Field Notes

concept

Value nihilism

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Value nihilism (värdenihilism, also axiological nihilism) is the name given to Axel Hägerström’s doctrine that value judgments are neither true nor false: because nothing in the knowable, spatio-temporal world corresponds to a value, a moral judgment expresses a feeling or volition rather than stating a fact. The label was coined pejoratively by the critic John Landquist in 1931; adherents preferred “value theory” (värdeteori) or spoke of non-cognitivism.

The doctrine separates three claims that its 1930s–40s critics ran together:

  1. Meta-ethical: there are no objective values, so no moral proposition can be known.
  2. Scientific: morality can still be studied empirically, as feelings, volitions, and their causal histories — “a science of morals,” though never “a scientific morals.”
  3. Practical: nothing follows about how anyone should act; the theory neither forbids nor permits anything.

The third claim carried the defense against the era’s central accusation. During the “crisis of democracy,” critics charged that value nihilism left a spiritual void exploited by totalitarian movements; the Social Democrat Anders Orne called it “a theoretical foundation for the advance of the modern totalitarian states,” and the philosopher Alf Ahlberg argued it undermined the shared values on which civilization and democracy rested. The Scandinavian Value Nihilists documents the rebuttals: Ingemar Hedenius answered that a descriptive theory cannot found any morality, destructive ones included, and that the practical nihilist’s “everything is allowed” is itself a valuation and therefore meaningless on the theory’s own terms. Hedenius, Herbert Tingsten, and Alf Ross grounded democracy instead in the sociological fact of shared basic values and a formal, majoritarian procedure, not in metaphysical rights.

The distinction that matters for the “might makes right” charge is between denying that power can be justified and asserting that power justifies itself. Value nihilism makes the first move: justification talk is cognitively empty, so no amount of power creates a right, and no right limits power. Critics answered that a culture unable to say that power is wrong has in practice disarmed itself before power — the position Norwegian bishop Eyvind Berggrav took in 1945 when he wrote that jurisprudence treating law as a physical phenomenon “had been Hitler’s prophet” and was forced into the conclusion that might is right. Both readings are documented positions in the debate; Scandinavian legal realism carries the same tension into legal doctrine, where Did legal realism weaken Swedish rights protection records the open causal question.

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