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?
On the topic of vegetarianism, I originally became a vegetarian 15 years ago because I thought it was "wrong" to cause unnecessary pain and suffering of conscious beings, but I am still a vegetarian even though I no longer think it is "wrong" (in anything like the ordinary sense).
Now that I no longer think that the concept of "morality" makes much sense at all (except as a fancy and unnecessary name for certain evolved tendencies that are purely a result of what worked for my ancestors in their environments (as they have expressed themselves and changed over the course of my lifetime)), I remain a vegetarian for the reason that I still prefer there to be less unnecessary pain and suffering rather than more. I don't think my preference is demanded or sanctioned by some objective moral law; it is merely my preference.
I recognize now that the reason I thought it was "wrong" is that I had the underlying preference all along and that I recognized that my behavior was inconsistent with my fundamental preferences (and that I desired to act more consistently with my fundamental beliefs).
Would I prefer that more people were vegetarians? Yes. Is it because I think unnecessary pain and suffering are "wrong"? No. I just don't like unnecessary pain and suffering and would prefer for there to be less rather than more. If you take the person who says it is "wrong", and keep probing them for more fundamental reasons that they have this feeling of "wrongness", asking them "why do you believe that?" again and again, eventually you come to a point where they say "I just believe this".
As Wittgenstein said:
Believers in morality try to convince us that there is a bedrock that justifies everything else but needs no justification itself, but there is no uncaused cause and there can be no infinite regress. Our evolved tendencies as they express themselves as a result of our life experience are the bedrock, and nothing else is necessary. Morality is just a fairy tale that we build upon the bedrock in order to convince ourselves that reality or nature (or God) cares about what we do and that we are absolved of responsibility for our behavior as long as we were "trying to do the right thing" (which is a more subtle version of the "I was just following orders" defense).
One might argue that I believe in "morality" but have merely substituted "preferences" for "moral beliefs", but the difference is that I don't think any of my preferences are different in kind from any others, so there is no justification for picking a subset of them and calling that subset "the moral preferences" and arguing that they are fundamentally different from any other preference I have.
Ah, I'm rambling ... Too much coffee.