Episode 3: Brian Leiter discusses Nietzsche on morality
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What does Nietzsche mean by “morality” and how does it differ from ordinary ethics?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tugman.
And I'm Mark Hopwood.
With us today is Brian Leiter, John P. Wilson Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. And he's here to talk to us about Friedrich Nietzsche's views on morality. Brian Leiter, welcome. Thank you very much. I appreciate you doing this. Nietzsche is famously a critic of morality. So I thought we could start with a terminological question. Normally we use terms like morals and moral as synonyms for ethics and ethical. But as far as I understand, Nietzsche means something more specific by morality than simply ethics. So perhaps you could explain what that special sense of morality is.
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
How does Leiter define the “pejorative” sense of morality that Nietzsche attacks?
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? 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
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Nietzsche mean by “morality” and how does it differ from ordinary ethics?
0:19–2:59
2
How does Leiter define the “pejorative” sense of morality that Nietzsche attacks?
2:59–6:06
3
Why does Leiter argue that Nietzsche should be read as a philosophical naturalist?
6:06–9:08
4
What is the distinction between Nietzsche’s methodological naturalism and physicalist naturalism?
9:08–13:29
5
How does Nietzsche’s critique target specific moral systems like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics?
13:29–16:49
6
What rhetorical techniques does Nietzsche use to shake the “herd morality” of his readers?
16:49–20:45
7
How does Nietzsche’s speculative moral psychology connect with modern empirical psychology?
20:45–24:39
8
What are the prospects for integrating Nietzsche’s ideas into contemporary analytic moral philosophy?
24:39–30:33
Speakers
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