The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [46]
You might think that we have to resist these conclusions or else we’ll never get people to agree with us. Most people really do accept morality as a constraint on their conduct. The few who might agree privately with Darwinism about morality won’t do so publicly because of the deep unpopularity of these views. “Anything goes” is nihilism, and nihilism has a bad name.
There is good news and bad news. The bad news first: We need to face the fact that nihilism is true. But there is good news here, too, and it’s probably good enough to swamp most of the bad news about nihilism. The good news is that almost all of us, no matter what our scientific, scientistic, or theological beliefs, are committed to the same basic morality and values. The difference between the vast number of good people and the small number of bad ones isn’t a matter of whether they believe in God or not. It’s a difference no minister, imam, vicar, priest, or rabbi can do much about. Certainly, telling people lies about what will happen to them after they die has never done much to solve the problem of morally bad people. In addition to not working, it turns out not to be necessary either. By the same token, adopting nihilism as it applies to morality is not going to have any impact on anyone’s conduct. Including ours.
There is really one bit of bad news that remains to trouble scientism. We have to acknowledge (to ourselves, at least) that many questions we want the “right” answers to just don’t have any. These are questions about the morality of stem-cell research or abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or our obligations to future generations. Many enlightened people, including many scientists, think that reasonable people can eventually find the right answers to such questions. Alas, it will turn out that all anyone can really find are the answers that they like. The same goes for those who disagree with them. Real moral disputes can be ended in lots of ways: by voting, by decree, by fatigue of the disputants, by the force of example that changes social mores. But they can never really be resolved by finding the correct answers. There are none.
WHO ARE YOU CALLING A NIHILIST, ANYWAY?
Nihilism was a word that was thrown around a lot in the nineteenth century. It often labeled bomb-throwing anarchists—think of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and people like Friedrich Nietzsche who rejected conventional morality. Today, nobody uses the word much. We can use it for a label, though we need to sharpen it up a bit, given the misuses to which it has also been put.
What exactly is nihilism? It’s a good idea to start with what it isn’t. Nihilism is not moral relativism. It doesn’t hold that there are lots of equally good or equally right moral codes, each one appropriate to its particular ethnic group, culture, time period, or ecological niche. Nihilism doesn’t agree with the relativist that capital punishment is okay at some times and places and not okay at other ones. It’s also not moral skepticism, forever unsure about which among competing moral claims is right. Moral skepticism holds that capital punishment is definitely right or definitely wrong, but alas we can’t ever know which.
Nor does nihilism claim that everything is permitted, that nothing is forbidden. Still less does it hold that destructive behavior is obligatory, that figurative or literal bomb throwing is good or makes the world better in any way at all. These are all charges made against nihilism, or at least they are often attributed to people the establishment wants to call nihilists. But they don’t stick to nihilism, or at least not to our brand.
These charges fail because nihilism is deeper and more fundamental than any moral code. Nihilism is not in competition with other codes of moral conduct about what is morally permitted, forbidden, and obligatory. Nor does it disagree with other conceptions of value or goodness—what is good or the best, what end we ought to seek as a matter of morality.
Nihilism rejects the distinction between acts that are morally permitted,