Against Moral Nihilism

I have generally avoided the moral arguments that take place here on Substack. Since I don’t really care whether there are big fat stance independant intuitions or even think such debates are necessarily resolving anything, I have generally preferred to be one of the quiet quietists on many of the debates. As it is such debates are generally outside of my domain, since I am a Christian and have a commitment at the least to certain theological ways of speaking about my obligations to what is right, but recently philosopher at the University of Reading Walter Veit published what he self-confessedly called a “polemic” titled “To hell with moral realism” and a subsequent article titled “the end of moral philosophy,” both arguing for the dispensing entirely of morals and moral language, justified by a stream of what are probably best described as insults towards philosophers and ordinary people who cling to such language. As someone who spends most of my time thinking and writing about religion, my inner Smaug was awoken by Veit’s repeated comparison of moral belief with religion, with myths, and fairytales, all of which are apparently pre-scientific hindrances to rational thinking that should be “consigned to hell.” Veit thinks not just that morals aren’t objectively, stance independently real as some anti-realist philosophers would argue, but that moral language both reflects belief in said objectivity, and should be got rid of and replaced by a kind of amoral utilitarianism aimed at resolving conflicts between subjectively held values.

When suggesting moral language is nothing but an expression of moral realism and that it should be dispensed with, the obvious question would be what moral language and beliefs are doing. Does the moral language of ordinary people reflect absolute moral realism, how should we think about it? What is its value? The answer, according to Veit, is rather depressingly the New Atheist stance towards ordinary people’s beliefs, which is that they are stupid and wrong and need updating according to science. He says rights and wrongs and duties are “leftovers from a pre-scientific age in which dogma and myths ruled over evidence and reason,” and he claims “humans are largely irrational and addicted to their own intuitions, which we had to overcome in order to develop modern science,” resulting in the “dogma of moral realism” which is expressed in the culture wars, for which realism is apparently responsible, causing people to behave like “irrational hooligans.” (I note Walter presents neither any evidence that the culture wars employ the language of objective morality nor that said language is their cause, I assume because the simplicity of the latter claim is enough to render it fairly explanatorily useless.)

Walter’s disdain at those who don’t share his views is not only reserved for the ordinary people apparently addled by moral language but, guess what, all philosophers who don’t agree with him. He compares people who speak about morals to “religious zealots standing in town squares with annoying loud speakers” and the only reason philosophers don’t accept his views is because it “would mean that their job here is done and that they’ve wasted much of their lifetime defending theories that aren’t even close to truth” so they “desperately cling to their alternatives,” again, “like the vast majority of religious leaders.” Thus moral language of rights, wrongs, duties, and so on are “like unicorns, gods, and other fairy tales, they should be consigned to hell.”

One might point out at the outset that the actual arguments here are threadbare, that smearing people who think there are morals is to say the least not exactly a good PR move for someone who wants to argue for self declared moral nihilism, and most obviously that such comments rather transparently reflect gripes, annoyances and prejudices held by the author rather than clear eyed logical conclusions, an ironic fact given Veit is claiming we must dismiss our “convictions” and “deeply held values.” His basis for this certainly appears from his clumsy polemics to be at least in part his own convictions and deeply held values.

When it was pointed out that most of the essay is thin on argumentation, Veit responded that “criticizing a polemic for being polemical is a bit pointless,” a defence that might sound better if it was actually a half decent polemic in the first place or wasn’t written by an actual professional philosopher attempting to market the end of morality to the masses with the wit of a fourteen year old who’s just read The God Delusion for the first time. When I responded that this was pointless, he claimed there in fact was an argument after all: “Premise 1: The main arguments for moral realism depend on intuitions. Premise 2: Intuitions are unreliable. Conclusion: The main arguments for moral realism are unreliable.”

This is rather incongruous given his claims, what Veit was arguing is that we get rid of moral language, become moral nihilists and replace it with some form of cold utilitarianism, something which is as much a claim about the role of moral language as it is about the existence of a certain kind of moral reality. The above argument is adjacent to this, since some might argue ordinary people are merely using moral language rather than making absolute moral claims, or question whether they even have intuitions let alone if that even means anything. Clearly at the outset, one of Walter’s problems arises from his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of certain terms in order to dispense his polemics. One of these would be “intuitions,” which he claims are both the ground of moral realist arguments and also “unreliable.” We are “addicted to our intuitions” and intuitions are what we have to “overcome in order to develop modern science.” Yet the problem with these claims is that “intuitions” doesn’t really mean anything here. If we take it to mean something like a “hunch” then it’s ridiculous to say we had to overcome it to achieve modern science, after all, how many theories and ideas in science started because someone had a hunch they pursued? The hunch itself is not a fact until it becomes something, but it may often be useful, and reflects nothing more than the fact that we aren’t the conscious initiators of our ideas. Some hunches are wrong, some are moments of inspiration. Either way, it’s hard to argue ordinary people see morals primarily as hunches especially in a way that constitutes something that would also interfere with science. So what does it mean? What is unreliable? If intuitions means that we just know some stuff as basic, then there are ways it’s trivially true, as some of Walter’s arguments for his alternatives later assume. Without clarity though none of this means a lot.

The point is, if the whole premise of your argument not just for arguing that morals aren’t real but that moral language both reflects moral realism and is a hindrance to progress is because you think ordinary people express belief in intuitions as revealing objective moral facts and “intuitions are unreliable,” then you are required, rather ironically, to actually defend what you mean by “intuitions,” and show that people believe all that. You yourself would be arguing ordinary people think morals are stance dependently real because of their intuitions and that this is what moral language reflects. In making his claims Veit ties common moral language to the kinds of claims made by certain philosophers he is taking aim at, thus he binds himself to their claims in a way that means he has to defend their basis before claiming they are faulty. If, on the other hand, you recognise that “intuitions” is a hazy and polysemous term that could mean all sorts of things from hunches to emotions to instincts to basic valenced experiences to goodness knows what else, we end up at square one. Throwing in comments like “scientists teach their students that intuitions are unreliable garbage” is helping no one and further reflects Veit’s own inability to see past his annoyances, since a) no scientists are wasting their time saying things like this and b) if they did said student would likely reply “what are you talking about?” to which said scientist would either have to say they don’t know, or refer to something else to which “intuitions” refers.

One might say there is something analogous to religion here, which Veit’s swipes suggest he has an equally low view of. Let us say that propositionally you come to reject theism because you consider some argument for God’s existence false, or perhaps you decide we can at best be agnostic about it because the arguments are not propositionally convincing. Does it follow that all belief in God is nothing but philosophical propositions, that all religion is doing is serving as pre-science, housing factually incorrect beliefs, and must immediately be dispatched? Well, you might reject its propositions, but anyone who wants to make an account of what we are to do about religion has to explain what it actually is and is doing. This seems obvious, we assume, but neither evolutionary nor cognitive accounts of how religion arises are that satisfying let alone widely agreed on, and it must be emphasised that the person who claims to disbelieve in God is not left with nothing, they are left with something that most humans that have ever existed partake in in some form, and whose forms of thinking persist even beyond its bounds. If you reject propositional accounts of God, by definition continuing to view religion through the lens of propositional accounts of God will only hinder your understanding of it. The same is true of morals: if you reject claims about moral realism, you can’t “explain” moral language with “morals don’t exist,” because you have explained nothing. If God is not an explanation for religion, something else is, if absolute morals are not an explanation for moral language because they don’t exist, something else is. “People used to believe stupid stuff” is woefully incurious and reflects not their blindness but yours.

The problem with morals is even more complicated because if we reject God we might still be left with religion and its psychological and cultural components, if we claim to dispense with whatever objective morals are, we are still left with the domain most people understand as moral under a different name. Even calling oneself a “moral nihilist” is still a kind of moral language, and as we will get to, utilitarianism still rests on ‘moral’ foundations. Thus there is a slightly muddled double argument here: if the argument is nothing more than that in some contexts we might be better served if we were less emotional and more pragmatic and more precise with our language and expressions, you aren’t going to have much trouble getting people to agree, although writing a hand waving polemic to claim our language needs to be precise and less emotional might be too hypocritical to be taken seriously; if the argument is that your deeply held values about the wrongness of killing babies or something is only justified if you can come up with a scientific reason why it is the case and that all language about its wrongness is a fairy tale like believing in unicorns, then you have a problem with converting what you claim are “subjective values” into something justified by the lofty language of science in a way that is remotely workable.

Does utilitarianism step in here to save us? Veit believes so, he argues the solution to these problems is the shotgun wedding of moral nihilism with utilitarianism. He claims we need both, because moral language is unhelpful, again citing the culture wars as an (unproven) example of something apparently caused by moral language, and that utilitarianism provides us with what we need, which is “conflict resolution, social coordination, and cost-benefit analysis.”

Yet the rather obvious problem is that utilitarianism can’t just be applied as conflict resolution or cost-benefit without some basis because most people don’t want to hold their views for reasons they will accept are merely their own subjective values. If someone thinks torturing babies is wrong, they don’t think it’s wrong for them and merely want to be left alone to not torture babies, they likely think it’s wrong for other people to torture babies, and if some psychopath wants to, they want them to be stopped. So the mediation here is not whether we can pragmatically stop these two people arguing or work out which solution is cheapest, it’s whether we have some principle or legal view like rights that enable us to agree it is actually ‘wrong,’ unless you think the removal of moral language will cause people to stop thinking others should be bound by what they feel, in which case you really are arguing for an immoral society. A utilitarian would argue it is wrong to make a baby suffer on the basis of its foundations, which most people would accept as the case, but Walter wants us to be moral nihilists and the assumption that it’s obviously wrong that a baby suffers sounds a lot like a reference to a shared ‘intuition’ which sounds a lot like an agreed upon moral fact, within our society at the very least, and we can’t give it ‘rights’ because rights are in hell with unicorns. Even if we take the idea that some utilitarians do that consciousness gives us a kind of pre-loaded moral colour palette, with all the problems that entails, you still have a claim for an ‘objective’ premise upon which what follows is scaffolded. The point is, even to utilitarianism, the “moral nihilism” is adding nothing. I remind you, moral nihilism does not mean mere deference to pragmatism, Veit claims “that this would be an amoral society is no objection. For we would all be better off if we cast off the yoke of tyranny that is morality.”

You'd think at this point having made such an obviously inflammatory statement Veit would offer some justification, but no. He simply declares that such a conclusion renders metaethics redundant and that most moral philosophers are merely clinging on out of desperation and denial, with another swipe at the religious thrown in for good measure. Nothing about the many problems with utilitarianism, nor about how you combine its ground floor assumptions with nihilism. Indeed, one wonders if Veit in reality means very little of what his polemics suggest, in another article he sounds far more like a routine, albeit contradictory utilitarian: “pleasures and pains still exist, as do preferences. Things can still be better or worse for humans or other animals from their own point of view, irrespective of whether morality exists. And we can, of course, care about these interests…The idea that things can’t be ‘good’ for someone from their own point of view, unless moral realism is correct, is a common error committed by philosophers. When I speak of nihilism enabling a better world, I don’t imply any objective evaluation of the world in moral terms, just that individually we would be better of and should prefer it on pure prudential grounds.”

Is this really “moral nihilism” given you fairly obviously require a subjective basis that is both agreed upon and requires some common reflection? Aren’t you just smuggling in the objectifying of subjectivity and hoping no one will notice? Will people actually go along with the nihilistic basis? He says “Of course, I am not denying that an embrace of nihilism may promote selfishness in some individuals. But it is a mistake to think that there is a necessary link here. If you have an altruistic prosocial psychology, none of that will change if you become a nihilist.” He goes on “If things can be better or worse for individuals, independently from morality, then we are free to ask whether morality itself is harmful.”

So basically, if you’re selfish it might make you more selfish but if you’re nice it might not. Great, but not particularly helpful or empirical if you want to argue for an entire society sloughing the scent of moral beliefs or claim “better” and “worse” is somehow “independant from morality” as if you’ve somehow fixed it by adjusting the terms slightly so they sound more functional. Not to mention an obvious flaw with the argument is that there is no empirical evidence Veit has provided that such a change actually would lead to these or any consequences in any direction, nor is there even any for the claim that moral language is the problem in the first place other than that Veit has a distaste for it. One would think the irony of arguing for the objectivity of something you subjectively and reflexively believe would not be lost on him, but alas no.

Anyway, I am going to do something I haven’t done that much recently or really at all: put my ‘Tom Holland’ hat on and defend wholesale ‘the Tom Holland argument’ in a context where I think it is actually of some value: against naive views such as Veit’s. For those unfamiliar, Holland is a popular historian who has argued that much of our modern society’s values are dependant essentially upon Christian moral assumptions, that our assumptions about altruism, concern for the weak and so on are derived wholesale from Christianity, and that many modern rights movements find their origin in Christian history: basically like it or not we’re all Christian in our moral and cultural thinking.

I have written plenty about the problems with this argument, although I actually think many of the problems are problems for Christians who want to strap it to a moral argument for God’s existence. For those claiming to have a view of the world that claims we can do better ‘morally’ as a society if we get rid of ‘morals,’ the assumption that prosociality and altruism are just tenants of psychology that utilitarianism can bootstrap has a few problems, among which is the sheer scale of difference between our own values and those of other societies both historically and globally. Holland establishes his argument by pointing out how radical Christian claims about the evaluation of the weak were in a Roman context in which Caesar was worshipped as the son of a god and boasted of slaughtering a million Gauls. While his argument that it must therefore be Christianity or Rome we inherit is weaker when applied to the modern world, part of his point is that we often don’t internalise how if pluralism or relativism really are the case, viewed naturalistically through the lens of the historian our own assumptions about morality are highly contingent facts of history. How many of our assumptions are really ‘Christian’ has much to do with semantics and is debatable, but that moral nihilism assumes we can grant a set of ‘obvious’ facts about wellbeing and subjective values upon which we can base utilitarianism is simply an absurd claim. That we could think otherwise and that millions of humans have thought otherwise is one of the most basic facts there is, a fact which, ironically, many antirealists might base their case upon. Holland’s claim that a lot of modern atheism and its concomitant assumptions are a naive form of Christianity may be too much, but insofar as they proclaim to erect on a scaffold something that actually rests upon a set of contingent facts, they are surely a naive form of something.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that Veit includes so many swipes at religion in company with his swipes at moral realists. In both cases, many of the assumptions about our dismissal of certain beliefs are essentially confusions over language. Much of the debate over intuitions for example rests on the assumption that there must be or not be some ‘thing’ that an intuition ‘is’ that we can say ‘doesn’t exist’ or is ‘unreliable,’ in other words it seeks to convert a word with a variety of meanings into a kind of scientific proposition or a function that can be accepted or rejected. Thus, for someone like Veit, moral language must go because it hinges on a factual claim nested in its language that can be proven false, and said language is therefore a pragmatic impediment to the scientific business of conflict resolution in regard to how we make things ‘better.’

Yet even a term like ‘better,’ which Veit seems to assume to be obvious, could be placed on the same scientific table. What is better? Where is the thing that is better? How is it measured? Self-reporting? Self-reporting is unreliable and rife with priming and context and culture and everything else under the sun, you can’t just claim that people who say something is better know something is better, better for who and when and for how long? Aren’t you just appealing to the same agreement as those who claim everyone has intuitions, that we just know something and it’s good to act on it? Are we even transparent to ourselves at any given time? Would porn addicts claim they are happier or miserable? Bonnie Blue, popular OnlyFans model, who is currently pregnant, recently hosted a “golden baby shower” at which she…I’ll leave you to work out what she and the group of men she invited did, but in interviews about it she declares herself happy and thinks it is good. Is it? Is it better? Will she regret it in a decade or two? Will society regret they didn’t ban it? Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘better,’ just as there are no ‘intuitions’: perhaps there are just a bunch of beliefs people have and things people say.

Nonetheless, a belief I have and a thing I say is that such a view of concepts within moral language or indeed religion are pointless. I think language is doing things, and reflects shared values in ways that are neither ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ and that relate things that matter to us to experiences that are not sayable in other kinds of language. As Wittgenstein put it “Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like. Compared with the impression which the thing described makes on us, the explanation is too uncertain.” For countless thousands of years religious dispositions and enculturated beliefs have shaped how we relate to one another and to reality through forms of language that are metonymic, containing a whole they speak of without saying. There are some who have a relentlessly reductive view of the ability of science to make all things explicit, dispense with superstition and bind the universe of our experiences in the laboratory, so we can build with them our own Babel. First, of course, they must dispense with the myths we have told ourselves for so long: that there is such a thing as goodness, that it looks like something when it is breathed upon our lives, that there is no true freedom outside of our obligation to pursue it, and that it matters to the state of your soul that you do. Myth it may be, and perhaps Veit will succeed in consigning it to his utilitatism nihilist hell, but until then, so help me, I believe it.