Abstract
Intuitionism and nihilism, according to nihilists, have key features in common: the same semantics and the same phenomenology. Intuitionism is the object of nihilism’s attack. The central charge nihilism lodges against intuitionism is that its nonnatural moral properties are queer. Here I’ll examine what ‘queer’ might mean in relation to the doctrines nihilism uses to support this charge. My investigation reveals that nihilism’s queerness charge lacks substance and resembles a tautology served with a frown. There’s really nothing to it. After I show that, I’ll offer an explanation for why nihilism has gotten intuitionism wrong. It makes a central mistaken methodological assumption and doesn’t target any identifiable intuitionism in the last hundred or so years.
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Notes
Huemer 2005: 110 and my 2012: Ch.4.
In my 2017 I show how my intuitionism explains a wide range of moral phenomena.
Thomas Hurka distinguishes inherent, or internal, moral explanations from external ones (Hurka 2011)
See my 2012: Ch. 2.
Much confusion has resulted from the fact that after G.E. Moore defines naturalism in this way (Moore 1903: 41), he then quickly moves to characterize the nonnatural more narrowly as, in our contemporary terminology, consisting of abstract entities (Moore 1903: 42). My definition of nonnatural fits Moore’s broader initial definition.
This understanding is in line with Shafer-Landau’s claim that the non-reductive naturalist and the nonnaturalist ‘can have identical ontological inventories’, but differ epistemically (2003: 64).
I say ‘direct’ here for indirect evidence for why someone believes a moral claim p can undermine it. For example, if someone was brainwashed to believe that p, and they are thereby psychologically unable to doubt that p, that would indicate a psychological explanation for their belief. See Huemer 2008.
See my 2012: Ch. 5.
Compare these explicit possible meanings of ‘queer’ with the corresponding standard nihilist elliptical meanings at the beginning of section 6.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the audience members of the 9th Annual Felician Ethics Conference at Felician College, Rutherford, NJ: April 25, 2015 for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.
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Kaspar, D. Intuitionism and Nihilism. Philosophia 46, 319–336 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9930-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9930-0