Reddit reviews Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

Your friend's argument is not unknown in metaethics. A popular argument for the subjectivity of moral truth is that moral knowledge comes easy if the individual or one's society determines what is morally right and wrong; all one needs to do is examine what oneself (or one's culture) believes about what is right and wrong, and these are things that are easily accessible, epistemically speaking.

However, objective moral properties would be another thing altogether. (Your friend talks about "absolute moral truth", which I take him to mean "objective moral properties.") The most popular argument of the sort you friend mentioned is one version of Mackie's Argument from Queerness. (source: Mackie, J.L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin.) Mackie states that if there are objective moral properties, then they would be utterly odd and weird properties that would require an utterly odd and weird cognitive faculty to detect them. Perception, memory, rational intuition, and the like would all fail to detect these queer properties. Since we shouldn't postulate such a weird cognitive faculty (like an ethical intuition), we should be skeptical about these moral properties. So even if there are these objective moral properties, we would not know of them.

Two responses to Mackie: (1) The most common contemporary response to Mackie is the ethical naturalist's. Naturalists believe that in some way moral properties are reducible to or even identical to natural properties. Since natural properties are not odd properties that require odd cognitive faculties to detect them, we can come to know what is right and wrong by knowledge about natural properties, which we come to know via our quotidian cognitive faculties. Thus, objective moral properties are knowable. (2) A response that is coming back into vogue is from the ethical non-naturalists, which are those that think that the moral realm of properties is wholly non-natural. The non-naturalist claims that Mackie's argument begs the question. We should not be all that surprised by the existence of an ethical intuition because moral properties are easily knowable. What do I know more certainly than that it is morally wrong that torture small children for my own enjoyment? I certainly know that claim more certainly than any of Mackie's premises in his argument. So postulating such a faculty isn't all that detrimental.

So, there are several things you could mean by "an objective moral standard exists." I'll assume that you're talking about moral cognitivism, which is the view that ethical propositions, like "Rape is bad," are capable of being either true or false.

How this "works" is a difficult and subtle question. It's not immediately obvious how there could be truth in a realm like ethics. Perhaps this is because most people (and most philosophers) are walking around with an implicit Correspondence theory of truth in the back of their minds. The correspondence theory claims that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to the world - and this requires some feature of the world to which "rape is bad" can correspond. But that seems incompatible with the picture of the world that we get from the natural sciences. They tell us about muons and bosons - but there's no talk of "morons" (or moral particles). The world doesn't seem to have "to-be-doneness" built into it (as Mackie says).

So, then, why not just throw in the towel and say that, since there's no reality to which our ethical propositions can correspond, there's no ethical truth? Well, there are a couple reasons.

First and foremost, you might be a hell of a lot more confident in the truth of the proposition "Rape is bad" and the falsity of the proposition "genocide is noble" than you are in the correspondence theory of truth. If so, better to reconsider what exactly truth consists in than to lose the ability to say that the person who claims "genocide is noble" has spoken falsely.

Secondly, naive correspondence truth and a naturalistic world-view is going to destroy far more than ethical truth and falsity once you get it going. It's going to run roughshod over mathematical truth and falsity (surely there aren't mathematical entities out in the world according to our best scientific theories) - it's going to leave you without any way to say that "If I drop out of school, my job prospects will be dim" is true, while "If I drop out of school, the sky will rain money" is false (because I don't actually drop out of school, so there's no part of the actual world to which the "if"-clause can correspond). Also, you won't be able to say that it's true that "I could have been an economics major" (because there's no feature of the world which is my possibly being an economics major). You also won't be able to say that it's false that "I could have been a phrenology major."

So, there's good reason to think that the intuitive reason for thinking that there isn't ethical truth (or, the one that I've always found intuitive) has got to have gone wrong somewhere along the line.

If you're asking me how to fix things, that's the subject of a dissertation or a book. One new and exciting proposal is constructivism about reasons, which has been spear-headed by Sharon Street, and which you can read about here and here.

At least for Anarchists or other left-libertarians it should also be important to actually read up on some basic or even fundamental ethical texts given most political views and arguments are fundamentally rooted in morality (unless you're a orthodox Marxist or Monarchist). I'm sadly not familiar enough with applied ethics to link collections of arguments for specific ethical problems, but it's very important to know what broad system you're using to evaluate what's right or wrong to not contradict yourself.

At least a few very old texts will also be available for free somewhere on the internet like The Anarchist Library.

Some good intro books:

• The Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer-Landau
  
• The Elements of Moral Philosophy by James and Stuart Rachels
  
• Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Blackburn
  
  Some foundational texts and contemporary authors of every main view within normative ethics:
  
  
• Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotles for Classic Virtue-Ethics. Martha Nussbaum would be a contemporary left-wing Virtue-Ethicist who has used Marx account of alienation to argue for Global Justice.
  
• Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel (or Emmanuel) Kant for Classic Deontology. Kantianism is a popular system to argue for anti-statism I believe even though Kant himself was a classical liberal. Christine Korsgaard would be an example of a contemporary Kantian.
  
• The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick for Classic Utilitarianism. People usually recommend Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, but most contemporary Ethicists believe his arguments for Utilitarianism suck. 2 other important writers have been R. M. Hare and G. E. Moore with very unique deviations from classic Utilitarianism. A contemporary writer would be Peter Singer. Utilitarianism is sometimes seemingly leading people away from Socialism, but this isn't necessarily the case.
  
• Between Facts and Norms and other works by the contemporary Critical Theorist Jürgen Habermas may be particularly interesting to Neo-Marxists.
  
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I know Rawls is a famous liberal, but his work can still be interpreted to support further left Ideologies. In his later works like Justice as Fairness: A Restatement you can see him tending closer to Democratic Socialism.
  
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche for... Nietzsche's very odd type of Egoism. His ethical work was especially influential to Anarchists such as Max Stirner, Emma Goldman or Murray Bookchin and also Accelerationists like Jean Baudrillard.
  
• In case you think moralism and ethics is just bourgeois propaganda maybe read something on subjectivism like Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J. L. Mackie
  
• Or if you want to hear a strong defense of objective morality read Moral Realism: A Defense by Russ Shafer-Landau orc

At the outset, please note that this topic is exceedingly slippery. I am convinced that the most efficient way to understand these issues is through the study of philosophy of ethics.

> Where do atheists get their [sense of] morality?

Nature, nurture, and the phenomenological self-model.

> What defines the "good" and "bad" that has
permeated much of human society?

Easy: notice that personal definitions of morality between individuals immersed in the same culture tend to strongly overlap (e.g., most moderns consider rape to be "bad").

From this considerable volume of data, it is fairly simple to construct principles that adequately generalize these working definitions, such as "promote happiness", and "mitigate pain".

> [If you're not caught, why not murder? Why donate to charity? Does might make right?]

These questions appear to have both practical and intuitive solutions.

What are you trying to understand?

> How do atheists tend to reconcile moral relativism?

What do you mean?

> Barring the above deconstructions, how do atheists account for morality?

Moral theories largely attempt to bridge the gap between descriptive facts and normative commands:

• Kant argued that norms are not discovered via our senses, but are simply axiomatic principles.
  
• Rawls argued that norms are the product of a hypothetical agreement in which all ideally rational humans would affirm certain values (Social Contract) if they didn't know their fate in advance (Veil Of Ignorance).
  
• Mill argued that norms are best expressed through the need to increase pleasure and decrease pain.
  
• Parfit argued that these three approaches don't really contradict one another.
  
• Nietzsche argued that norms and artistic tastes are the same.
  
• Mackie argued that norms are human inventions that include social welfare considerations.
  
  

Also, utilitarianism, ethics of care, and prima facie duties work fine in a materialistic system, and there are even modern versions of virtue ethics and Kantianism that eschew their teleological and numinal parts and can be materialistic. If materialists have a hard time explaining morality that's not an issue particular to materialism, but just a sign that ethics is difficult in it's own right.

Divine command theory and natural law theory also have their difficulties, in addition to the difficulties brought about by the theistic basis. For example, divine command theory has enough of an issue describing how we can know god's commands are moral, and that's not even getting into the general theistic issue of knowing that's we've even received such commands in the first place.

Your teacher sounds like he's making good, difficult to challenge points because he's educated in the subject matter in a way that you, the student, are not. I assure you that there are atheistic philosophers on the other sides of these issues with similarly logical rebuttals. It's just that you're not getting told what these rebuttals are, or who those philosophers are.

Once you know what arguments are being presented I recommend looking them up on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has pretty solid overviews of things beyond the bias of one particular instructor in one particular school.

Atheist philosopher of religion J. L. Makie has a good book on ethics, and I bring him up because the theistic philosophers I know still consider his arguments an issue that needs to be dealt with. Those specifically are the Argument from Relativity, and the Argument from Queerness.

In any case, just expect that really getting into this stuff is going to involve a lot of studying on one's own, and good luck.

Short answer: yes, maybe besides a few less common philosophical positions if you expend the definition of moral nihilism.

Long answer: This question is kinda tricky, because moral nihilism is such a broad (and often misused) term with a long history, while error theory is a relatively new term, originating in J.L Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. If you confine yourself to contemporary meta-ethics, than yes, error theory is the only form of moral nihilism, but it must be said there are different types and variations, the only thing common to all of them is the idea there is an "error" in the common-sense view of mortality, manly that humans refer, in speech and action, to moral properties and facts that don't really exist.

But if we take a more broad view, there may be different types of moral nihilism. For example, it can be argued that existential thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre are favoring a view that one may call "Atheistic Divine Comand Theory"^(*) because they claim that without God there are no moral values ("If God is dead then everything is permitted"), in other words, arguing for moral nihilism. This view is different from error theory, because it claims that if God existed there would be moral properties, but because he doesn't exist there aren't ones. Another possible view is that certain forms of Ethical Egoism might be seen as forms of moral nihilism, been a logical conclusion to take after reaching a nihilistic view of morality for some. It's hard to think about philosophers who have defended this sort of view, and the only one that comes to my mind is a 19th-century German philosopher by the name of Max Stirner (although some may object to the common characterization of him as a moral nihilist).

So to sum up, there might be different types of moral nihilism besides error theory, but there are not very common in the history of philosophy. And in the context of contemporary meta-ethics, error theory is the only type of moral nihilism.

*it must be said that this is an analytical interpretation of continental philosophers, who never worked under this framework and might have objected to this interpretation of their views.