Brian Leiter

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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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Elucidations · Episode 3: Brian Leiter discusses Nietzsche on morality · 1 Sep 2009 podcast

Or if it places a high value upon pity or compassion.

If it views altruism and selflessness as the most important hallmark of genuinely moral behavior in a morally good life, if it places an unusually high value on happiness and views suffering, as Nietzsche likes to say, as an objection to life.

So th those are some of the characteristic normative contents.

Now, I think we have to define the concept in this kind of partly disjunctive.

And rather complex way in order to capture the actual targets he's got in mind.

So to take again a perhaps obvious example, he's clearly a critic of utilitarianism.

But it's not the case that utilitarian moral philosophies have to be committed to a view about free agency.

Again, this is a nuance Nietzsche wasn't particularly thinking of, but you know, we have examples in 20th century utilitarian ethics of philosophers who

utilitarians who assign a very high value to happiness on some interpretation

but at the same time are uh determinists and not compatibilists.

So Jack Smart is the f example of that's familiar to modern students of moral philosophy.

Anyway, so that's the rough picture.

And then the idea is to in the book I try to make the case that in fact he's targeting moralities along all these different dimensions, but not every morality in the Pajardi sense necessarily has all these features, right?

Kant comes closest.

Kantian morality comes closest, but of course even Kantian morality has a rather funny relationship to the the importance or value of happiness.

So even there it's not complete.

So that's my basic idea.

Right, good.

So I suppose the subject on which my two thousand two book and some prior papers have generated the most discussion and controversy is in the claim that we should read Nietzsche as a certain kind of philosophical naturalist.

That we shouldn't, as was more popular in the seventies and eighties, read him as sort of a precursor of French postmodernism or post structuralism.

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