Phi202

Nihilist/relativist/naive subjectivisit

Meta-ethical doctrines

no objective moral facts/properties i.e no facts of the matter about right/wrong, good/bad or over above the facts as to what pople in different groups accept as right/wrong, good/bad

Truth of moral statements?

(P) "it is always wrong to fight, even in self-defence"

Nihilists:
No true moral statements. All are meaningless, neither true nor false. (P) is neither true nor false.

Relativists

Not true unrelativised moral statement

(P) is true, if you mean... by Amish standards (the statement (:) answers to facts about the Amish people)

(P) is false, if you mean... "By Ghurka Standards" (ditto)

(P) is neither true nor false if you mean..."full stop, unrelativisedly" ( there is no fact of the matter

Naive subjectivist (P) always means... "According to my standards" (answers to facts about what the person uttering it accepts)

true if uttered by someone who accepts the claim and false if uttered by someone who doesn't

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Normative aspects of these views

Nihilism and relativism each have a normative part. To see how this works, we'll start by seeing how naive subjectivism has no part. It is all purely meta-ethical.

Naive subjectivists say that you can without irrationaliy, even the given the lack of any objective moral fact, have any normative attitude you like.

Nihilists, in contrast, advocate a certain cause of action refraining from breaking any moral statement as true. Nihilists see irrationality in believing that no unrelativised moral claim is true yet treating certain moral claims as true. They see their meta-ethical beliefs as rationally compelling them to in a certain way. They sat it is irrational to treat a moral statement as a reason for actoin. You can only rationally invoke nominal reasons

e.g acting in one's egoistic self-interest can be rational. Old point of view. See Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic. A sup;osedly hard-headed no-nonsense attitude.

Revolutionary 'nihilists' from the 19th century who claimed to disbelieve morality and when asked "why are you throwing this bomb?" (Trying to assassinate the minister)
would say that were acting based on reasons that were non-moral (maybe 'objectivism interests') or 'to be in conformity with the course of history' but these reasons pretty clearly were actually simple a misinterpreted moral code.


Relativisits have a very different emotional valance. Non-judgemental, 'ecumenical'.

Relativists agree that there is nothing irrational in the Amish guy treating (P) as true and in the Ghurka treating (P) as false.

However, the relativist does think that it is irrational to treat (P) as unrelativisedly true, absolutely true, as opposed to true-for-the-Amish or false-for-the-Ghurkas. In practice, this amounts to advocate the following course of action: treating (P) as true as applied to Amish and false as applied to Ghurkas. Note that this does not fit in with anyone's views. So why does this relativist advocate it?

It makes an exception to the general naive subjectivist policy of advocating no particular course of action as entailed by the meta-ethics.

Surely the most simple policy would be to go naive subjectivist.

The psychological motivation seems to be simply confusion. What relativists are thinking is: there is no objective fact of the matter, so it is unfair to advocate Amish standards over Ghurka standards this is obviously inconsistent.