Introduction

Moral psychology, for purposes of this volume, encompasses issues in metaethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, including questions concerning the objectivity of morality, the relationship between moral judgment and emotion, the nature of the emotions, free will, and moral responsibility, and the structure of the mind as that is relevant to the possibility of moral action and judgment. Nietzsche’s “naturalism” is introduced and explained, and certain confusions about its meaning are addressed. An overview of the volume follows

A Positive View of Freedom?

This chapter reviews the textual evidence that Nietzsche retains a positive conception of “freedom.” Interpretive proposals due to Gemes and Poellner are shown not to be borne out by the texts. The chapter concludes that Nietzsche offers a “persuasive definition” of freedom, attaching the term’s positive valence to a sense of freedom unfamiliar in the modern Humean or Kantian traditions, but having echoes in Spinoza: “freedom” as acting from one’s inner nature rather than from external influences, something one can only do if fated to do so. The Spinoza-type view is shown not to be a kind of Control view of free will, so not one that vindicates moral responsibility.

Anti-Realism, Value, Perspectivism

If all value judgments arise from affective responses, what are the implications for judgments about epistemic value and Nietzsche’s naturalism? The chapter offers a new reading of perspectivism: while all expressions of knowledge depend on “will” or “affect,” evolutionary pressures select in favor of some of these affects, such that most “creatures like us” converge on many epistemic values, albeit not all. Beyond that baseline, the “Busy World Hypothesis” reminds us that which objects of cognition command our attention is influenced by our other affects and interests, which determines what we come to know about the world. Nietzsche emerges as an anti-realist about epistemic value, as well as moral value, defending something like the old Stevensonian view that where people share attitudes, reasoning about what one ought to do and believe is possible; where people do not share attitudes, reasoning is not possible and only force prevails in a dispute.

Nietzsche’s Metaethics

This chapter argues against various attempts to portray Nietzsche as a value realist, someone who thinks either that there are objective facts about value, or that his own evaluative perspective enjoys some other kind of epistemic privilege over its targets. A particular focus is arguments appealing to the idea of will to power. These arguments are shown to fail, both philosophically and textually. An alternative, psychological interpretation of Nietzsche’s interest in will to power is argued to be more plausible.

Nietzsche’s Anti-Realism about Value

Nietzsche defends the metaphysical thesis that there are no objective (i.e. mind-independent) facts about values, including moral values. His primary arguments for his moral anti-realism are “best explanation” arguments: the best explanation of our moral judgments, indeed of the two-millennium long disagreements among moral philosophers, make no reference to objective moral facts. The details of an “inference to the best explanation” are laid out, and illustrated with Nietzsche’s own texts. Contemporary attempts to defend the explanatory role of moral facts are critiqued, and the radical implications of the argument from disagreement among philosophers considered and defended.

Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects

Nietzsche is a sentimentalist about moral judgment, in the manner of Hume and, in the German tradition, Herder: the best explanation of our moral judgments is in terms of our emotional or affective responses to states of affairs in the world, responses that are, themselves, explicable in terms of psychological facts about the judger. Nietzsche understands our basic emotional or affective responses as brute artifacts of our psychological constitution, though there is nothing in Nietzsche’s view to rule out the possibility that more complicated feelings (e.g. “guilt”) might not involve a cognitive component added to the non-cognitive one, even if that is explanatorily otiose. The chapter concludes with a consideration of empirical evidence in support of sentimentalism.

The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology

This chapter (co-authored with Joshua Knobe) reviews a vast body of evidence from empirical psychology—for example, concerning the role of conscious decision in behavior, and the relative influence of heritability versus upbringing on character traits—demonstrating the superiority of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, as defended throughout the book, to the moral psychologies associated with Aristotle and Kant, which are based on false and often fantastic assumptions about human psychology.

Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency

Nietzsche’s repudiation of free will and moral responsibility is documented throughout his corpus, and his arguments for this conclusion—arguments from his distinctive kind of fatalism, his skepticism about the causal efficacy of the will, and his particular brand of epiphenomenalism about the conscious mental states crucial to deliberation—are shown to undermine both compatibilist and incompatibilist views about free will and moral responsibility by engaging the views of many contemporary philosophers working on these topics, including Harry Frankfurt, Galen Strawson, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Gary Watson, and others. In particular, the chapter argues that both “alternate possibilities” and “control” views of free will are vulnerable to Nietzsche’s critique. Some empirical evidence is adduced in support of Nietzsche’s view.