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By Root 730 0

morally forbidden, and morally required. Nihilism tells us not that we can’t know which moral judgments are right, but that they are all wrong. More exactly, it claims, they are all based on false, groundless presuppositions. Nihilism says that the whole idea of “morally permissible” is untenable nonsense. As such, it can hardly be accused of holding that “everything is morally permissible.” That, too, is untenable nonsense.

Moreover, nihilism denies that there is really any such thing as intrinsic moral value. People think that there are things that are instrinsically valuable, not just as a means to something else: human life or the ecology of the planet or the master race or elevated states of consciousness, for example. But nothing can have that sort of intrinsic value—the very kind of value morality requires. Nihilism denies that there is anything at all that is good in itself or, for that matter, bad in itself. Therefore, nihilism can’t be accused of advocating the moral goodness of, say, political violence or anything else.

Even correctly understood, there seem to be serious reasons to abstain from nihilism if we can. Here are three:

First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.

Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.

Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.)

Scientism can’t avoid nihilism. We need to make the best of it. For our own self-respect, we need to show that nihilism doesn’t have the three problems just mentioned—no grounds to condemn Hitler, lots of reasons for other people to distrust us, and even reasons why no one should trust anyone else. We need to be convinced that these unacceptable outcomes are not ones that atheism and scientism are committed to. Such outcomes would be more than merely a public relations nightmare for scientism. They might prevent us from swallowing nihilism ourselves, and that would start unraveling scientism.

To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount. Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.

PLATO’S PROBLEM FOR SERMONIZING ABOUT MORALITY

The problem of justifying morality—any morality—is a serious one for everybody—theist, atheist, agnostic. The difficulty of grounding ethics is one Plato wrote about in his very first Socratic dialogue—the Euthyphro. Ever since, it’s been a thorn in the side of Sunday sermon writers.

In the Euthyphro, Plato invites us to identify our favorite moral norm—say, “Thou shalt not commit abortion” or “Homosexual acts between consenting adults are permissible.” Assume that this norm—either one—is approved, sanctioned, even chosen by God.

Now, Plato says, if this norm is both the morally correct one and also the one chosen for us by God, ask yourself the following question: Is it correct because it is chosen by God, or is it chosen by God because it is correct? It has to be one or the other if religion and morality have anything to do with each