It is true that it feels very differently to enjoy a good meal, taking part in an interesting conversation, or to think of how successful your children are. Suppose we do all these things at a particular time. How happy are we at the time? We do not need to calculate the value of each such feelings on any singular scale to answer this question. We need not see our happiness at the time as a mathematical function of these items. It is rather that all these experiences, together with many other factors, causally puts us at the time at a certain level of happiness, i.e. in a certain mood.

It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.

I wanted to know what it means to know something, whether we can know at all, and, if so, how.

You should not take the content of your intuitive response as evidence until you have submitted your psychological reaction to what I call cognitive psychotherapy. You should do what you can to learn as much as possible about the origin of your reaction.

My conjecture is that most people will refuse to let go, even when their lives have become boring (at least in comparisons with possible lives lived by new generations). If this happens, there will eventually be no room for new generations. A kind of collective irrationality will lead to a bleak life for the last generation that decides to stay around. Unless we put and end to the human race (through global warming, for example), before this happens, individual egoism will block the path to a better world.

We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so.

If two norms conflict, if they are mutually inconsistent, then at least one of them must be false.