Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Understanding Nihilism: What if nothing matters?





We spend so much of our time caring about things. Thomas Nagel described the phenomenon quite nicely:

[People] spend enormous quantities of energy, risk and calculation on the details [of their lives]. Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-knowledge, the quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and friends, how well he does his job, whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern. 
(Nagel 1971, 719-720).

Why so much intense concern? What if nothing we do really matters? What, in other words, if nihilism is true?

That’s the question I want to look at in this post. I do so with the help of Guy Kahane’s recent paper ‘If nothing matters’, which is an excellent and insightful exploration of the topic. It doesn’t defend the nihilistic view itself, but it does clarify what it means to be a nihilist and what the implications of the nihilistic view might be. In the process, it takes issue with a strange trend in contemporary metaethics which assumes that if nihilism is true, then nothing about our day-to-day lives would change all that much. Kahane finds this implausible and tries to explain why.

In what follows, I discuss the key elements of Kahane’s analysis. I start by explaining what nihilism is, and distinguishing between its evaluative and practical versions. I then look at the oddly deflationary attitude of some metaethicists towards the truth of nihilism. And I close by considering Kahane’s critique of this deflationary view. As we shall see, Kahane argues that if we come to believe that nihilism is true, then we are unlikely to be able to go about our daily business much as we did before. On the contrary, we can expect much to change.


1. What is Nihilism Anyway?
Nihilism is the view that nothing matters. It comes in two distinct forms. The first is evaluative nihilism, which Kahane describes like this:

Evaluative Nihilism: Nothing is good or bad — or — All evaluative propositions are false.

Remember that time a few weeks back when you were walking to work, it was raining heavily, you stubbed your foot and ripped the sole off your shoe, then got splashed by a car and ended up being late and soaking wet? At the time, you said that this was ‘bad’. If evaluative nihilism is correct, you were wrong to say this. Nothing is really good or bad because evaluative propositions that ascribe those properties to particular events or states of affairs are always false. And this is just to use a trivial example. Evaluative nihilism also applies to more serious evaluative propositions like ‘murder is bad’ or ‘pleasure is good’. None of these claims is true.

Evaluative nihilism is the core of nihilism. But the typical belief is that it entails another form of nihilism:

Practical Nihilism: We have no reasons to do, want, or feel anything.

The idea here is that values are what should motivate action, desire and emotion. The badness of being wet and late for work should motivate me to avoid this outcome in the future. It should motivate me to leave earlier, wear more sensible raingear and footwear. But if nothing is really good or bad all that motivational force is sapped away. This is a normative claim, not a psychological one (we’ll touch upon psychology later). It is about having reasons for doing, wanting and feeling. Practical nihilism strips us of all such reasons.

Practical and evaluative nihilism often go hand-in-hand, but they are separable. Kahane argues that evaluative nihilism only implies practical nihilism if you accept a consequentialist view of practical reason. If there are non-consequentialist constraints on action, then the goodness or badness of an outcome or state of affairs may not always be decisive in determining whether you have reasons for action. That said, it is worth treating the two forms of nihilism together since many who worry about the implications of nihilism worry about both.

But why do they worry? There are some misconceptions about the consequences of accepting nihilism. Many authors speak of nihilism in hushed and terrified tones. The idea is that if we really believed in nihilism we would be overwhelmed by the emptiness of our lives and driven to despair and suicide. In short, if nihilism were true then our lives would be worse. This is to misunderstand nihilism. To use the classic retort: if nothing matters, then it doesn’t matter that nothing matters. Or, in more evaluative terms:

No Cause for Despair: If nihilism is true, then its truth couldn’t make our lives worse (or better) for the simple reason that nihilism entails that you cannot say that a particular state of existence is worse or better.

Of course, how we react to the truth of nihilism is an empirical matter. It may be that some people do feel despair at the thought that nothing matters. But this is arguably because they implicitly cling to non-nihilistic views. They assume that things can really be better or worse for them; that they can have reasons for their despair. If nihilism is true, neither of these things is actually possible.


2. Deflationary and Conservative Metaethical Nihilism
Now that we have a firmer grasp of nihilism we can consider some broader issues. One is the role of nihilism in contemporary metaethical debates. Metaethics is the branch of moral philosophy that is concerned with the ontology and epistemology of moral claims. Moral claims are all about what is good and bad and right and wrong. Some metaethicists are cognitivists, who believe that moral claims are capable of being objectively true or false (i.e. that things really are good/bad and right/wrong). Non-cognitivists reject this view. There are many different schools of non-cognitivism, but the one that is the focus of Kahane’s analysis is that of the error theorists.

Error theorists hold that our entire moral discourse rests on a mistake. The mistake is that when we say something like ‘Torture is bad’ we think we are making a claim like ‘Water is H2O”, but we are wrong. The latter statement is capable of being objectively true or false; the former is not. In short, our moral discourse is in error: there are no objective values (or rights and wrongs). Famous error theorists include JL Mackie and Richard Joyce.

Described thusly, error theorists seem to embrace nihilism. You might think this would cause them to cast off ordinary moral practice. But strangely enough they do not. Many of them adopt an oddly deflationary attitude toward their metaethical insights. Yes, it is true that there is no objective good or bad or right or wrong, but this shouldn’t change much about how we live our lives. Consider the following passage from Mackie:

The denial of objective values can carry with it an extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all... Of course this does not follow; the lack of objective values is not a good reason for abandoning subjective concern.. 
(Mackie 1977, 34)

Mackie’s suggestion here is that even if his error theory is correct it is possible for people to care about things and to continue to live their lives as they always have. This is reinforced elsewhere in his work when he talks about the practical utility of continuing to behave in a ‘moral’ way. As some have put, we should be error theorists in the seminar room; but practical evaluative realists in the streets.
Kahane thinks this deflationary attitude is itself in error. It fails to take seriously the implications of evaluative and practical nihilism. As he sees it, in order for us to follow Mackie’s lead, it must be possible for us to do two things after coming to accept the truth of nihilism:


  • A. We must continue to have the subjective concerns we used to have before coming to believe in nihilism (i.e. believe that some things are worthwhile, not worthwhile etc).

  • B. We must be able to use these concerns to guide our actions (i.e. engage in instrumental reasoning).


While Kahane thinks it might be possible for us to conform to something like instrumental reasoning, he is much less convinced that we will continue to have the same subjective concerns. He has an argument for this which we will consider next.



3. Against the Deflationary View
Kahane’s argument is somewhat elaborate. I’ll describe a simplified version. The simplified version focuses on two claims about our normative psychology, i.e. by what should happen if we come to believe in the truth of nihilism. The empirical reality might be somewhat different, and Kahane concedes as much, but he thinks his argument works off a number of basic truisms about how our psychology functions.

The two main claims are as follows:

Belief Loss: If we come to believe in the truth of nihilism, we will lose many (or all) of our evaluative beliefs.
Covariance thesis: Our subjective concerns covary with our evaluative beliefs in such a way that the loss of the latter is likely to result in the loss of the former.

These claims then get incorporated into an argument which runs something like this:


  • (1) If we are to continue to live as we did before, then we need to retain our subjective concerns.
  • (2) If we come to believe in nihilism, we will probably lose many (possibly all) of our evaluative beliefs.
  • (3) If we lose many (possibly all) of our evaluative beliefs, then we will probably lose our subjective concerns.
  • (4) Therefore, if we come to believe in nihlism, we will probably not continue to live as we did before.


This is a probabilistic argument. It is about what is likely to happen rather than what will definitely happen. How can its key premises be defended?

We’ll start with the second premise, which is the belief loss claim. The first obvious point in its favour is that evaluative nihilism straightforwardly entails the falsity of evaluative beliefs. If no evaluative proposition is true, then any beliefs we have in such evaluative propositions must be false. The question is whether this subsequently implies that we will lose our evaluative beliefs. The logical implication is straightforward, but human psychology does not always track logic. It is conceivable that people could hold contradictory beliefs in their heads at the same time. But this is an unstable state of affairs. Over time, we might expect them to favour one or the other. Kahane uses a thought experiment to illustrate his thinking:

Witch Belief: Suppose Bob believes that two people he knows (Anne and Claire) are witches. But suppose you manage to convince Bob that witches do not exist, i.e. that no one has been or ever will be a witch. Will he continue to believe that Anne and Claire are witches? It is difficult to see how, at least in the long term. His acceptance of the general proposition (“there are no witches”) is going to be in constant tension with the more specific propositions (“Anne is a witch” and “Claire is a witch”). Eventually, something would have to give.

This certainly seems plausible. And if we expect this to happen in the case of witch-belief, it seems natural to expect it to happen in the case of nihilism. After all, the two scenarios are structurally similar. If I come to believe in the general proposition “Nothing matters”, it’s hard to see how I could continue to believe in specific propositions like “My job matters”. It is, of course, possible that I could waver in my commitment to nihilism, believing in it at times and disbelieving in it at others. This might cause me to oscillate back and forth between believing that my job matters and believing that it doesn’t. But if I am unwavering in my commitment, my other evaluative beliefs should slowly ebb away.

This brings us to the third premise which holds that this loss of evaluative belief should impact upon my subjective concerns. Kahane doesn’t give an elaborate argument for this view. He seems to think the covariance of evaluative belief is a basic truism of our psychology. To reject it, one would have to embrace an epiphenomenalist view of evaluative belief. This would hold that evaluative belief has no causal impact on our ‘pattern of concerns’. There may be some materialist approaches to the philosophy of mind that accept this notion, but these approaches have their costs.

If the second and third premises are correct, then the conclusion follows. The deflationary view of error theorists like Mackie looks to be implausible. Believing in nihilism is likely to have a knock-on effect on our lives. We probably couldn’t be nihilists in the seminar room and evaluative realists in the streets. We could only be one of these things.


4. Conclusion
I don’t have too much to say about all this. Kahane’s argument seems right to me, at least when it is interpreted within its own self-imposed constraints. Kahane deals with normative psychology, not empirical psychology. It would be interesting to have more empirical evidence about the effects of nihilistic belief on someone’s behaviour, but I suspect it would be difficult to conduct any tests on this. I also think that further engagement with the epiphenomenalist view would be interesting.

24 comments:

  1. at a root level, evaluation of any kind is inherently an impostion of meaning or value, as such, the classification is as one or other is artificial.

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  2. the act of evaluation is a rejection of nihilism

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  3. Thank you for the post. Surely the belief that nothing matters carries with it the opposite belief that everything matters, and here, with the liberation from the idea of an objective code of ethics, a subjective one fills the space. This could possible open the way to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Nothing matters out there, everything matters subjectively (me, myself and I).

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    1. That's exactly how everyone should react honestly (a lot people already do, like you and I). Since nothing matters, since the universe is chaotic and indifferent as far as anyone can tell, we should live and do whatever we please. This is the basis of optimistic nihilism.

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    2. I disagree that that belief entails everything mattering. Yes it opens the way for subjective notions of value, but there is no imperative to value your own over others.

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  4. things only matter if you allow your ego to place a value on it. your ego and my ego were formed differently. what your ego places value on, i'm sure my ego will not. -- who has enough ego to start placing value on anything? Apparently everyone does, which devalues the value of everything when everyone can place a subjective value on "it" -- it REALLY doesn't matter, no matter how much our egos trick us into thinking it does.

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  5. Does the presence of oxygen matter to you? Yes, for survival. That is subjective. Does the presence of oxygen matter to all human kind? Yes, for survival. Not so subjective, kinda objective if one is an organism on planet earth. Does the presence of oxygen matter to the universe? Yes, maybe for different reasons. It is an element. Objective.

    Does my life matter? Yes to me and my dogs. Very subjective. Does my life matter to people outside of my sphere of influence? No. How could it, they don't know or care about me, or my dogs. Objective. Does humanity matter? Only at the individual level, evidenced by the horrific atrocities perpetrated throughout human history. Objective.

    So things only matter if it is important to someone. Subjective.

    The universe does not care about humanity and our consistent plight for survival. The universe is incapable of caring it simply exists to perform its timeless order and system.

    Our lives and everything we experience is only worth as much, matter, as the value we place on them. Subjective

    Nobody or anything else outside of your sphere of influence is capable of caring about an idividual and his/her experience. It just doesn't matter. Objective


    Nihilism 1
    Purpose 0

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  6. You and Kahane consider the consequences of nihilism with such impractical and naive theories that I have to wonder if philosophers like you ever leave the house. Are you simply writing these inconclusive essays everyday and thinking you learned something? Your burning question is this: How will nihilism (complete meaninglessness) impact people if they accept it? Answer is: most likely it won't. I'll testify with my experience of having lived 17 years that no, people don't have mental crises about whether their job matters or not because of some suspicion that nihilism is true. They will either think their job should matter for them or not. People don't suddenly think "Wait, nothing matters in life. Let me quit this job and kill myself." People who think like that are already dead, physically or mentally. What matters is subjective, never objective. Ethics has nothing to do with objectivity. If we value certain things, we do. If we don't, we don't. It's fun to theorize and use big words, I understand. But this is unrealistic. There are no two categories of values called "evaluative beliefs" and "subjective concerns," which are, by the way, two fancy terms for the definitions you imply: objective values and subjective values. All values are subjective, including the ones in the Bible. We can even argue that no objective truths exists through subjectivism and perspectivism. You sometimes sound insane, and I just wanted to point that out. "(2) If we come to believe in nihilism, we will probably lose many (possibly all) of our evaluative beliefs. (3) If we lose many (possibly all) of our evaluative beliefs, then we will probably lose our subjective concerns." Honestly this argument might've been the problem. Maybe this is supposed to be a shock to religious people who depend on objective morals. A lot of people, I guess surprisingly for you, live perfectly fine with subjective values they've created themselves. Otherwise, I think this was another typical essay from you: boring, cold, detached, and fraught with meaningless conclusions.

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    1. You overlook the impact that nihilism has on modern society, those people weren't as you say "already dead". You also overlook how many people believe deep down their subjective values to be objective. The truth cares not whether you conclude it to be boring, cold, or detached.

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  7. +1 we really have no control over how others perceive our actions just as we have no control over their actions or perceptions. Letting go over the illusion of control and self important need to "matter" is a healthier attitude. If you want evidence of this go narcissist watching on Twitter.

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  8. Anything that could “discredit” nihilism is a social construct so it in turn further proves it.

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  9. Empirically speaking nothing matters. Which is to say that whatever occurs it it nonsensical to think of that occurrence as either a good or bad thing. Which is further to say to think of any given occurrence as either desirable or undesirable is nonsensical where the apportioning of good and bad value judgements are synonymous with that which we would deem to be either desirable or undesirable. I would accept all of this as realistic reasoning that accurately reflects the actual world I live in. It is also however true that I still maintain and act on these very desires that this realistic world view would have are nonsensical as far as their existence implies the importance(value) of the outcomes whose occurrence is dependent on those desires being made manifest. The reason is obvious. Pain is uncomfortable. Sex feels good. The biological imperative is at play. That which promotes survival survives. That which does not does not. The truth is that those who project their own false subjective value on to things are more likely to pursue those things with vigour and determination than those that don’t and as a result are more likely to obtain those things as a result of their desires which speak to the false apportioning of value there in. Where those things that are pursed and obtained are useful for survival, and in the final analysis the survival and passing on of their genes, the reinforcing of the observed and enacted behaviour that denotes a placing of value that is empirically speaking false will occur until it is shown to be unhelpful or obstructive in this regard of promoting gene survival. So while it doesn’t matter and is neither good or bad and is neither in that sense desirable or undesirable I will still eat and sleep and fornicate and go to work and tell the truth or lie as seems appropriate at the time or indeed act in any number of ways one day and then do exactly the opposite the next day for this very reason. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be my fathers son or my sons father. I would be nothing in a world full of nothing. Which of course I am.

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  10. Why'd you waste time writing shit that doesn't matter, especially when you yourself don't matter? Why do you want to 'navigate the future of humanity' when neither of you matter? Sounds like a bunch of intellectual dishonesty to me, fueled by a giant ego while pretending that ego doesn't matter. The whole thing is ridiculous. It's a wonder that you don't crawl under a rock and kill yourself. I hope you never have kids because in your eyes they don't matter. I hope no one ever needs your help because in your eyes they don't matter. I hope God has mercy on you because He doesn't matter to you. Damn, you are useless and cold. What's the point of your existence?

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    1. In the grand scheme, nothing does matter. The planets will continue to revolve around their star whether your car is electric or gas, you own property or are homeless or humans exist at all. Gods are human invention to feel connected to the world at large. Where are all the roman gods? Hint: they never really existed.
      Nothing actually matters.

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  11. All these comments are about is the rejection against the necessary code of social survival. You can't deny the need for a code or that you live in it. But the only thing nihilism is about is veering away the individual from the existence of a God. That is it. Don't complicate it, otherwise you are a narcissistic wannabe intellectual. No, I could care less who goes to any place after our deaths, this includes you. But I acknowledge the purpose of nihilism because its nothing more than a scheme to tickle the ego and you all fall for it.

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  12. Many years ago, long before I held any interest in philosophy, I read a book by an Englishman. I think his name was Graham Martin. It was, as I remember, about nihilism. I finished the book, said: OK, and went on with my life. I knew little about the topic then; know little more now. I don't think that book had much effect on me. My interest in philosophy grew out of other things. Nihilism's influence on me? I'd say: nil.

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  13. As far as I can see, it is true that we do not fully understand what we are, but in my eyes, life is no longer something intrinsically mysterious; what remains a mystery is why we are reluctant to admit it. In my point of view, all that we are experiencing is just a mechanical result of impersonal physical factors that culminated, through self-replicating informational entities – in our case, DNA –, in our existence as machines, therefore without free- dom . free will, conscious of themselves and having, by their very nature, the goal of perpetuation, which in turn has no goal.

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  14. I think it is mistaken to compare ourselves with machinery such as AI and other human creations. I realize my view is antiquated in the eyes and minds of many modern thinkers. I don't mind that. But, simply put, if it is an error to compare apples to oranges, I think it likewise to rank us among non-living *intelligence*. All good. I am not on board with Panpsychism either. Everyone has their own album to do. I am still thinking and writing about consciousness and reality, and,you know, I am not the last one doing that either.

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  15. Here is a brief thought experiment: If nothing matters, why is anyone talking about that? No trolleys, No Chinese rooms...

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  16. I have been struggling a lot recently. It feels like everything I do is worthless because a few years after I die, nobody will remember me or anything I did. And even if they do, why does it matter? I am dead anyway. The only impact anybody would remember is negative, but it would be irrational to ruin things in order to be remembered. I could devote my life to helping others, but the people I help would eventually die, and so would I, meaning it would never be remembered. Nothing seems to matter. I could kill myself right now, and nobody would know after 50 years.

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