Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Criminology

2020 ◽  
pp. 136248062097785
Author(s):  
Prashan Ranasinghe
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Cesare Beccaria ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have much to offer criminology. To date, however, his work has been largely neglected in this scholarship. Taking this lacuna seriously, this article reads Nietzsche’s second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and explicates its importance to criminology. Specifically, focus is cast upon Nietzsche’s exposition of crime and particularly punishment, pertaining to the production of a calculating and calculable being upon whom pain and suffering can be inflicted and the ways that concerns over excesses of punishment come to be framed as problematic. Via this reading, it is claimed that On the Genealogy of Morals can serve, among others, as an important critique to many of the presuppositions that ground the classical school of criminology, epitomized in the work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. The article concludes by locating the importance of Nietzsche to penology specifically and criminology more broadly.

Reclaiming Bentham on Torture

2020 ◽  
pp. 435-468
Author(s):  
Steven J. Barela
Keyword(s):  
Severe Pain ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Presumption Of Innocence ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Epistemic Duty ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

Nearly two and a half centuries ago, Jeremy Bentham presented a moral challenge to the absolutist view on eliminating torture in all circumstances—written in the privacy of his study and never published during his lifetime. Although three sentences of his utilitarian argument for torture in limited situations have become quite well-known (often equated with the ticking bomb scenario), Bentham’s view on torture would be greatly served by a more nuanced understanding of his sometimes-contradictory opinions, the development of his thought, and the context of his writing. This chapter aims to provide a fuller view. We will find four main points well worth highlighting: (1) Bentham was strikingly indecisive about the effectiveness of interrogational torture; (2) he keenly touched on the same questions that drive scientific research today; (3) he worried that torture could open the door to tyranny; and (4) he struggled to find the proper standard of “certainty” that could trigger the government’s use of severe pain and suffering. In the long run, the trigger softened as Bentham identified the insurmountable hurdle that we can only suspect what resides inside a prisoner’s mind. As a result, I will suggest that a moral epistemic duty was implied in his work and would require that when choosing subjects for questioning, we must begin with a presumption of innocence as the innocent and ill-informed will inevitably wind up under questioning.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 108-112
Author(s):  
Craig A. Boyd ◽  
Kevin Timpe
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Moral Sentiment ◽  
The People ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals

This concluding chapter highlights some criticisms of the virtues. David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both challenged the traditional construal of the virtues and their role. Hume’s approach to morality was based upon ‘moral sentiment’ where moral feelings were central to one’s deliberation about ethics and so one’s practical reason was simply a means to best secure the satisfaction of one’s various desires. Nietzsche argues that the traditional virtues are merely terms used and cultivated by the weak to control the strong. He draws up a ‘genealogy of morals’ and concludes that terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have no real meaning apart from self-descriptions of the people who employ them.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora ◽  
Derek La Shot
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
The Will ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a German philologist, philosopher, and iconoclast. He is best known for his controversial but powerful reevaluation of traditional Western morality, epistemology, and theology. His early academic career was devoted to philology, and he secured a professorship at Basel University at the age of twenty-four despite having failed to obtain his doctorate at Leipzig. He obtained most of his philosophical training outside of his speciality. His principle resources were Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, followed by Richard Wagner’s revolutionary music. Although he admired Schopenhauer’s stark premise that existence was a chaotic affair guided by a will to life, Nietzsche later replaced Schopenhauer’s embrace of ascetic "will-less-ness" as the only response to suffering with the "will to power": the idea that man "will rather will nothingness than not will" (Genealogy of Morals, III: sec. 1; emphasis in the original). His first book was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872; title altered in subsequent editions), which explained Greek tragedy by revealing the wrestling of two intellectual energies within it.

Perlocution and the Rights of Desire

2016 ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Eric Lindstrom
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Good Faith ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Real ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
The Right ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals ◽  
Moral Perfectionism

Friedrich Nietzsche famously and mischievously begins the notorious Second Essay in On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) with an assertion that ties the proper breeding of mankind to the right to make promises. Nietzsche maintains: “[t]o breed an animal with the right to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is this not the real problem which man not only poses but also faces?” Nietzsche’s language challenges its reader from the start to comprehend its various possibilities of mood and mode, rhetoric and grammar: is it a bold statement of authorial values or an ironic insinuation meant to trap the bad conscience of civilized man? More simply, is it a “real” question or a rhetorical statement? The passage loses no time in deploying some of the soldiers in the army of poetical tropes that Nietzsche unmasks as the producers of truth in his equally well-known short piece, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (here prosopopoeia: speaking for nature).Based on this small sampling, already we can sense fully how the “literary” intensity and instability of Nietzsche’s style are embedded in his very conduct of philosophy. The question marks on which the two sentences of this opening salvo end (or sort of end, as there are original ellipses “…”) may not indicate a question has been posed at all for the reader directly to answer. No question, at least, has been posed from the quasi-naïve and open premise that we tend to call a question on equal (epistemological) footing or in (sociable) “good” faith. Not a “real” question from Nietzsche, then; but all the more a real problem. A driving interrogation in fact: in light of what the next sentence calls the “countervailing” and saving “force of forgetfulness,” the conduct of the human will in verbal action becomes “the real problem” we both pose and face as linguistic beings engaged by what Stanley Cavell understands in the term moral perfectionism.

Clinical Update: Pain and Suffering

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-5
Author(s):  
Sheila Wendler
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Personal Injury ◽  
Treatment Interventions ◽  
Medical Expenses ◽  
Affective Component ◽  
Pain Behaviors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Patient’S Experience ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
And Training

Abstract Attorneys use the term pain and suffering to indicate the subjective, intangible effects of an individual's injury, and plaintiffs may seek compensation for “pain and suffering” as part of a personal injury case although it is not usually an element of a workers’ compensation case. The AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides), Fifth Edition, provides guidance for rating pain qualitatively or quantitatively in certain cases, but, because of the subjectivity and privateness of the patient's experience, the AMA Guides offers no quantitative approach to assessing “pain and suffering.” The AMA Guides also cautions that confounders of pain behaviors and perception of pain include beliefs, expectations, rewards, attention, and training. “Pain and suffering” is challenging for all parties to value, particularly in terms of financial damages, and using an individual's medical expenses as an indicator of “pain and suffering” simply encourages excessive diagnostic and treatment interventions. The affective component, ie, the uniqueness of this subjective experience, makes it difficult for others, including evaluators, to grasp its meaning. Experienced evaluators recognize that a myriad of factors play a role in the experience of suffering associated with pain, including its intensity and location, the individual's ability to conceptualize pain, the meaning ascribed to pain, the accompanying injury or illness, and the social understanding of suffering.

Pain and Suffering

1969 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-101
Author(s):  
RICHARD A. STERNBACH
Keyword(s):  
Pain And Suffering

For the Pain and Suffering Caused, We Say, “Sorry”

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Scott
Keyword(s):  
Pain And Suffering
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