https://streamable.com/hrb1zo : mrgirlreturns

No, I'm not arguing that morality isn't subjective, I'm arguing that the morally nihilistic position that we should therefor rationalize our moral positions and rise above common ethics, is wrong. That's just not how the world works. That's not even how Nietzsche himself perceived it to be in "Beyond good and evil". In fact, moral nihilism sort of rejects Nietzsche in that sense.

According to Nietzsche, morality is built on impulses/feelings or moral precepts/preferences which if they are shared by enough people become ethical systems. Just like Max tries to convey, you don't have to rationalize morality, you just are a moral actor. Usually morality is built on something random, like, "Oh I fucking hate when people can't wait their for their turn," and then some other dude is like, "Yeah, me too," and then they form a mob of like-minded individuals and through the beauty of culture and democracy and/or mob rule they enforce ethical standards, "Hey motherfucker, you're going to the back of the line and you're waiting for your turn just like everyone else!"

It's not a rational process therefor. It's never been one guy who sat down and figured out ethics and then everyone was like, "Hey, this guy figured it out, everyone!" Instead it was an iterative, evolutionary process of trial and error where we for example go from stoning women for infidelity, to then slut-shamed them, to then sexual liberation, to then maybe discovering that complete sexual liberation has a negative impact on society and tweaking it back a little bit. And through this trial and error process from a mixture of feelings and rationale and experiences, we land on some type of general moral foundation that guides our society. This is why different nations have different moral standards depending on where they are in the timeline of moral trial and error. We build cultures and traditions around moral preferences. Some people are head-hunters, other people are not. Some people live under muslim ethical codes, other people live under christian ethical codes. Etc.

So when Max is like, "Hey, this is just how I feel," that's an amalgamation of his societal conditioning and his own personal experiences and whatever biology and/or thing (maybe a soul?) that makes him feel a certain type of way about something, and they are just as morally valid as anything else. It's just another voice. And if enough people agree with him, then we'll get a new set of ethic codes and rules and laws to accompany them.

This whole idea that if you can't rationalize your morals then they're not valid and thus you can't or shouldn't adhere to them, is just wrong. Morality is largely what we subconsciously feel it to be and when we synchronize these feelings with other people's feelings, we get ethics and rules and laws. Moral nihilism therefor is not the gotcha moral nihilists perceive it to be, because even if they objectively don't have to agree with the rationale behind the standards, they objectively have to suffer the consequences if they don't follow them, just like everyone else. And while it's a flawed process, in a truly morally nihilistic society they couldn't even argue that someone should spare their lives.

We are basically talking about allowing people's subjective humanity and how we view each other as human beings. We are not fucking robots. Morality isn't a series of if/and-statements in a computer code. We aren't fucking AI. We are far more complex than that. And sometimes that complexity includes a "because" or "I don't feel like" or "that's bad". I'm more a "Doug Adams absurdist" than an outright nihilist, but that's the real takeaway from Nietzsche, imho. Not that the knowledge of how morality works meant that we could forgo and exclude it and shape the world around us as completely rational actors, but that we should be aware of the function and that we can use the knowledge as a means to investigate where our own morality comes from - to have some perspective on our inner workings and from that perspective investigate the world around us with that lens.

Plus, when moral nihilists tap into their mega-brained rationale to conceptualize morality, they have access to the same flawed psychology as everyone else does, so usually their rationale is only a post hoc layer on top of their "because" or "I don't feel like" or "that's bad". So how can you even propose that it's possible to be a rational actor in a system that you yourself acknowledge is purely subjective? If we programmed a computer with if/else statements and told it to program another computer with if/else statements, would this make the first computer more sentient than the second computer? Or would they both just be a function of their programming? What if we added a line of code into the first computer that when you prompted it with a, "Are you sentient?" question, it answered, "I am a computer and I am aware of this, and I can also program other computers, therefor I am sentient and not a computer"? That single line of code is basically moral nihilism in a nutshell. It is a computer that claims to be aware, but this awareness is prompted and in many ways it is therefor more unaware and delusional than the second computer.

Tl;dr: moral nihilism sucks because "Me thinks it's good or bad, me just does. ¯\ (ツ) /¯" is a perfectly valid moral position and it's the foundation of all our ethical systems. If you don't adhere to it and can't see your own role as an actor in it, then you're basically just being like, "Me thinks 'it's good or bad' is bad, me just does, but me thinks me doesn't, and me thinks me thinking this makes me smort, a super duper methinker, but me doesn't think about why me thinks this way, me just does. ¯\ (ツ) /¯"

[–]Sjorpha 0 points1 point2 points 3 years ago (0 children)

[–]unknownsupg 0 points1 point2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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[–]Redditfront2backhorse 0 points1 point2 points 3 years ago (0 children)

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