re: #104 dog philosopher

too easy for a right winger to misunderstand you and think you say you believe in “relativistic morality”

i just tell them “if you don’t hurt people only because you think god will punish you if you do, and not because you couldn’t possibly live with yourself if you harmed another living thing, your conception of morality is merely childish and possibly even sociopathic”

I certainly do believe in relativistic morality - because I reject absolute morality.

I am not, however, a moral nihilist. I have a set of subjective values, some of which are just there, and some of which can be derived rationally. Moral nihilism denies any kind of morality - objective and subjective. Notably, it is possible to be a theist and a moral nihilist at the same time. These two are not necessarily contradictory.

Moreover, I would argue that classical theistic morality is in effect just like moral nihilism. A nihilist doesn’t believe in any values, and the classical theism basically asserts that whatever God decrees is good by def. Which means that, for example, when God decreed the annihilation of Amalekites - including children - it was good and proper. When you believe that genocide is good just because God told you so, that’s really not that much different from nihilism.