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comment by bioemerl
bioemerl  ·  3182 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Your phone was made by slaves: a primer on the secret economy

    That said, I doubt your self-claimed moral nihilism, simply because you evidently feel there's something amiss about killing so many animals for meat, burning up the planet and buying slave-made gadgets.

I don't believe anything is amiss about them, I believe other people think that is true, and use the statements to make an emotional point.

I talk about things from the context of "Traditional right and wrong" not of my own views, and attempt to show just how much the world fails to follow the words of that tradition to show people just how wrong that assumption of morality is.

    Perhaps you're more of a skeptic than a nihilist.

I go by nihilism from the standpoint of "there is no definite right and wrong" instead right and wrong is defined entirely by one's goals, and what they believe should and should not be done to achieve them.

In this case, all these "immoral" things serve goals, they make the world better in the long run, and doing them is better for humanity at the end of the day. We, as a whole, are a massive decision making and self-aware society, and the actions we take are based on the pressures we face from outside factors. Morality is determined by those pressures, not by our quest for the true common good.





rrrrr  ·  3181 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I thought a little more about what I wrote and why it didn't quite ring true to me. Actually I think it smacked of the assumption that you cannot care unless you buy into some kind of moral system, if only an implicit one. And in fact I don't believe that.

The notion that caring implies morality is, I think, an implicit dogma among some religions and moral philosophies that's not borne out by the experience of living. In fact it's quite possible, common, and even wise, to care for the world without feeling any need to systematize that care, and without it being possible to capture the dynamic of that care in some systematic model. We become dumb when we think we've "got it" with some moral system and then set about applying moral rules and measures to life. We also tend to become hypocritical, as you point out.

So it's quite possible to care about stuff without believing in morality, and it'd do us all good to get over the idea that without morality we'd become heartless monsters. I see care as a living engagement with the world and morality as a cheap substitute for that, an attempt to replace the irreducible complexity of life with a simplistic model that absolves us of personal responsibility in the moment.

And that means that a moral nihilist is nothing to be afraid of. So thanks - you helped me see more clearly how, despite my deeper views, I still associated being humane and caring with "morality". In fact it can be a bold and an enriching step to leave morality behind. And perhaps you are a moral nihilist, and perhaps I learned something from my kneejerk reaction to that.