Moral nihilism?

Question

I have two main worries, which are drawn from Nagel and Mackay for their expression, though I think I agree with neither of these philosophers. First I will sketch my idea about right and wrong, incase my question depends on it.

Let "value" be a good, a kind of, for the sake of argument, belief about the world and what in it is has worth; I'm sorry I know no way of defining value without circularity. Intuitively and nothing more, I don't think these beliefs can be strictly true or false, but that some of them seem to be absolute and independent of any context. These seem to me to include a prohibition against another holocaust, and on a different scale, small minded petty cruelty. Moreover, I think that from these absolute standards, we can derive further ones. Not mechanically, but in dialogue with other people; and I think that this process is self correcting not because being moral is rational, but that we find, in living with them, that some ideologies about morality and meaning lead to a better happiness; almost as if they were more consistent with our absolute standards.

1. Nagel's view from nowhere. It seems that while I am still living and breathing and enjoying myself, my life has a certain currency, albeit a puny one in the context of all of humanity or existence. But once I've died and been forgotten, meaning can no longer depend on me or my small community; only it seems to me their place in the view from nowhere. And if that really is nowhere and time is infinite, how can anything still be valuable after the dissolution of myself?

2. Mackay's queerness argument. Not only does time the universe and life dwarf me, but it is entirely free of value, because none of these entities can be a source of real independent value.

If value is neither real nor enduring, then is it bunk?

Answer 1

Let's address the first argument. I'm not overly familiar with Nagel, but (at least as you've characterized his argument) his contention seems to rest on the idea that being a small part of a large universe precludes meaningfulness in of itself. There are at least three counterarguments:

1) Consider a lengthy book, such as "War and Peace." The fact of there being a very large number of sentences in the book does not mean that any given sentence does not have meaning. It is also not clear that any individual sentence in "War and Peace" has less meaning than any individual sentence in a much shorter book.

2) Consider Borges' concept of the "Library of Babel" which contains all possible letter combinations. The vast majority of the library is indecipherable nonsense, but it is said that there is a book in the library which random chance has formed into an explanation of all the hidden secrets of the universe. If we accept this exactly as given, we see that the fact that there are very many superficially similar meaningless books in the library does not prove that a given book might not be supremely meaningful.

3) Consider a vast quantity --billions-- of carbon atoms. Arranged in one pattern they are soot, in another they are a diamond. The fact of them being identical and vastly numerous does not mean that they do not collectively form a meaningful pattern which might not be capable of being grasped by any given atom.

Taken as a whole, these metaphors demonstrate that neither the introduction of scale nor the fact of being one among many removes meaning from something that is meaningful. Nagel's argument is misleading --it first assumes meaninglessness, and then increases the impact of the perception of meaninglessness through the multiplying effect of scaling upwards.