Okay, we both call ourselves a “moral nihilist”. Now, with respect to abortion [and to all other conflicting goods] my own understanding of that is rooted existentially in this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
How about you? What sequence of experiences, relationships and sources of information etc., predisposed you to become a moral nihilist?
In other words, let’s probe the extent to which your own moral and political narratives are more “intellectual contraptions” or “existential contraptions”.
Re abortion, you believe this:
You’re serious, aren’t you?
Okay, making that assumption, how does one go about the task of making a credible distinction between those unborn babies that either do or do not qualify to be aborted?
Is your answer here rooted more in the assumption that all reasonable men and women will share your own political prejudices, or that your own political prejudices are rooted more in the manner in which I construe the meaning of individual daseins interacting socially, politically and economically out in a particular is/ought world?
In other words, to what extent do you acknowledge that your moral and political values “here and now” are just “existential contraptions” rooted in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change? And, thus, that given new experiences, relationships, sources of information/knowledge etc., you may well come to reject what you believe here and now and embrace an entirely conflicting point of view.
Because that is the crucial distinction that I make between a moral nihilist and a moral objectivist.
Not that one set of values is right and another set of values is wrong, but that right and wrong itself seem ever embedded in conflicting goods derived existentially from a particular life lived out in a particular world. And ever governed by the reality of political power. Not who may or may not be right, but who has the power to enforce their own perceived interests.
Which are of course [from my way of thinking] no less existential contraptions. Or, as Nietzsche once intimated, the opposite of truth may well be less a lie than a conviction.
Moral and political convictions in particular.