Few philosophical positions generate as much confusion, misuse, and genuine anxiety as nihilism. In popular culture it has become a catch-all term for a brooding indifference to life, a kind of fashionable despair dressed in black. In philosophy, it refers to a cluster of distinct and serious positions about meaning, morality, and knowledge that have occupied thinkers from ancient Greece through the twenty-first century. Understanding what nihilism actually claims, why it has seemed unavoidable to some of the most rigorous minds in Western thought, and how various traditions have responded to it is essential for anyone who takes seriously the question of how to live.
The Word and Its Roots
Nihilism derives from the Latin nihil, meaning "nothing." The term entered philosophical discourse most prominently in nineteenth-century Russia, where it described a radical intellectual movement that rejected all established authority, tradition, and morality in favor of science and individualism. Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862) gave this cultural nihilism its iconic literary form in the character of Bazarov, who dismisses art, sentiment, and inherited values as sentimental fiction. The term soon migrated into German philosophy, where Friedrich Nietzsche made it the central problem of modern thought.
But the philosophical issues nihilism names are far older. The Sophists of fifth-century Athens already gestured toward moral and epistemological relativism. Pyrrho's ancient skepticism suspended all judgment about whether anything could be known. The Epicureans and Stoics were partly responding to the same anxieties about whether life has meaning that contemporary nihilism raises. What changed with modernity was the felt urgency of the question — the sense that the collapse of religious certainty had left a void that no ready substitute had filled.
The Russian nihilism of the 1860s was a cultural and political phenomenon distinct from philosophical nihilism, though they shared a vocabulary. Young Russian intellectuals, frustrated by the autocracy's resistance to modernization and influenced by German materialism and the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, embraced nihilism as liberation: liberation from the church, from aristocratic sentiment, from romantic idealization of the peasantry, from everything that reason and empirical science could not verify. Dmitry Pisarev, one of the movement's most influential voices, wrote in 1861 that "whatever can be broken should be broken; what survives the test is fit to exist, what flies to pieces is rubbish." This was nihilism as political iconoclasm rather than metaphysical despair — a clearing operation, not a counsel of despair.
Major Varieties of Nihilism
Philosophers distinguish several distinct positions that travel under the nihilist banner.
| Type | Core Claim | Key Thinkers |
|---|---|---|
| Existential nihilism | Life has no inherent meaning or purpose | Schopenhauer, popular existentialists |
| Moral nihilism | There are no objective moral truths | J.L. Mackie, early Nietzsche |
| Epistemological nihilism | Genuine knowledge is impossible | Pyrrhonian skeptics, Gorgias |
| Political nihilism | Social and political institutions should be destroyed | Russian nihilist movement, Bakunin |
| Mereological nihilism | No composite objects exist, only simples | Contemporary analytic metaphysics |
| Ontological nihilism | Nothing exists | Contested; rarely seriously defended |
Of these, existential nihilism and moral nihilism are the most culturally significant and philosophically debated. They are related but distinct: one might hold that life has no inherent cosmic meaning while still believing in objective moral facts, or one might accept moral nihilism while finding meaning through purely subjective projects.
The relationships between these varieties matter. A person might be a moral nihilist while finding rich subjective meaning in relationships, art, and work — holding that moral claims are systematically false while living a deeply engaged life. Conversely, someone might believe in objective moral facts while doubting that any human life has cosmic significance. The tendency to conflate all these positions into a single "nihilism" creates much of the confusion that surrounds the term.
Nietzsche's Diagnosis: God Is Dead
No thinker has done more to frame the nihilism problem for modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche. His approach is not to defend nihilism but to diagnose it as the cultural disease of his era and to ask, with desperate urgency, what might cure it.
The declaration "God is dead" appears first in The Gay Science (1882) and is dramatized in the famous parable of the madman, who runs into the marketplace crying: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." The madman's words are received with mockery — the crowd is indifferent. This is Nietzsche's point: the catastrophe has already happened, but its consequences have not yet been felt.
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?" — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125 (1882)
Nietzsche is not making a triumphant atheist declaration. He is observing that the Enlightenment's success in undermining religious belief has destroyed the metaphysical and moral framework that Western civilization relied on for meaning, value, and social cohesion. Christianity had provided not merely a theology but an entire architecture of significance: a cosmological story, a basis for moral judgment, a source of consolation, and an account of human dignity. The intellectual forces that dismantled this framework — empirical science, historical criticism of scripture, philosophical skepticism — did not provide a replacement.
Without this framework, Nietzsche argued, the inherited values of Western civilization lack foundations. This is the source of nihilism: not a philosophical argument that nothing matters, but a cultural crisis in which the values that structured existence suddenly appear groundless. The most frightening nihilism, in Nietzsche's view, is not the dramatic declaration "nothing matters" but the quiet continuation of the same behaviors and values without any genuine foundation for them — what he called passive nihilism, the exhausted continuation of forms whose spirit has departed.
Nietzsche's diagnosis anticipates what sociologists would later describe as secularization and what the philosopher Charles Taylor analyzed in A Secular Age (2007) as the "immanent frame" — the modern condition in which religious transcendence is no longer a self-evident backdrop of experience but one contested option among many. Taylor's monumental historical analysis argues that what Nietzsche saw as crisis (the loss of the transcendent horizon) is not the simple subtraction of religion from an otherwise unchanged human experience, but a fundamental transformation in the conditions of belief itself — one that creates what Taylor calls the "malaise of immanence," a sense that secular life, however comfortable, lacks depth.
Nietzsche's Response: Active Nihilism and Value Creation
Nietzsche's project is not to console us about nihilism but to move through it. He distinguishes passive nihilism — the despairing acceptance that nothing matters, the "decline and recession of the power of the spirit" — from active nihilism, the creative destruction of old values that clears space for new ones.
The key concept is will to power: not dominance over others, but the fundamental drive toward growth, mastery, and self-overcoming. Genuine values are not discovered — they are created. The Ubermensch (overman or superman) is Nietzsche's name for the type of person capable of creating values rather than merely inheriting them. This figure does not transcend morality by ignoring it but by taking full responsibility for the values by which they live.
The thought experiment of eternal recurrence — would you consent to live your life exactly as it has been, infinitely repeated, in every detail? — functions as a test for nihilism. To embrace this thought, to say "yes" to the permanent return of all one's experiences, requires that one's life be organized around genuinely affirming values rather than resentment, escape, or self-deception. Those who flee from life or resent their own existence could not endure the thought; those who genuinely affirm their life could.
Nietzsche's analysis of slave morality is directly connected to his nihilism diagnosis. Traditional Christian-derived morality, in his account, began as a reactive strategy of the weak: inverting the values of the powerful (strength, vitality, achievement) to make weakness, humility, and suffering into virtues. This "revaluation" expressed what Nietzsche called ressentiment — a covert hatred that cannot be openly expressed, turned into a moral system. Slave morality is nihilistic in a hidden way: it denies life while claiming to affirm it.
Whether Nietzsche's own proposed solution — the creation of new values by exceptional individuals through an act of will — can actually answer the nihilist challenge is disputed. Philosophers including Bernard Reginster (2006) have argued that Nietzsche's response is more rigorous than it appears: the will to power is not mere self-assertion but the affirmation of overcoming resistance, such that the meaningful life is defined by engagement with difficulty rather than the pursuit of comfort. On this reading, Nietzsche offers not arbitrary value creation but a substantive account of what makes human striving worthwhile.
Moral Nihilism: J.L. Mackie and Error Theory
The most rigorous philosophical defense of moral nihilism is J.L. Mackie's error theory, developed in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Mackie argues that:
- Ordinary moral discourse presupposes the existence of objective moral properties — facts about rightness and wrongness that are mind-independent and categorical.
- No such properties actually exist. They would require a strange kind of metaphysical entity quite unlike anything else in the natural world.
- Therefore, all moral claims are technically false — not because they are poorly reasoned but because they presuppose the existence of something that does not exist.
Mackie supports this with two arguments. The argument from queerness holds that objective moral properties would be metaphysically bizarre — entities that somehow entail obligations on anyone who grasps them, unlike any natural fact. The argument from relativity observes that the enormous variation in moral beliefs across cultures is best explained not by some cultures being more morally perceptive than others, but by the absence of any moral facts to perceive.
Error theory differs from moral relativism (which holds that moral truths are relative to cultures) and subjectivism (which holds that moral claims express attitudes rather than make truth-apt claims). Error theory holds that moral claims are truth-apt — they genuinely purport to describe facts — but systematically fail to do so.
The implications are significant. If error theory is correct, it is unclear what grounds claims about human dignity, the wrongness of genocide, or the basis for human rights. Various responses have been proposed: quasi-realism (Simon Blackburn) attempts to vindicate moral discourse despite its lack of objective grounding; constructivism (Rawls, Korsgaard) grounds morality in rational procedures rather than mind-independent facts; naturalism attempts to identify moral properties with natural properties that science can investigate.
Derek Parfit's On What Matters (2011), a massive late career work, mounts perhaps the most sustained contemporary defense of moral realism against error-theoretic nihilism. Parfit argues that there are objective reasons for action that are mind-independent, that the major normative theories (consequentialism, Kantianism, contractualism) "climb the same mountain from different sides" and converge on broadly similar conclusions, and that moral progress — the gradual expansion of our moral circle, the recognition of previously ignored harms — is genuine progress toward moral truth, not mere change in preference. Parfit's argument has been contested but represents one of the most serious attempts to defeat moral nihilism from within analytic philosophy.
Existentialism as a Response: Sartre and Camus
Both existentialism and absurdism begin from the nihilist premise — there is no God-given or inherent meaning in human life — but refuse the nihilist conclusion.
For Jean-Paul Sartre, the absence of inherent meaning is not a tragedy but the precondition for radical freedom. His formula "existence precedes essence" means that human beings have no pre-given nature or purpose; we define ourselves through our choices. Unlike a knife, which is made with a purpose in mind (essence precedes existence), human beings exist first and then create their own natures through action. This is terrifying — Sartre's anguish — because it means we bear full responsibility for what we make of ourselves, with no cosmic authority to blame or thank.
The concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's name for the psychological escape from this responsibility: the pretense that one's choices are determined by one's role, nature, or external circumstances. The waiter who acts as though being a waiter exhausts his being, the person who treats their "personality" as fixed destiny rather than chosen habit — these are bad faith. Authenticity requires the clear-eyed recognition of one's freedom and the acceptance of responsibility for what one does with it.
Albert Camus approached the same starting point differently. He named the fundamental confrontation between human longing for meaning and the universe's silence the Absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus argued that the appropriate response to the Absurd is neither suicide (which he called "philosophical suicide" — giving up the confrontation) nor religious "leap of faith" (which he also called philosophical suicide — abandoning the honest recognition of meaninglessness). The appropriate response is revolt: a defiant, lucid embrace of life in full acknowledgment of its meaninglessness.
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
Camus's Sisyphus, condemned to push his boulder up a hill forever, is happy not because his task has been made meaningful but because he refuses to let meaninglessness defeat him. Rebellion, freedom, and passion are the values that Camus opposes to nihilism — not metaphysical comfort but honest, defiant vitality.
The tension between Sartre and Camus is philosophically productive. Sartre's solution risks the abstraction of treating meaning-creation as purely voluntary — as if the contents of one's chosen commitments matter less than the authenticity of the choosing. Camus insists on the rebellion itself as having positive content: the refusal to accept despair is not arbitrary but the affirmation of human vitality against cosmic indifference. Whether either position fully answers the nihilist challenge — or whether they merely relocate the problem from cosmic meaning to self-created meaning — remains a live question.
Epistemological Nihilism and Skeptical Traditions
Epistemological nihilism — the position that genuine knowledge is impossible — has ancient roots. The Sophist Gorgias of Leontini argued, apparently seriously (or as serious performance), that nothing exists; that if anything existed it could not be known; and that if it could be known, it could not be communicated. This constitutes a form of nihilism about knowledge.
The Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition, founded by Pyrrho of Elis in the fourth century BCE and documented by Sextus Empiricus, suspended judgment on all non-evident matters. Unlike dogmatic nihilism, Pyrrhonism did not positively assert that nothing can be known — it maintained suspension of judgment even on that question. The result was ataraxia (tranquility), achieved not by resolving philosophical questions but by ceasing to worry about them.
Descartes' method of doubt in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) used skeptical arguments as a tool for finding an indubitable foundation for knowledge. The evil demon hypothesis — that an all-powerful deceiver might be causing all our experiences — represents a temporary epistemological nihilism that Descartes then attempts to escape through the cogito. While Descartes escapes this nihilism, the escape through God's existence and benevolence was widely found unpersuasive, leaving later philosophers to grapple with more limited but still serious forms of epistemological skepticism.
Contemporary epistemological discussions have largely moved from global skepticism (the hypothesis that we know nothing) to local skepticism about specific domains: moral knowledge, religious knowledge, introspective knowledge. The question of whether moral knowledge is possible connects epistemological nihilism directly to moral nihilism: if moral facts exist but are unknowable, moral knowledge is impossible for epistemic rather than metaphysical reasons. Sharon Street's evolutionary debunking argument (2006) represents a sophisticated contemporary version of this concern: if our moral intuitions were shaped by natural selection for reproductive fitness rather than truth-tracking, there is no reason to think they track moral facts even if such facts exist.
Political Nihilism and the Russian Context
Political nihilism, as a historical movement, emerged in mid-nineteenth century Russia and represented something quite specific: a rejection of all existing social and political institutions on the grounds that they rest on false foundations and should be destroyed before anything better can be built. The nihilists were typically committed materialists, empiricists, and individualists who rejected traditional authority — Tsarist autocracy, the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy — as irrational impositions on individual freedom.
This movement is often confused with anarchism or terrorism, though the overlap was partial. Sergei Nechayev's Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) represented the extreme position: the revolutionary must destroy everything without mercy, caring nothing for existing values, relationships, or human lives. This document, which genuinely shocked even radical contemporaries, represents the darkest application of nihilist logic — if nothing has value, then nothing restrains destruction.
The political nihilists influenced the development of Russian terrorism in the 1870s-1880s: the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) organization, which assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, emerged from a milieu saturated with nihilist ideas. The irony noted by many contemporaries was that the Tsar who was killed had just signed documents authorizing the first steps toward constitutional reform — the nihilist bomb destroyed the very process that might have begun to address the conditions that radicalized the nihilists.
Dostoevsky engaged most deeply with political nihilism as a novelist. His Demons (Besy, 1872) is the most thorough artistic examination of nihilist logic, tracing how the denial of moral foundations enables a character like Pyotr Verkhovensky — based partly on Nechayev — to manipulate, exploit, and murder those around him. Dostoevsky's argument, made through novelistic demonstration rather than philosophical argument, is that nihilism does not produce liberation but enables tyranny: without moral foundations, the strongest will dominates.
Contemporary Relevance
Nihilism has not become a solved philosophical problem. Several contemporary contexts keep its questions pressing:
Moral realism debates in contemporary metaethics continue to engage directly with Mackie's arguments. Philosophers including Derek Parfit (On What Matters, 2011), Russ Shafer-Landau (Moral Realism: A Defence, 2003), and T.M. Scanlon (Being Realistic About Reasons, 2014) have developed sophisticated defenses of moral realism against nihilist objections. The persistence of this debate, among technically sophisticated philosophers with access to all available arguments, suggests that neither nihilism nor its opponents have yet achieved decisive victory.
Existential risk and meaning in a secular age raises nihilism questions with new intensity. The philosopher Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) develops an account of meaning that does not require either religious foundations or Nietzschean heroism. Wolf argues that a meaningful life requires subjective engagement with projects that have objective worth — a formulation that navigates between pure subjectivism (anything you care about makes your life meaningful) and demanding objectivism (only a narrow range of recognized goods provide meaning). Her account acknowledges both the force of the nihilist challenge and the phenomenological reality that most human beings find genuine meaning in relationships, creative work, and engagement with things that matter beyond themselves.
Digital culture and nihilism have a complex relationship. Internet communities sometimes embrace ironic nihilism as a pose — "nothing matters" deployed as aesthetic, humor, or defense mechanism against being seen to care. The philosopher Whitney Phillips (2015) documented how nihilistic irony functions in online spaces as a way of maintaining social distance from earnest engagement — a form of passive nihilism in Nietzsche's sense, the continuation of forms whose affective content has been hollowed out. Philosophers like Nick Bostrom and effective altruists argue in the opposite direction: that meaning and morality are not only real but impose demanding obligations given the scale of suffering that could be prevented and the potential scale of positive futures that could be created.
Nihilism and Mental Health
One dimension of nihilism that philosophy textbooks rarely address is its psychological relationship to depression and despair. Clinical depression frequently involves nihilistic cognitions: beliefs that nothing matters, that effort is pointless, that the future holds nothing of value. This overlap raises questions about whether philosophical nihilism is sometimes a rationalization of a psychological state rather than a conclusion of genuine reasoning.
Aaron Beck's cognitive triad in his model of depression explicitly includes negative views about the future, including hopelessness, that resemble existential nihilism. A 2019 meta-analysis by Cuijpers and colleagues examining cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression found that challenging nihilistic cognitions about the self, world, and future was among the most effective therapeutic interventions — suggesting that nihilistic beliefs, whatever their philosophical status, function as psychological vulnerabilities that CBT can successfully modify.
The question of whether nihilism causes despair, whether despair causes nihilism, or whether they are correlated symptoms of a common underlying condition is genuinely difficult. Viktor Frankl, who developed logotherapy after surviving Auschwitz, argued in Man's Search for Meaning (1946) that nihilism is among the primary sources of psychological suffering in modernity, and that the will to meaning is as fundamental a human drive as any other. Finding meaning — even in suffering, even in circumstances that seem to offer no grounds for it — was for Frankl both a psychological necessity and a philosophical achievement.
Frankl's observations in Auschwitz led him to the conclusion that those prisoners who maintained a sense of meaning — through relationships, through art and thought conducted in the mind, through the decision to bear witness to what was happening — survived longer and with greater psychological integrity than those who lost the sense that anything mattered. This extreme case study provides the most striking possible argument against existential nihilism: in conditions designed to strip everything meaningful away, the discovery of meaning proved to be the most fundamental human act of resistance.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
Conclusion: Living With the Questions
Nihilism, properly understood, is not a comfortable stance but a diagnosis. Nietzsche did not celebrate the death of God; he mourned it, and spent his philosophical career desperately seeking a response adequate to the crisis. The honest response to nihilism is neither cheerful dismissal nor despairing acceptance, but the kind of sustained engagement that Camus modeled — living with the questions, refusing easy comforts, and finding in the confrontation itself something worth preserving.
The philosophical tools for responding to nihilism are richer now than they have ever been. Contemporary metaethics has mapped the terrain of moral nihilism with precision. Existentialist and absurdist literature has explored the psychological and existential dimensions with depth and honesty. Analytic philosophy has clarified the logical structure of the arguments with rigor. Whether these tools are sufficient to overcome nihilism — or whether nihilism names a permanent feature of the human condition, to be managed rather than solved — remains among the most important and genuinely open questions in philosophy.
What is clear is that the response to nihilism cannot simply be to ignore the challenge it poses. The most articulate nihilist positions — Mackie's error theory, Nietzsche's diagnosis of the death of God, the Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment — are made by serious thinkers engaging honestly with genuine difficulties. A life lived without engaging those difficulties is not a refutation of nihilism; it is an evasion of it. The philosophical tradition at its best offers not a comfortable escape from the nihilist challenge but the equipment — intellectual, ethical, and existential — to face it with clarity.
References
- Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books (1974).
- Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen. Hackett (1998).
- Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin.
- Sartre, J.P. (1943). Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. Washington Square Press (1984).
- Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. Vintage Books (1955).
- Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press (2006 edition).
- Turgenev, I. (1862). Fathers and Sons. Translated by Constance Garnett. Heinemann (1895).
- Dostoevsky, F. (1872). Demons (Besy). Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage (1994).
- Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters (Volumes 1 and 2). Oxford University Press.
- Wolf, S. (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.
- Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press (Belknap Press).
- Reginster, B. (2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Harvard University Press.
- Shafer-Landau, R. (2003). Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford University Press.
- Scanlon, T. M. (2014). Being Realistic About Reasons. Oxford University Press.
- Street, S. (2006). A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value. Philosophical Studies, 127(1), 109-166. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6
- Blackburn, S. (1993). Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford University Press.
- Cuijpers, P., et al. (2019). The effectiveness of psychotherapies for major depression: A meta-analysis. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 140(5), 396-404. https://doi.org/10.1111/acps.13096
Frequently Asked Questions
What is nihilism in simple terms?
Nihilism is the philosophical view that life has no objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value, or that moral truths do not exist, or that genuine knowledge is impossible. The word derives from the Latin nihil, meaning 'nothing.' In popular usage it often refers to the belief that nothing matters, though philosophers distinguish several more precise varieties: existential nihilism (life has no inherent meaning), moral nihilism (there are no objective moral truths), epistemological nihilism (genuine knowledge is impossible), and political nihilism (all social and political institutions should be destroyed). Nihilism is most often discussed as a challenge to be diagnosed and overcome rather than as a position to be defended.
What did Nietzsche mean when he said 'God is dead'?
Nietzsche's declaration 'God is dead' -- first appearing in 'The Gay Science' (1882) and dramatized in the parable of the madman -- is not primarily a theological claim but a cultural diagnosis. Nietzsche is observing that the Enlightenment's success in undermining religious belief has destroyed the metaphysical and moral framework that Western civilization had relied on for meaning, value, and social cohesion. 'God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,' the madman cries -- but the tragedy is that the very culture responsible for the death has not yet grasped the consequences. Without the Christian moral framework, the inherited values of Western civilization lack foundations; nihilism -- the recognition that there are no objective values -- becomes the inevitable diagnosis. Nietzsche's project is not to celebrate this but to ask: what must we create to replace what has been lost?
What is the difference between nihilism and existentialism?
Nihilism and existentialism begin from the same premise -- that there is no God-given or inherent meaning in human life -- but respond to it differently. Nihilism accepts or is paralyzed by the absence of meaning; existentialism treats this absence as the precondition for human freedom. Sartre's formula 'existence precedes essence' means that human beings have no pre-given nature or purpose; we define ourselves through our choices. Rather than being a cause for despair, the absence of inherent meaning is, for Sartre, the ground of radical freedom and responsibility. Camus's absurdism similarly acknowledges the confrontation between human longing for meaning and the universe's silence, but responds not with nihilism but with rebellion: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Both existentialism and absurdism treat nihilism as a philosophical temptation to be transcended.
What is moral nihilism and why does it matter?
Moral nihilism is the metaethical view that there are no objective moral truths -- that moral claims like 'murder is wrong' are not true or false but express attitudes, or are simply false because they presuppose the existence of moral facts that do not exist. Error theory, developed by J. L. Mackie in 'Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong' (1977), is the most influential form: Mackie argues that ordinary moral discourse presupposes the existence of objective moral properties, but since no such properties exist, all moral claims are technically false. Moral nihilism matters because it challenges the possibility of genuine moral reasoning, the basis of moral criticism, and the foundations of human rights and political legitimacy. If there are no moral facts, it is unclear what grounds claims that genocide is wrong or that persons have dignity.
How did Nietzsche propose to overcome nihilism?
Nietzsche's response to nihilism centers on the concept of value creation rather than value discovery. Since there are no objective values given by God or nature, the task is to create values that affirm life -- that express the will to power, the drive toward growth, mastery, and self-overcoming, rather than the life-denying 'slave morality' of resentment and pity that he associates with Christianity and utilitarianism. The Ubermensch (overman or superman) is Nietzsche's name for the type of person capable of creating values rather than inheriting them. The thought experiment of eternal recurrence -- would you consent to live your life exactly as it has been, infinitely repeated? -- is Nietzsche's test for whether one's values are life-affirming or nihilistic. Active nihilism, in Nietzsche's framework, is the creative destruction of old values that clears space for new ones; passive nihilism is the despairing acceptance that nothing matters.