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?
Imagining a state wherein all utilities are 0 is somewhat difficult for me... as I hold to a primarily egoistic morality, rather than a utilitarian one. Things primarily have utility in that they are useful to me, and that's not a state of affairs that can be stripped from me by some moral argument.
The only circumstance that I can conceive of that could actually void my morality like that would be the combination of certain knowledge of my imminent demise, formed in such away as to deny any transhuman escape clause. Such a case might go something like, "You have incurable cancer and are certain to die in a month, with probability 1, and complications involved in that will prevent you from being preserved cryonically, so your destruction is certain to be absolute and permanent"... but that's a rather unlikely and contrived state of affairs.
Even so, presented with such a situation, I can only perceive two possibilities. The first would be to rail against fate, spending the entirety of my limited time in a desperate quest to evade apparently certain destruction. If that failed... as it would, assuming the premises of the situation are true, then I'd eventually fall to the second; to turn to madness, and deliberately adopt some sort of irrational religious position to evade the knowledge of my certain destruction... as, irrespective of my current rational perspective, I don't feel confident enough to stare absolute, permanent, and unavoidable Death in the face without flinching. That said... I'm not entirely certain if that would be particularly irrational. Given that I cannot, as a Bayesian, actually assign a probability of 0 to any idea, however absurd... than, if I knew I was going to die, and that there'd be no chance to avoid it through technology, than it would actually be rational to do some quick odds-finding against Pascal's Wager, and pick a god that accepts a deathbed conversion. After all, it can't be rational to simply accept utter destruction, if there's any chance, however slight, of avoiding it. Even a thin reed is better then nothing.