. Often followed by the “Look out your window.” debate tactic.
It’s like the philosopher bit in Baldur’s Gate 2. A philosopher is arguing with a man about this and then the man in question murders him in plain sight.
If you are quick enough, you can stop the philosopher from being killed. If you do so, the philosopher will be mad at you because you prevented him from proving his point to the man he was speaking to.
I know that this is a joke, but an actual nihilist would just say “ok then”
If they get down on their knees, cry and wet themselves, they are not a nihilist.
I’m a nihilist and I don’t think that’s true whatsoever. At least to be a moral nihilist, it just means I don’t believe in any metaethical framework (no “oughts”)
Regardless of whether or not I think killing me would have or create some objectively bad property, I have an egotistical attachment to living, and of course I’m going to try to avoid it.
My ethics and my desires are related but different.
Perfectly explained. Thank you.
People will ask moral nihilists and similar folk who take that view what stops them from doing all kinds of harmful things to themselves and others.
Like they don’t quite understand that there’s no desire to rob or murder people and that’s reason enough.
Having explored moral nihilism ( but you and I have been through that and this is not our fate… ) I just found it leads to consequentialism and utilitarianism: what mores would lead to the society I want to see? Which drops us not far from Kantism.
The problem with Kantism is there are conflicting ideals, and some rivals are at the door with mp40s looking for the Jewish refugees hiding in your basement.
Existential nihilism invites us to try to create that which is meaningful, what is potentially an impossible or absurd task, as Camus notes, but yes, the alternatives are either suicide or philosophical suicide (taking a leap of faith, typically in some major religion).
That said, getting murdered rapidly (instantly is preferred) seems to me a lot better than dying of deterioration over weeks or months, and while I live in relative comfort right now, it is precarious, and can be brought to ruin easily. So while a raid by SWAT on the warpath is immediately and momentarily terrifying, it’s certainly better than a long bout of homelessness and hunger before succumbing to age, misery and the elements. Fire away.
Does existential nihilism not argue that we can’t create meaning because meaning categorically can’t exist? I feel like you’re talking of Existentialism, which is a different thing.
Camus notes three options: the two you mentioned, as well as embracing the absurd and rebelling against it.
I think meaning and existence are a matter of semantics. The quadratic formula is a fundamental tool of mathematics? Does it exist? Not materially, in that it’s one statement in an abstract language. Similarly, while we can demonstrate that gravity is a consistent force that acts upon us, and even have a law (some mathematical rules) that accurately model how objects behave under the influence of gravity (accurate enough to fling space probes to distant planets), the theory of gravity is only a description of the material (very similar to Ceci n’est pas une pipe ).
When a nihilist asserts that knowledge, morality and meaning don’t exist, that is to say they don’t exist much the way the quadratic formula or the law of gravity doesn’t actually exist. While we can understand gravity to a high degree of accuracy, we cannot know the future outcome of a gravitational event (say, the flight trajectory of a space mission) until we see the end results (and even then we’re only assessing what happened based on how we interpret the evidence of the aftermath.)
None of this is to say we cannot invent our own meaning (and for social purposes meaning and mores can be very useful!) but they remain in the abstract. They might inform what your intentions are, and what actions you choose to take, but until after you’ve taken action, all of that is imaginary.
Because we are highly social creatures and organizing is one of our superpowers, we take interpretation of the real, and the meaning we derive from it very seriously. We also take mores very seriously (to which I point to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which highlights how we should treat refugees (id est, the least of us ), but as grandiose as such a charter might be, it only exists as an idea that we communicate to others and decide whether or not we agree to treat each other in kind. But the ephemeral nature of these social constructs becomes very clear in the jungle, when microbes, pathogens and hungry predators all ignore our rights, mores and higher purposes and descend upon us without hesitation.
Much the way King Cnut’s royal authority was not recognized by the sea foam, meaning exists only so far as those who observe and regard it.
