Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, so the puzzle you confront when you're you're reading Nietzsche is that he presents himself as a critic of morality, but at the same time he does speak of things like higher moralities or moralities that he doesn't seem to be critical of.
And it turns out that the terminology doesn't help sort these cases out.
That is, more often than not, he's using one word, the German der Morale, in both these cases, right?
That is for both moralities he's criticizing
And moralities that he approves of, as in when he's talking about higher moralities.
He there are some other terms that he uses, but the basic difficulty is you can't distinguish between what he's against and what he's for based on the words he uses.
So I've introduced, in effect, a term of art, what I call morality in the pejorative sense, to refer to
What it is morality that Nietzsche is critical of is supposed to have in common, right?
What distinguishes the morality that he's opposed to as distinct from the higher moralities or the moralities about which he has positive things to say.
And on my view, this morality in the pejorative sense, and this is the view set out in my 2002 book on Nietzsche and morality, morality in the pejorative sense.
Is it's marked by two broad sets of commitments.
On the one hand, a morality is a morality in the pejorative sense for Nietzsche, meaning it's a target of his critique, if it's characterized by certain kinds of descriptive assumptions about human agency, about what human beings are like, assumptions that Nietzsche takes to be essentially false that aren't true.
So the obvious one is he thinks certain kinds of moral views of which
He is critical, are committed to assumptions about free and autonomous agency, or agency that is free and autonomous in a way that would be sufficient to underwrite descriptions of moral responsibility, and he doesn't think there is such agency.
So that would be an example of a kind of descriptive assumption.
But on the other side, he's targeting a set of views as morality in the pejorative sense that are characterized by certain kinds of
normative contents.
And here it's a matter of sort of, you know, a disjunctive list.
That is, it suffices for a morality to be a morality in the pejorative sense if it it has one or more of these distinctive normative contents.
So for example, if it's an egalitarian morality, right?
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