In this essay, I’ll try to briefly explain why I believe that the most despised theories in ethics and meta-ethics, respectively, can resolve all of ethics when combined.

I have been a utilitarian since my undergraduate days, or at least since my twelfth year of school, when we had a philosophy elective for a year. What a wonderful opportunity that was, by the way, for I may never even have considered studying philosophy otherwise.

But I’ve also been a moral nihilist. I see no reason to believe that there are moral facts. Indeed, I’ve also become a moral abolitionist—a nihilist twice over. I think that we should abandon much of moral language for it is deeply confused and would make most of us better off in the process. Yet I also think that we should organise society in broadly utilitarian ways.

This may seem paradoxical. One cannot both defend a particular view of what is morally right and good while denying that there are moral facts. So how can we square this strange combination, which I believe even Jeremy Bentham himself endorsed?

In ethics classes, I largely found utilitarian answers vastly more compelling than deontological ones—or whatever other alternatives were discussed. Whereas utilitarianism was naturalistic, grounded in the mental states of particular individuals and what makes their lives better from their own point of view, other ethical theories have always been awfully paternalistic, telling people what they should really value, and building metaphysical castles in the sky unconnected to reality to justify these intrusions into people’s own visions of the good life.

And yet, when utilitarians made the move from the fact that positive mental states or the........

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