Is nihilism compatible with the moral life? – The Minefield – ABC News

In moral philosophy and mass culture alike, nihilism has a bad name. And little wonder. It is most often associated with meaninglessness, pessimism, and amoralism. In its more extreme forms, nihilism calls to mind a figure like The Joker, with his raucous rejection of every criterion of value and human progress or ambition. It frequently suggests a certain existential despair, stemming from the pointlessness and futility of human endeavours. Or, in its more everyday variety, we tend to think of the languid unsentimentality, or the air of perpetual half-disappointment and total self-absorption, displayed by characters on Seinfeld.

But nihilism is a complex phenomenon. Karen Carr (in her book The Banalization of Nihilism) has produced a kind of taxonomy of kinds of nihilism, each related, in some way, to the other:

Taken together, nihilism suggests a world without independent or transcendental guarantee; a world in which progress is not assured and there is no immutable rule against which human actions are judged; and a world without purpose, but only in the sense that there is no appointed telos deriving from an overarching meaning (or providence; just think of Martin Luther Kings notion of the arc of the universe).

The question is: is such a view of reality corrosive to a robust conception of the moral life? Or are there defensible ways of thinking about moral obligation, as well as moral progress, that dont rely on transcendental guarantees? Can meaning itself give rise to forms of corrosive egotism, which undermine the possibilities of both moral community and moral growth?

You can read more from our guest, Tracy Llanera, on the nihilism and the moral life on ABC Religion & Ethics.

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Is nihilism compatible with the moral life? - The Minefield - ABC News