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?
There are several things wrong with this post. Firstly, I'm sure different people would react to being convinced their moral philosophy was wrong in different ways. Some might wail and scream and commit suicide. Some might question search further and try to find a more convincing moral philosophy. Some would just carry go on living there lives and not caring.
Furthermore, the outcome would be different if you could simultaneously convince everyone in a society, and give everyone the knowledge that everyone had been convinced. Perhaps the society would break down as the police and institutions upholding the law abandoned their tasks due to both apathy and a desire to capitalise on the new state of affairs, with no guilt. Who knows.
The fundamental flaw of this article is that it asks us to consult our intuitions about what would happen if so and so. Consulting our intuitions is something I believe this site shuns, so it is quite hypocritical that the author has requested we place so much emphasis on them in this instance. Furthermore, anyone answering this question who believes in moral eliminativism has a confirmation bias to say 'nothing would change' as this is seen by them to support their beliefs.
Consulting your intuition in a matter of descriptive questions should be done with caution. (But even then, it's not forbidden or even really discouraged, since intuition can offer valuable--if non-rigorous--insights.) Using your intuition when confronting normative or prescriptive problems, on the other hand, is perfectly fine, because there's no "should" without an intuition about what "should" be. (Unless, of course, you think that normative problems are also descriptive, in which case you believe in objective morality, which has its own problems.)