Holding nihilism does not necessarily imply that one should give up using moral or ethical language; some nihilists contend that it remains a useful tool.
For under Mackie's view, if there are to be moral properties, they must be objective and therefore not amenable to differences in subjective desires and preferences.
Moreover any claims that these moral properties, if they did exist would need to be intrinsically motivating by being in some primitive relation to our consciousness.
Perhaps the most common response, and the position which Mackie adopts, is to view moralizing as an inherently useful practice, and that everyone is better off behaving in a moralistic manner.
[8] Garner encouraged people to adhere to an alternative to traditional normative morality: "informed, compassionate amoralism," a blend of compassion, non-duplicity, and clarity of language that he believed would nurture our capability for tolerance, creation, and cooperation.
[9]For all those who also find such entities queer (prima facie implausible), there is reason to doubt the existence of objective values.
In his book Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (1999), Mark Timmons provides a reconstruction of Mackie's views in the form of the two related arguments.
[10] There are several ways in which moral properties are supposedly queer: Christine Korsgaard responds to Mackie by saying: Of course there are entities that meet these criteria.
Therefore if one had independent grounds for supposing such things to exist (such as a reductio ad absurdum of the contrary) the argument from queerness cannot give one any particular reason to think otherwise.
The observer effect, quantum entanglement, the wave-particle duality of light, and other phenomena have been shown to mirror aspects of ethics, providing a response to both the epistemological and meta-ethical puzzles raised by Mackie.
[15] Gilbert Harman argued that we do not need to posit the existence of objective values in order to explain our 'moral observations'.