Escape from Nihilism
J. Budziszewski
January 1, 1998
Seventeen years ago I stood in the Government Department of the University of Texas to give a talk. I was fresh out of graduate school, and it was my here's-why-you-should-hire-me lecture. I wanted to teach about ethics and politics, so as academic job seekers do everywhere, I was showing the faculty my stuff.
So what did I tell them? Two things. The first was that we human beings just invent the difference between good and evil; the second was that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway. And I laid out a ten-year plan for rebuilding ethical and political theory on these two propositions.
Does that seem to you a good plan for getting a job teaching the young? Or does it seem a better plan for getting committed to the state mental hospital? Well, I wasn't committed to the state mental hospital, but I did get a job teaching the young.
I've been asked to tell you how I became a nihilist, and I've been asked to tell you how I escaped from nihilism. Perhaps I should first explain just what my argument for nihilism was.
As I mentioned above, I made two claims: first, that we make up the difference between good and evil, and second, that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway. My argument reversed this order. I first denied free will. The reasoning was not very original. Everything we do or think or feel, I thought, is just an effect of prior causes. It doesn't matter that some of those prior causes are my previous deeds or thoughts or feelings, because those would be effects of still earlier causes, and if we traced the chain further and further back, sooner or later we would come to causes that are outside of me completely, such as my heredity and environment.
Second, I concluded that if we don't have free will, then good ...
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