To those who say "Nothing is real," I once replied, "That's great, but how does the nothing work?"
Suppose you learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden.
Devastating news, to be sure—and no, I am not telling you this in real life. But suppose I did tell it to you. Suppose that, whatever you think is the basis of your moral philosophy, I convincingly tore it apart, and moreover showed you that nothing could fill its place. Suppose I proved that all utilities equaled zero.
I know that Your-Moral-Philosophy is as true and undisprovable as 2 + 2 = 4. But still, I ask that you do your best to perform the thought experiment, and concretely envision the possibilities even if they seem painful, or pointless, or logically incapable of any good reply.
Would you still tip cabdrivers? Would you cheat on your Significant Other? If a child lay fainted on the train tracks, would you still drag them off?
Would you still eat the same kinds of foods—or would you only eat the cheapest food, since there's no reason you should have fun—or would you eat very expensive food, since there's no reason you should save money for tomorrow?
Would you wear black and write gloomy poetry and denounce all altruists as fools? But there's no reason you should do that—it's just a cached thought.
Would you stay in bed because there was no reason to get up? What about when you finally got hungry and stumbled into the kitchen—what would you do after you were done eating?
Would you go on reading Overcoming Bias, and if not, what would you read instead? Would you still try to be rational, and if not, what would you think instead?
Close your eyes, take as long as necessary to answer:
What would you do, if nothing were right?
This seems a bizarre claim. If you think the conclusion that EY is intuition-pumping to advocate for is false (which you seem to, given your first two paragraphs), surely that's a more fundamental flaw than the fact that he's intuition-pumping to advocate for it.
That said, I'll admit I don't really understand on what grounds you oppose the conclusion. (In fact, it's not even clear to me what you think the advocated-for conclusion is.)
I mean, your point seems to be that not everyone would respond to discovering that "nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden" in the same way, either as individuals or as collectives. And I agree with that, but I don't see how it relates to any claims made by the post you reply to.
Taking another stab at clarifying your objections might be worthwhile, if only to get clearer in your own mind about what you believe and what you expect.
I have no idea what the conclusion of this article is. I suspect the author wants to argue for moral eliminativism, and hopes to support moral eliminativism by claiming that nothing would change if someone (or is it everyone?) was convinced their moral beliefs were wrong. I'm not sure how exactly the author intends that to work out.
But in any case, my comment only intended to criticise the methodology of the article, and was not aimed at discussing moral eliminativism. I simply pointed out that the question asked - what would happen is someone (or everyo... (read more)