Nice Nihilism

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Nihilism is in conflict with our intuitions. So I just invite someone to say with a straight face, there's nothing wrong at all about perpetrating the sorts of acts I've just described. We are each one of us either individually or taken together is fallible in a whole range of ways. All these things come into play in making moral judgments. And I don't see how it can be that any of us can have the requisite authority to be such that it's our attitudes or our agreements or our judgments that are the ultimate source of morality.

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That’s not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it’s wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.

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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.

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