{"id":4851,"date":"2016-04-24T20:08:04","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T01:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4851"},"modified":"2016-04-25T06:09:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-25T11:09:54","slug":"morality-and-the-truth-as-nihilism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/24\/morality\/morality-and-the-truth-as-nihilism\/","title":{"rendered":"Morality and the Truth as “Nihilism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the keepers of the official dogmas in the Academy encounter an inconvenient truth, they refute it by calling it bad names.\u00a0 For example, the\u00a0fact of human biodiversity is “racist,” and the fact of human nature was “fascist” back in the heyday of the Blank Slate.\u00a0 I encountered another example in “Ethics” journal in one of the articles I discussed in a recent post; Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument<\/em><\/a>, by Tomas Bogardus.\u00a0 It was discretely positioned in a footnote to the following sentence:<\/p>\n

Do these evolutionary considerations generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism, that is, the view that evaluative properties are mind-independent features of reality and we sometimes have knowledge of them?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The footnote reads as follows:<\/p>\n

As opposed to nihilism – on which there are no moral truths – and subjectivist constructivism or expressivism, on which moral truths are functions of our evaluative attitudes themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This “scientific” use of\u00a0the pejorative term “nihilism”\u00a0to “refute” the conclusion that there are no moral truths fits the usual pattern.\u00a0 According to its Wiki blurb<\/a>, the term “nihilism” was used in a similar manner when it was first coined by Friedrich Jacobi to “refute” disbelief in the transcendence of God.\u00a0 Wiki gives a whole genealogy of the various uses of the term.\u00a0 However, the most common image the term evokes is probably one\u00a0of wild-eyed, bomb hurling\u00a019th century Russian radicals.\u00a0 No matter.\u00a0 If something is true, it will remain true regardless of how often it is denounced as racist, fascist, or nihilist.<\/p>\n

At this point in time, the truth about morality is sufficiently obvious to anyone who cares to think about it.\u00a0 It is a manifestation of behavioral predispositions that evolved at times very different from the present.\u00a0 It has no purpose.\u00a0 It exists because the genes responsible for its existence happened to improve the odds that the package of genes to which they belonged would survive and reproduce.\u00a0 That truth is very inconvenient.\u00a0 It reduces the “expertise” of the “experts on ethics,” an “expertise” that is the basis of their respect and authority in society, and not infrequently of their gainful employment as well, to an expertise about nothing.\u00a0 It also exposes that which the vast majority of human beings “know in their bones” to be true as an illusion.\u00a0 For all that, it remains true.<\/p>\n

To the extent that the term “nihilist” has any meaning in the context of morality at all, it suggests that the world will dissolve in moral chaos unless some basis for objective morality can be extracted from the vacuum.\u00a0 Rape, murder and mayhem will prevail when we all realize we’ve been hoodwinked by the philosophers all these years, and there really is no such basis.\u00a0 The truth is rather more prosaic.\u00a0 Human beings will\u00a0behave morally regardless of the intellectual fashions prevailing among the philosophers because it is their nature to act morally.<\/p>\n

Moral chaos will not result from mankind finally learning the “nihilist” truth about morality.\u00a0 Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a state of moral chaos worse than the one we’re already in.\u00a0 Chaos doesn’t exist because of a gradually spreading understanding of the subjective roots of morality.\u00a0 Rather, it exists as a byproduct of continued attempts to prop up the fa\u00e7ade of moral realism.\u00a0 The current “bathroom wars” are an instructive if somewhat ludicrous example.\u00a0 They demonstrate both the strong connection between custom and morality, and the typical post hoc<\/em> rationalization of moral “truths” described by Jonathan Haidt in his paper, The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Edvard Westermarck<\/a> explored the custom\/morality connection in his Ethical Relativity<\/em><\/a>, an indispensable text for anyone interested in the subject of moral behavior.\u00a0 According to Westermarck,<\/p>\n

Customs are not merely public habits – the habits of a certain circle of men, a racial or national community, a rank or class of society – but they are at the same time rules of conduct.\u00a0 As Cicero observes, the customs of a people “are precepts in themselves.”\u00a0 We say that “custom commands,” or “custom demands,” and even when custom simply allows the commission of a certain class of actions, it implicitly lays down the rule that such actions are not to be interfered with.\u00a0 And the rule of custom is conceived of as a moral rule, which decides what is right and wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, the rule of custom can be challenged.\u00a0 Westermarck noted that, as societies became more complex,<\/p>\n

Individuals arose who found fault with the moral ideas prevalent in the community to which they belonged, criticizing them on the basis of their own individual feelings… In the course of progressive civilization the moral consciousness has tended towards a greater equalization of rights, towards an expansion of the circle within which the same moral rules are held applicable.\u00a0 And this process has been largely due to the example of influential individuals and their efforts to raise public opinion to their own standard of right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Westermarck points out, in both cases the individuals involved are responding to subjective\u00a0moral emotions, yet in both cases they\u00a0suffer from the illusion that\u00a0their emotions somehow correspond to objective facts about good and evil.\u00a0 In the case of the bathroom wars, the defenders of custom rationalize their disapproval after the fact by evoking lurid pictures of perverts molesting little girls.\u00a0 The problem is that, at least to the best of my knowledge,\u00a0there is no data indicating that anything\u00a0of the sort involving a transgender person has ever happened.\u00a0 On the other side, the LGBT community points to this disconnect without realizing that they are just as deluded in their belief that their preferred bathroom rules are distilled straight out of objective Good and Evil.\u00a0 In fact, they are nothing but personal preferences, with no more legitimate normative authority than the different rules preferred by others.\u00a0 It seems to me that the term “nihilism” is better applied to this absurd state of affairs than to a correct understanding of what morality is and why it exists.<\/p>\n

Suppose that in some future utopia the chimera of “moral realism” were finally exchanged for such a correct understanding, at least by most of us.\u00a0 It would change very little.\u00a0 Our moral emotions would still be there, and we would respond to them as we always have.\u00a0 “Moral relativism” would be no more prevalent than it is today, because it is not our nature to be moral relativists.\u00a0 However, we might have a fighting chance of coming up with a set of moral “customs” that most of us could accept, along with a similarly accepted way to change them if necessary.\u00a0 I would certainly prefer such a utopia to the moral obscurantism that prevails today.\u00a0 If nothing else it would tend to limit the moral exhibitionism and virtuous grandstanding that led directly to the ideological disasters of the 20th century, and yet still pass as the “enlightened” way to alter the moral rules that apply in bathrooms and elsewhere.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps in such a utopia\u00a0“nihilism” would be rejected even more firmly than it is today, because people would finally realize that, in spite of the subjective, emotional source of all moral rules, human societies can’t exist without them.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the keepers of the official dogmas in the Academy encounter an inconvenient truth, they refute it by calling it bad names.\u00a0 For example, the\u00a0fact of human biodiversity is “racist,” and the fact of human nature was “fascist” back in the heyday of the Blank Slate.\u00a0 I encountered another example in “Ethics” journal in one … Continue reading “Morality and the Truth as “Nihilism””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[181,110,105,6,166,28,5],"tags":[120,299],"class_list":["post-4851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blank-slate","category-ethics","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-morality","tag-morality-2","tag-westermarck"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1gf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4851"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4861,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}