| I've had this discussion with people before, the best answer I've come up with is this: Nihilism is less the idea that all things are irrelevant or immaterial but rather that there is no universal valuation to things. What we do may not affect a universal scale observer or tautologically "matter" in some sense but there exists some scale or model under which things have some valuation. The trick then becomes rather than conform to some agreed scale or model of the universe for the moral or value derivative we instead turn to what we have decided is valuable. If I am cold is irrelevant to the universe, but it is relevant to me, and as such being cold may only last a short time and can be survived but it still matters to me. Equally there is no universal sense of being moral, there is however my sense of being moral and as such some actions can be good not by being derived from some universal morals but instead by my own definitions. "Being kind to a stranger" is moral to me in line with my definitions, but "not eating fish on Fridays" has no moral definition within my moral declaration so I can eat fish on Fridays without being immoral. Nihilism isn't an end, it's the start to a personal conversation on values that are specific to you and become meaningful to you by your understanding of their worth. Once you have defined your values independent of some larger prescriptive whole you have a system you actually understand and can defend the merits of, a much stronger core for reasoning about morality and the goodness of your actions. |