Nietzsche: Value Theory

This paper examines Nietzsche's views on love and marriage in the works of his middle period. Contrary to the general consensus in the secondary literature regarding Nietzsche's ideas on these matters, it shows that he offers several positive reflections on love and marriage. Indeed, at times he accepts that friendship is possible between the genders and even models marriage on friendship. Modelling marriage on friendship creates an overlap between Nietzsche's thought and that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. However, (...) it is argued here that, albeit for different reasons, none of these visions of marriage as friendship succeeds in fully accommodating sexuality. (shrink)

"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: -/- This excellent collection, edited by Julian Young, features ten essays on the topic of Nietzsche’s valuation of the individual and the implications this has for notions of community. The book features contributions from some of the most respected contemporary Nietzsche scholars, and each essay displays rigorous analysis while being written in an engaging style. -/- Many of these contributions are evidently written in response to Young’s own (...) provocative reading of Nietzsche as a communitarian thinker in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Young presents aspects of this reading in the opening essay. He argues that Nietzsche’s “liberal communitarianism” (8) stems from his intellectual inheritance from Wagner of a distinctly Hegelian project, that of synthesizing the need for common meaning with the desire for liberal individual rights. Young provides a close reading of Wagner, identifying the liberal aspect of Wagner’s communitarianism in a form of “soft power” (9)—namely, the capacity to inspire, rather than coerce, the collective toward a shared ideal. This soft power opens the space for reconciliation between the desires of the individual and the goals of the community at large. Young contends that Wagner’s early Hegelianism “appears virtually word for word” in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (16). More controversially and less convincingly, he extends this liberal communitarianism across Nietzsche’s entire corpus. In particular, for Young, we should understand Nietzsche’s free spirits as “agents of change” (25), exemplary individuals who both establish and question the evaluative boundaries of the collective ethical imperative. -/- Hans Sluga’s chapter investigates Nietzsche’s call for a new “great politics” (32). Drawing comparisons with Plato, Sluga argues that Nietzsche views the lack of a socially recognized order of rank, a corollary of modern democratic pluralism, as the inception of political nihilism. Sluga locates this diagnosis in Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche’s critique of modern democracy inaugurates his concern with the tensions between political processes and the prospect of cultural flourishing. For Sluga, however, it is in Beyond Good and Evil that Nietzsche floats the possibility of reconciliation between the two, with the prospect of exceptional individuals instigating a new political relationship. Sluga argues that Nietzsche sees the European notion of the nation-state as something that should and will be abolished. While taking Nietzsche’s recommendation to be problematic, Sluga concludes that his diagnosis is profound. [End Page 469] -/- How convincing one takes Sluga’s argument to be depends on the literalness one thinks should be placed on the phrase “great politics.” By Beyond Good and Evil, is it not employed purely as a metaphor? This would accord with Ken Gemes and Chris Sykes’s approach in the following essay. Like Young, Gemes and Sykes emphasize Nietzsche’s kinship with Wagner, identifying the problem of meaning as central to both. Nietzsche is identified as conducting an anthropology of communities’ answers to the problem of meaning, or, rather, their creations of illusions to act as semblances of meaning. In his early works they take Nietzsche to hold that the foundations for the kind of cultural consecration necessary for the provision of collective meaning can be provided through myth, in the place of metaphysics. But, contra Young, Gemes and Sykes argue that Nietzsche develops away from his early communitarianism: first, toward an (ultimately pessimistic) investigation into the possibility of a scientific culture that provides meaning, and then by advocating a narrower individualism. For Gemes and Sykes, then, Nietzsche’s aspiration for communitarian cultural flourishing died at Bayreuth, and with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes a final attempt to provide a life-affirming “mythology” (72) for the flourishing of his intended recipients, now of a far more limited scope—namely, only truly exemplary individuals. -/- Here one might wonder whether Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence might better fit this need for the provision of a mythology. Although Nietzsche marks out Zarathustra as the jewel of his oeuvre (EH P:4), he also declares the eternal recurrence, which receives...". (shrink)

Contrary to what a superficial reading of Nietzsche might suggest, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is only apparently limited to the theoretical sphere. In fact, Nietzsche also relates perspectivism with his analysis of values and, more in general, with his critique of morality. The aim of the present paper is to present an overview of what might be called Nietzsche’s “moral perspectivism”. In order to answer the question about what kind of practical philosophy derives from Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we shall focus the attention on (...) two views which are erroneously believed to follow from it: radical individualism and strong relativism. (shrink)

ITALIAN: Contrariamente a quanto possa suggerire una lettura superficiale, il prospettivismo di Nietzsche è limitato alla sfera teoretica solo in apparenza. Nietzsche, infatti, collega questa nozione alla propria analisi dei valori e, più in generale, alla critica della morale. Scopo del presente articolo è di presentare una disamina di quello che possiamo chiamare il "prospettivismo morale" di Nietzsche. Col preciso scopo di rispondere alla domanda relativa a quale tipo di filosofia pratica derivi dalle riflessioni di Nietzsche sul prospettivismo, concentreremo la (...) nostra attenzione su due posizioni che erroneamente si crede possano seguire da esse: l'individualismo radicale e il relativismo forte. -/- ENGLISH: Contrary to what a superficial reading of Nietzsche might suggest, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is only apparently limited to the theoretical sphere. In fact, Nietzsche also relates perspectivism with his analysis of values and, more in general, with his critique of morality. The aim of the present paper is to present an overview of what might be called Nietzsche’s “moral perspectivism”. In order to answer the question about what kind of practical philosophy derives from Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we shall focus the attention on two views which are erroneously believed to follow from it: radical individualism and strong relativism. (shrink)

This second part of the essay deals with the horns of the dilemma at the conceptual level and ?on the street?. The first part ended with that quandary where a deep understanding was precluded no matter which way one turned, whether an inadequate comprehension based on individual and partial notions, a perplexing pluralist path or a relinquishment of the hermeneutic enterprise altogether. The philosophical solution of existential overtones presently put forward deftly avoids the sharp ends of the predicament by means (...) of a three-tiered phenomenological analysis of the event. First, death is considered via Heidegger's and Sartre's existential examination; next, risk and related concepts, such as fear, are scrutinised; and third, Nietzsche's and Ortega y Gasset's life-affirming views lead us to the liberating conclusion: facing danger and death are means to an enhanced and joyful experience of life. As in the first part, this one also presents several photographs that complement the text at different levels. Once several objections are disposed of, readers are left with a philosophical elucidation of a sense of joy predicated on the ability to face daring challenges willingly undertaken for the fun of it. (shrink)

This essay charts several key points of contact between Nietzsche and the hermeneutical tradition. It begins by arguing that the familiar claim that Nietzsche offers a hermeneutics of suspicion is potentially misleading. Seeking a more accurate representation of Nietzsche’s views, the essay argues that Nietzsche’s interpretive stance has several key features: he rejects immediate givens, endorses holism and perspectivism, and sees conscious experience as structured by concepts and language. Methodologically, Nietzsche inaugurates a genealogical approach to studying objects of philosophical concern, (...) and offers a series of thoughts and arguments on perspectives and the ways in which they might be assessed. After explaining these points, the essay reviews the way in which Nietzsche takes religious, moral, and philosophical systems as aspiring to provide an interpretation of existence that renders it meaningful. The closing section briefly discusses the Nietzschean approach to interpretation that is adopted by Foucault. (shrink)

Kant and Nietzsche are typically thought to have diametrically opposed accounts of willing: put simply, whereas Kant gives signal importance to reflective episodes of choice, Nietzsche seems to deny that reflective choices have any significant role in the etiology of human action. In this essay, I argue that the dispute between Kant and Nietzsche actually takes a far more interesting form. Nietzsche is not merely rejecting the Kantian picture of agency. Rather, Nietzsche is offering a subtle critique of the Kantian (...) theory, denying certain aspects of it while preserving others. On a standard reading, the Kantian theory of willing is committed to three claims: (1) choice causes action, (2) motives do not determine choice, and (3) reflective deliberation suspends the effects of motives. I argue that Nietzsche accepts claims (1) and (2) while denying claim (3). I show that Nietzsche's denial of (3) is premised upon a sophisticated conception of motivation. I contend that Nietzsche's denial of (3) leads him to a new model of reflective agency. This model preserves certain Kantian insights about the nature of self-conscious agency, while embedding these insights in a more complex and arguably more plausible account of motivation. The resultant theory of agency is considerably more sophisticated than has yet been appreciated. (shrink)

The central aim of this article is to argue that Nietzsche takes his own taste, and those in the relevant sense similar to it, to enjoy a kind of epistemic privilege over their rivals. Section 2 will examine the textual evidence for an anti-realist reading of Nietzsche on taste. Section 3 will then provide an account of taste as an ‘affective evaluative sensibility’, asking whether taste so understood supports an anti-realist reading. I will argue that it does not and that (...) we should resist construing the affects, which constitute taste for Nietzsche, as no more than Humean subjective preferences. Section 4 will then consider passages in which Nietzsche makes a connection between taste and epistemic considerations, suggesting that he appears to situate the epistemic privilege of his taste in a more fundamental method of evaluative disclosure, namely pre-reflective affective responses. Finally, Section 5 will argue that we can make sense of how such affective responses could provide us with evaluative knowledge by narrowing the scope of the objects of Nietzsche’s taste to other affective-evaluative states, such that the affective responses are meta-affective evaluations. On the basis of this idea, I construct a theory of meta-affective responses providing their subjects with access to the intrinsic phenomenal value of other affective-evaluative states, and then go on to show how Nietzsche can be read as applying this theory in a number of passages. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s presentation of the eternal recurrence in Gay Science 341 is often viewed as a practical thought experiment meant to radically transform us. But exactly why and how we are supposed to be transformed is not clear. I contend that addressing these issues requires taking a close look at the psychological setting of the passage. The eternal recurrence is presented in our “loneliest loneliness.” I argue that facing the eternal recurrence from a state of profound loneliness both motivates self-transformation and (...) contributes toward helping us succeed at that project. (shrink)

This introductory essay addresses Nietzsche's famous claim that God is dead, develops his arguments for it, and examines its potential implications for contemporary religious and ethical thought.

Review of Tsarnia Doyle, Nietzsche's Metaphysics of the Will to Power: The Possibility of Value.

Despite its centrality for an understanding of Nietzsche's thought, the term ressentiment does not appear in his writings before Beyond Good and Evil. This article argues that the roots of the idea of ressentiment appear in his middle period writings when he discusses vanity [die Eitelkeit].

“Another Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality?” one might be excused for asking at the sight of Simon May’s new collection. This volume has to contend for shelf space with homonymic monographs by Lawrence Hatab (2008) and David Owen (2007), as well as Daniel Conway’s (2008) Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, a compilation of the same name edited by Christa Acampora (2006), and Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality (2002). Add to this that Hatab contributes to May’s collection, Owen and (...) Conway contribute to Acampora’s, and Christine Swanton contributes to both, and the question of redundancy becomes even more pressing. Is Nietzsche’s Genealogy – whether of morality or morals – sufficiently rich, difficult, and interesting to merit such a hubbub of scholarly voices, and, if it is, does the attention paid in May’s new volume significantly advance our understanding of it? The answer to both questions is an unequivocal “Yes.”. (shrink)

_A Companion to Nietzsche_ provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, profiling the most recent research and trends in scholarship. Brings together an international roster of both rising stars and established scholars, including many of the leading commentators and interpreters of Nietzsche. Showcases the latest trends in Nietzsche scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche’s philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. Includes clearly organized sections on Art, Nature, and Individuation; Nietzsche's New Philosophy (...) of the Future; Eternal Recurrence, the Overhuman, and Nihilism; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; Evolution and Life. Features fresh treatments of Nietzsche’s core and enigmatic doctrines. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to investigate what Nietzsche sees a being the origin of morality. The various systems of morality and ethics that make up specific religious practises and different ideologies are all derived from a similar system of cruelty and seemingly arbitrary ritualizations of behaviours.

Using Alasdair MacIntyre as a foil, I defend what I take to be a viable Nietzschean genealogical account, showing that a proper perspectivism is neither perniciously subjectivist nor absolutist. I begin by arguing against MacIntyre’s assertion that genealogists are committed to the view that rationality requires neutrality and that as there is no neutrality, there is no rationality. I then continue by offering something of a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s view, designed partly to clarify the error pinpointed in MacIntyre’s arguments, but (...) primarily to amplify the Nietzschean solution. This reconstruction involves claiming that Nietzsche is committed to three different senses of “truth:” the “Truth” (with a capital “T”) of correspondence theories, “truth” which is really pragmatic knowledge that helps us survive, and, finally, “truth” that is nothing more that “metaphors and metonyms” which are falsely taken to be useful to survival. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysical free will and moral desert has been widely recognised, the sense in which Nietzsche continues to use the term freedom affirmatively remains largely unnoticed. The aim of this article is to show that freedom and agency are among Nietzsche’s central concerns, that his much-discussed interest in power in fact originates in a first-person account of freedom, and that his understanding of the phenomenology of freedom informs his theory of agency. He develops a non-reductive drive-psychological motivational (...) theory: reflective judgement and reasons can motivate by means of affective orientations agents have due to their drives. In particular, due to a standing desire or 'instinct for freedom' agents can generate, in mental simulations, the necessary motivational affects to unify their drives in view of certain long-term goals. (shrink)

This article argues that Nietzsche's transvaluation project refers not to a mere inversion or negation of a set of values but, instead, to a different conception of what a value is and how it functions. Traditional values function within a standard logical framework and claim legitimacy and bindingness based on exogenous authority with absolute extension. Nietzsche regards this framework as unnecessarily reductive in its attempted exclusion of contradiction and real opposition among competing values and proposes a nonstandard, dialetheic model of (...) valuation. (shrink)

Cheryl Chase has argued that “the problem” of intersex is one of “stigma and trauma, not gender,” as those focused on medical management would have it. Despite frequent references to shame in the critical literature, there has been surprisingly little analysis of shame, or of the disgust that provokes it. This paper investigates the function of disgust in the medical management of intersex and seeks to understand the consequences—material and moral—with respect to the shame it provokes.Conventional ethical approaches may not (...) provide quite the right tools to consider this affective dimension of the medical management of intersex, but we find in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality a framework that allows us a profound appreciation of its moral significance (Nietzsche 1887/1998). Understanding doctors' disgust—and the disgust that they promote in parents of those born with atypical anatomies—as a contemporary expression of ressentiment directs us to not focus on the bodies of those born with intersex conditions, which have been the privileged objects of attention both in medical practice and in criticisms of it, but moves us to consider instead the bodies of those whose responses constitute the motivating force for normalizing practices in the first place. (shrink)

Nietzsche never presented a worked-out normative ethical theory and appeared to regard any attempt to do so as woefully misguided. He poured scorn on the main contenders for such a theory in his day, and in ours – Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. Moreover, he repeatedly referred to himself as an 'immoralist' and gave one of his books the title Beyond Good and Evil, thus seeming only to confirm the impression that he was more interested in demolishing, and even abolishing morality (...) altogether than in making any constructive contribution to the subject. While the topic of morality appears as a central and almost obsessive interest in his works – especially in the sequence of books from Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881) to On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) – it generally does so as the target of relentless criticism. Many have concluded, not surprisingly, that Nietzsche, rather than being interested in replacing an existing conception of morality with a better one of his own, was in the business of advising us to abandon morality altogether – to live, in some sense, without morality. (shrink)

Much has been made of the apparent tensions in Nietzsche’s ethical and metaethical views. In this essay I examine a kind of value standard available to Nietzsche that is present in his work. I offer an interpretation of honesty as both a Nietzschean virtue and a means of ethical assessment. Despite Nietzsche’s well-known criticisms of truth, he upholds honesty as the only remaining virtue of his free spirits. Honesty has been treated in the literature primarily in the contexts of truth (...) or life affirmation, but I argue that we should instead recognize honesty as a virtue within the context of valuing. I defend honesty as a distinct kind of truthfulness and sincerity involving what I call confrontation. The seeds of Nietzsche’s mature view are first evident in his work on tragedy, then developed further in Zarathustra, ultimately revealing a constraint on valuing that is essential to Nietzsche’s broader normative projects. (shrink)

This article discusses how a wide range of apparently conflicting metaethical theories have been ascribed to Nietzsche. It reviews the major kinds of contemporary metaethical theories and the initial textual evidence for ascribing some version of each kind to Nietzsche. It then considers the objections to such ascriptions as well as arguments in favor of claims of the relative plausibility of ascribing one metaethical interpretation to Nietzsche over another. The article concludes with a serious consideration of the view that perhaps (...) Nietzsche simply does not have a considered metaethical stance. (shrink)

Though Nietzsche traditionally often used to be interpreted as a nihilist, a range of possible metaethical interpretations, including varieties of realism, subjectivism and fictionalism, have emerged in the secondary literature. Recently the possibility that Nietzsche is a non-cognitivist has been broached. If one sees Hume as a central non-cognitivist figure, as recent non-cognitivists such as Simon Blackburn have, then the similarities between Nietzsche and Hume can make this reading seem plausible. This paper assesses the general plausibility of interpreting Nietzsche as (...) a non-cognitivist. Non-cognitivism can mean various things and so some attempt is made to lay out the various kinds of non-cognitivism one might ascribe to Nietzsche. As part of the overall assessment of the plausibility of a non-cognitivist Nietzsche, the paper considers in detail the arguments of Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick on behalf of a non-cognitivist reading. It argues, however, that there is insufficient evidence to justify the interpretation and that the analogy to Hume is unhelpful. (shrink)

In THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY Nietzsche assess the value of the value judgments of morality from the perspective of human flourishing. His positive descriptions of the “higher men” he hopes for and the negative descriptions of the decadent humans he thinks morality unfortunately supports both point to a particular substantive conception of what such flourishing comes to. The Genealogy, however, presents us with a puzzle: why does Nietzsche’s own evaluative standard not receive a genealogical critique? The answer to this puzzle, (...) I argue, lies in recognizing the centrality of the notion of “life”, and its connection to power, in Nietzsche’s overall account. Leiter has argued that his “Millian Model” provides the most charitable reconstruction of appeals to a privileged evaluative standard of power; this model ascribes an inference from a strong doctrine of the will to power according to which only power can be desired. I propose a “Benthamite Model” that ascribes an inference from the inescapability of a tendency towards power, a tendency that is essential to life. I argue that this model avoids the objections Leiter directs at the Millian Model. (shrink)

There is a widespread, popular view—and one I basically endorse—that Nietzsche is, in one sense of the word, a nihilist. As Arthur Danto put it some time ago, according to Nietzsche, “there is nothing in [the world] which might sensibly be supposed to have value.” As interpreters of Nietzsche, though, we cannot simply stop here. Nietzsche's higher men, Übermenschen, “genuine philosophers”, free spirits—the types Nietzsche wants to bring forth from the human, all-too-human herds he sees around him with the fish (...) hooks, as he says, of his books—seem to engage in what looks like valuing. These free spirits are supposed to revalue the old values—revaluing, as is clear from the texts, is not simply to remove the old values from circulation (Nietzsche uses “umwerten” and not “entwerten”)—and they are supposed to create new values. And, of course, Nietzsche himself, free spirit that he is, takes on the task of revaluing all values and seems to assert many a strident evaluation. So we need to say more here. What are Nietzsche and his free spirits up to when they engage in what looks, for all the world, like a practice of valuing? What is the practice of valuing Nietzsche is recommending for his free spirits? I argue for two claims: (i) First, we end up facing an interpretive puzzle when we attempt to explain how Nietzsche's free spirits are supposed to engage in a practice of valuing. (ii) Second, we can solve the interpretive puzzle by taking Nietzsche's free spirits to be engaged in a fictionalist simulacrum of valuing. (shrink)

An overview of Nietzsche's philosophy of action.

I argue that the rarely discussed Antichrist can serve as perhaps the best guide to Nietzsche’s mature ethical theory. Commentators often argue or assume that while Nietzsche makes many critical points about traditional morality, he cannot be offering a positive ethical theory of his own. This, I argue, is a mistake. The Antichrist offers a substantive ethical theory. It explicitly articulates Nietzsche’s positive ethical principles, shows why these principles are justified, and uses them to condemn traditional Christian morality. The chapter (...) reviews and explains Nietzsche’s ethical theory. It also considers why commentators so often assume that Nietzsche cannot have an ethical theory: I argue that commentators tend to be driven by the assumption that all ethical theories embrace seven commitments. These commitments are, I suggest, definitive of Enlightenment ethical theory, but not of ethical theory as such; Nietzsche’s rejection of them in no way precludes his having a positive ethical theory of his own. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s discussions of nihilism are meant to bring into view an intriguing pathology of modern culture: that it is unable to sustain "higher values". This paper attempts to make sense of the nature and import of higher values. Higher values are a subset of final values. They are distinguished by their demandingness, susceptibility toward creating tragic conflicts, recruitment of a characteristic set of powerful emotions, perceived import, exclusionary nature, and their tendency to instantiate a community. The paper considers Nietzsche’s arguments (...) for the claim that we are committed to instituting some set of higher values. The cost of not doing so is vitiating our deepest aim and precluding a central form of happiness. (shrink)

Near the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). This raises a number of questions. What are these “fundamental problems” that psychology helps us to answer? How exactly does psychology bear on philosophy? In this conference paper, I provide a partial answer to these questions by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche’s account of value. I argue that Nietzsche’s ethical theory is based upon (...) the idea that power has a privileged normative status: power is the one value in terms of which all others values are to be assessed. If this is the correct interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethical theory, though, it raises a question: how could power have a privileged status, given that Nietzsche denies that there are any objective facts about what is valuable? I argue that Nietzsche’s account of psychology provides the answer: he grounds power’s privileged status in facts about the nature of human motivation. In particular, Nietzsche’s account of drives entails that human beings are ineluctably committed to valuing power. So Nietzsche’s ethical theory follows from his philosophical psychology. (shrink)

The Genealogy takes a historical form. But does the history play an essential role in Nietzsche's critique of modern morality? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. The Genealogy employs history in order to show that acceptance of modern morality was causally responsible for producing a dramatic change in our affects, drives, and perceptions. This change led agents to perceive actual increases in power as reductions in power, and actual decreases in power as increases in power. Moreover, (...) it led agents to experience negative emotions when engaging in activities that constitute greater manifestations of power, and positive emotions when engaging in activities that reduce power. For these reasons, modern morality strongly disposes agents to reduce their own power. Given Nietzsche’s argument that power has a privileged normative status, these facts entail that we have a reason to reject modern morality. (shrink)

This volume capitalizes on a growth of interest in Nietzsche's work on morality from two sides -- from scholars of the history of philosophy and from ...

This paper argues that besides the critical and historically informed genealogies of his later work, Nietzsche also sketched genealogies that are not historically situated and that display an under-appreciated affirmative aspect. The paper begins by looking at two early examples of such genealogies where datable historical origins are clearly not at issue, which raises the question of what kind of origins Nietzsche is after. It is argued that these genealogies inquire into practical origins—into the original point of certain conceptual practices (...) given certain needs, and that this reflects Nietzsche’s instrumentalism about concepts. It is then argued that this focus lends the genealogies an affirmative dimension, because they present their object as naturalistically intelligible and practically indispensable. Finally, it is shown how the nature and limits of this affirmative dimension can be tentatively sharpened by connecting it to Nietzsche’s later notion of the economic justification of morality. (shrink)

This paper argues that Nietzsche is a critic of just the kind of genealogical debunking he is popularly associated with. We begin by showing that interpretations of Nietzsche which see him as engaging in genealogical debunking turn him into an advocate of nihilism, for on his own premises, any truthful genealogical inquiry into our values is going to uncover what most of his contemporaries deem objectionable origins and thus license global genealogical debunking. To escape nihilism and make room for naturalism (...) without indiscriminate subversion, we then argue, Nietzsche targets the way of thinking about values that permits genealogical debunking: far from trying to subvert values simply by uncovering their origins, Nietzsche is actively criticising genealogical debunking thus understood. Finally, we draw out the consequences of our reading for Nietzsche’s positive vision. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of Nietzsche's re-evaluation of values that seeks to satisfy two desiderata, both important if Nietzsche's project is to stand a chance of success. The first is that Nietzsche's re-evaluations must be capable of being understood as authoritative by those whose values are subject to re-evaluation. The second is that Nietzsche's project must not falsify the values being re-evaluated, by, for example, misrepresenting intrinsic values as instrumental values. Given this, five possible forms of re-evaluation are distinguished, (...) and, of these, four are argued both to satisfy the specified desiderata and to feature more or less prominently in Nietzsche's later work. The conclusion of the paper is therefore that Nietzsche's project has at least the right general shape to succeed, and that the reasons for this depend upon acknowledging the importance of the desiderata and of the distinctions to which the paper draws attention. (shrink)

A significant portion of recent literature on Nietzsche is devoted to his metaethical views, both critical and positive. This article explores one aspect of his positive metaethics. The specific thesis defended is that Nietzsche is, or is plausibly cast as, a reasons internalist. This, very roughly, is the view that what an agent has normative reason to do depends on that agent's motivational repertoire. Section I sketches some of the metaethical terrain most relevant to Nietzsche's organising ethical project, his “revaluation (...) of all values”, and lays out three “design-requirements” that an adequate account of Nietzsche's metaethical views must satisfy. Section II introduces the basic internalist position. Sections III–IV provide textual support for the internalist reading of Nietzsche, with Section V showing how it meets each of the design-requirements. Section VI concludes by showing how the internalist apparatus also illuminates Nietzsche's views about the process of revaluing values. (shrink)

A significant portion of recent literature on Nietzsche is devoted to his metaethical views, both critical and positive. This article explores one aspect of his positive metaethics. The specific thesis defended is that Nietzsche is, or is plausibly cast as, a reasons internalist. This, very roughly, is the view that what an agent has normative reason to do depends on that agent's motivational repertoire. Section I sketches some of the metaethical terrain most relevant to Nietzsche's organising ethical project, his “revaluation (...) of all values”, and lays out three “design-requirements” that an adequate account of Nietzsche's metaethical views must satisfy. Section II introduces the basic internalist position. Sections III–IV provide textual support for the internalist reading of Nietzsche, with Section V showing how it meets each of the design-requirements. Section VI concludes by showing how the internalist apparatus also illuminates Nietzsche's views about the process of revaluing values. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s influence on analytic philosophy, focusing on the field of analytic ethics. It presents some key rationales motivating his re-evaluation of values and, in particular, his critique of modern morality. To demonstrate his influence on the work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and Bernard Williams, the role of Nietzsche’s genealogical method in his re-evaluative project is considered. This is followed by a discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of the value of moral values and its relation to similar objections (...) developed by more recent morality critics. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka has argued that Nietzsche’s positive ethical views can be formulated as a version of perfectionism that posits an objective conception of the good as the maximization of power and assigns to all agents the same goal of maximizing the perfection of the best. I show that Hurka’s case for both parts of this interpretation fails on textual grounds and that the kind of theory he proposes is in conflict with Nietzsche’s general approach to morality. The alternative reading for (...) which I argue defends a form of perfectionism as the value perspective of a ‘noble type’ that may emerge in the wake of a revaluation of all values. The basis of this perfectionism is an individual’s projection of an ideal of life to which she ascribes intrinsic value and in terms of which the value of other things is assessed. Justifying this reading requires drawing a distinction between life-denying ideals – forms of the ‘ascetic ideal’ – and life-affirming ‘counterideals’. It also requires recognizing that the perfection of the noble type is expressed in an individual ideal that cannot be shared with others, as opposed to a common ideal of human perfection. (shrink)

The author gives an account of how a set of themes that we nowadays call metaethics contributes to shaping Nietzsche’s approach to morality. Initially, moral judgement, or value judgement, in order to be acceptable for the philosopher, should be similar to a judgement made in the field of natural sciences. The impossibility of moral judgement to satisfy such a requirement precipitates the loss of morality, at least in Nietzsche’s “first way” (in Human too Human). The position thus joined comes with (...) a great disadvantage: it removes action. Faced with such a disadvantage, Nietzsche is forced to change his way of understanding the nature of moral judgement. At this point, in his “second way”, he embarks in experiments engaging a completely different approach to moral judgement. It is as such that he becomes almost a “metaethician”, while ultimately leaving the status of moral judgement in indecision. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed a flurry of interest in Nietzsche's metaethics — his views, if any, on metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological issues about normativity and normative language and judgment. Various authors have highlighted a tension between Nietzsche's metaethical views about value and his ardent endorsement of a particular evaluative perspective: Although Nietzsche makes apparently "antirealist" claims to the effect that there are no evaluative facts, he vehemently engages in evaluative discourse and enjoins the "free spirits" to create values. Nearly (...) every major type of metaethical "-ism" has been ascribed to Nietzsche in response. This chapter provides a critical introduction to Nietzsche's metaethics, focusing on matters concerning the nature and grounds of normativity. I begin by examining and raising challenges for Nadeem Hussain's prominent interpretation of Nietzsche as a revolutionary fictionalist. I argue that a constructivist interpretation (developed elsewhere) provides an improved account of the connections, for Nietzsche, between evaluative attitudes and the nature of value, and among practical nihilism, art, and value creation. Values, on this view, are treated as grounded purely in facts about creatures’ evaluative attitudes. The chapter concludes by considering several alternative subjectivist, constitutivist, and non-cognitivist interpretations. A nuanced understanding of the space of metaethical theories brings into relief a plausible normative and metanormative view that we can attribute to Nietzsche. (shrink)

Nietzsche takes moral judgments to be false beliefs, and encourages us to pursue subjective nonmoral value arising from our passions. His view that strong and unified passions make one virtuous is mathematically derivable from this subjectivism and a conceptual analysis of virtue, explaining his evaluations of character and the nature of the Overman.