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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that in the context of things that we've learned or learned is sometimes too strong because some of these results are inconclusive, but evidence that has been gathered in the empirical human sciences and especially psychology, behavioral genetics and so on.
And I think there's a reasonable case to be made that it turns out Nietzsche was pretty good at speculative naturalism.
Better than Hume, I actually think.
Though when I say this to the Hume scholars, they get very perturbed about.
So I don't want to pick on Hume unnecessarily.
That's a topic for a different discussion.
That is, I think it turns out that Nietzsche had the overall structure of his picture of human beings, of the relatively small role that consciousness plays in human life.
Of the central role that the unconscious and the effective plays in moral judgment, that his skepticism about whether our conscious experience of willing was really indicative of an exercise of genuinely free and autonomous choice, that a lot of these themes that he pursues turn out to win a lot of support from work that's being done in empirical psychology.
So, as a general matter, I'm just interested in the intersection between moral philosophy.
philosophy and empirical psychology, but I'm particularly been particularly interested in the extent to which Nietzsche's moral psychology turns out to be plausible.
And my, you know, my conclusion so far is that it turns out to be actually quite plausible.
And I've written this paper with Joshua Noeb.
who of course is a well-known sort of leader in experimental philosophy, we've written a paper that if you line up three paradigms of moral psychology, what we call an Aristotelian, a Kantian, um, and a Nietzschean, it turns out if if you look at the underlying descriptive assumptions about agency and moral psychology these theories make, Nietzsche's are the most plausible, hands down.
And Aristotle and Kant are just making it up as they go.
But of course we all knew that about Kant.
Kant's moral psychology, that is.
I I will remain agnostic on other parts of the philosophy.
So that's where I see a particularly fruitful point of intersection.
Now, there has been a literature in English speaking moral philosophy that raises criticisms about morality, right?
There was the morality demands too much literature, or that morality shouldn't necessarily override all kinds of other considerations.
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