Is morality relative?

Moral nihilism: there is no such thing as Morality

Question: Is morality relative?
Position‹2 of 3›: It doesn't matter
Argument1 of 2›: Moral nihilism: there is no such thing as Morality

Morality isn't absolute or relative. "Right and wrong" don't exist at all and continuing to pretend that they do is both pointless and harmful.

The argument

Throughout history, billions of people have grappled with the same question: what is the right thing to do? Even after millions of years and countless philosophical theories struggling to explain morality, we have no definitive answer to this fundamental question. Maybe, then, we’re missing something. After all, our struggle with morality makes a huge assumption, erroneously claiming that morality exists to begin with. According to moral nihilism, there is no such thing as right or wrong. () Rather, these categories are arbitrary constructs, created by humans, that reflect no objective value in the outside world. While all moral nihilists agree that claims like “it is wrong to steal” are untrue, there are two main viewpoints that attempt to clarify this point in slightly different ways. One says that all moral claims are false, while the other states they are neither true nor false. () Both agree that to blindly abide by meaningless moral rules is to accept a fictional view of the world and worse, a view that will only serve to needlessly control your every thought, word, and action.

Premises

[P1]Despite millennia of inquiry, no definitive account of objective morality has ever been established. [P2] Moral categories like right and wrong are arbitrary human constructs that correspond to no objective feature of the world. [P3] Treating such constructs as binding imposes a fictional framework that needlessly controls thought and action. [C] Therefore, whether morality is relative doesn't matter, because morality itself does not exist.

Counter-arguments

Firstly, proponents of this argument have historically done little to prove that morality is nonexistent, merely using it as an easy way to disparage other philosophers’ moral theories. Secondly, this argument offers no “way forward,” and no solution for the issue it points out. It claims that there is no such thing as morality, but it fails to address what we should do with this information, or how our society should change to adapt to it. Perhaps this is because moral nihilists want to avoid an obvious truth: even if morality truly doesn’t exist, we still have to follow the norms we have created in order to maintain a functional society.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Absence of an agreed account is not evidence of absence: the same reasoning would dissolve mathematics, consciousness and causation, where long-running disagreement coexists with the subject matter. [Rejecting P2] That moral categories are human constructs does not establish that they are arbitrary — laws, money and language are constructed and non-arbitrary — and the step from "made by us" to "corresponding to nothing" is the one the premise leaves out. [Rejecting P3] Calling the imposition of a fictional framework needless is itself a normative judgement, so stating the position requires the vocabulary it denies — and, as the counter notes, it supplies no account of how to live once accepted.