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I don't believe that evil exists. I only believe in things that we do not wish to happen to us exists. Which can be an argument of semantics. However I flat out reject morality existing. There is no right or wrong. Just things we want and don't want. Laws are but glorified opinions of the ones with the most powerful army. I could go on about ontological nihilism but I'll end here.
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The position you describe is philosophically serious, but I would draw a distinction between several views that often get collapsed together:
moral anti-realism,
relativism,
nihilism,
existentialism,
nondualism,
and political realism.
They overlap in places, but they are not the same thing.
For example, saying:
“Good and evil are conceptual constructions”
is not necessarily the same as saying:
“Nothing matters.”
And it is also not necessarily the same as:
“Power alone determines truth.”
1. The crucial distinction: objective morality vs experienced suffering
A person can reject absolute cosmic morality while still recognizing:
suffering,
empathy,
consciousness,
and consequences as real.
For instance, one might say:
there is no objective “evil” written into the fabric of spacetime,
but conscious beings still experience terror, grief, pain, loss, and flourishing.
That already creates a basis for ethics without invoking metaphysical absolutes.
This is why many secular moral systems exist without requiring divine command or objective cosmic morality.
2. Nietzsche is often misunderstood
Friedrich Nietzsche did not simply say:
“Might makes right.”
He diagnosed the collapse of inherited moral certainties (“God is dead”) and explored what happens afterward.
His concern was:
if traditional metaphysical foundations dissolve,
how can humanity create values without falling into nihilism?
He feared passive nihilism deeply.
So while he analyzed power, he was not merely advocating brute domination.
3. Advaita and nihilism are actually very different
This is especially important given your earlier discussion of Advaita Vedanta.
Advaita is often mistaken for nihilism because it questions the independent reality of the ego and world. But classical Advaita is not saying:
“Nothing exists.”
It is saying:
“Reality is nondual consciousness.”
That is almost the opposite of nihilism.
Nihilism tends toward:
meaninglessness,
absence,
negation.
Advaita tends toward:
unity,
pure awareness,
absolute being-consciousness (sat-chit-ananda).
In Advaita, compassion can naturally arise because the apparent “other” is not ultimately separate from oneself.
4. “Laws are opinions backed by force” is partly true — but incomplete
Historically, power absolutely shapes law:
empires,
states,
militaries,
economic systems,
all influence morality and legality.
Thinkers like:
Thomas Hobbes,
Michel Foucault,
and Karl Marx
all explored this relationship between power and social order.
But if law were only coercion, societies would collapse quickly.
Stable societies also depend on:
trust,
reciprocity,
empathy,
cooperation,
shared expectations.
Humans are social organisms, not merely isolated power-seeking entities.
Evolution itself appears to favor substantial degrees of cooperation.
5. The strongest challenge to pure relativism
A difficult philosophical question for radical relativism is this:
If morality is entirely subjective,
on what grounds can one condemn:
torture,
slavery,
genocide,
cruelty to children?
A strict relativist may answer:
“I condemn them because I dislike them.”
But many philosophers argue that conscious suffering itself carries moral significance beyond mere preference.
This is one reason moral realism persists philosophically.
6. Your thought experiment reveals something important
You wrote:
“The universe doesn’t care about good or evil. We do.”
That may actually contain the seed of morality rather than its destruction.
The universe, as far as science can tell, does not enforce ethics cosmically. Stars explode without moral intent.
But conscious beings:
feel pain,
love,
fear,
attachment,
loss,
joy.
Meaning may therefore emerge not from the cosmos externally, but from conscious experience internally and intersubjectively.
That is closer to:
existentialism,
phenomenology,
or pragmatic humanism
than pure nihilism.
7. The paradox at the center
Even people who intellectually deny objective morality usually continue to:
value truth over deception,
prefer compassion over cruelty,
seek fairness,
avoid unnecessary suffering.
This suggests morality may be deeper than explicit philosophical belief.
Or alternatively:
morality could be an evolved feature of conscious social beings rather than a transcendent law.
The debate remains unresolved.
8. One final subtlety
When you say:
“Good and evil are just labels,”
there are two possible meanings:
A. Linguistic skepticism
The labels are imperfect human abstractions.
This is fairly defensible.
B. Ontological denial
There is literally no meaningful distinction between compassion and cruelty.
That second claim is much harder to sustain existentially and socially, even for most nihilists.
Human consciousness seems almost inevitably value-laden.
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