Nietzsche and Morality (review)

Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu hope this collection “will mark Nietzsche’s arrival as a co-equal figure in moral philosophy with the other historical greats” (2). As they see it, only in the past twenty years could one even begin to formulate such a hope, for only in that time have “talented moral philosophers … begun to think seriously about Nietzschean ideas” and only in that time have Nietzsche scholars managed to produce “work of considerable philosophical sophistication that now rivals what we have come to expect of philosophically informed work on figures like Aristotle and Kant” (2–3). The editors make clear their view that the eleven contributions to Nietzsche and Morality—by Thomas Hurka, Bernard Reginster, Mathias Risse, Joshua Knobe and Leiter (jointly), R. Jay Wallace, Christopher Janaway, Nadeem J. Z. Hussain, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick (jointly), Peter Poellner, Sinhababu, and Simon Blackburn—represent the very best of this recent talent and scholarship.

The book is divided into two parts: six essays grouped around the theme “Normative Ethics and Moral Psychology” and five around “Metaethics.” The essays are supplemented by a brief introduction summarizing their contents, a serviceable index, and a rather superfluous bibliography, since each essay is self-contained reference-wise (although no uniform style of citation has been imposed). In this review, I focus on a handful of essays that will hopefully provide a good sense of the entire collection. My decision to say nothing, or almost nothing, about the contributions of Hurka, Reginster, Risse, Janaway, Poellner, and Sinhababu in no way reflects my judgment regarding their merits.¹

This is not your sophomore’s Nietzsche. The book contains, for example, not a single reference to what Nietzsche calls “the highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable” (EH “Z” 1), the doctrine of eternal recurrence, taken by many to be of fundamental ethical significance.² Even will to power is conspicuous by its absence.³ If anything, the book is Leiter’s Nietzsche, by which I mean that Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality is never far from view.⁴ Indeed, every author but two engages with one or more aspects of Leiter’s interpretation of Nietzsche, sometimes in just a footnote, sometimes for nearly half an essay. One gets the sense that Leiter and Sinhababu’s Nietzsche and Morality represents Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality by other means. If, as Ken Gemes and Janaway report, Nietzsche on Morality “sets a new high standard for those concerned to position Nietzsche within dominant philosophical debates in ethics and moral psychology in English-speaking philosophy,” Nietzsche and Morality carries on that very same effort to “make Nietzsche a live participant in contemporary debates in ethics and cognate fields” (2).⁵ It may seem somewhat curious, then, given the book’s ambition to “establish Nietzsche’s rightful place as one of the most creative and insightful figures in the history of moral theory” (6), that only a single essay acknowledges what might be called “Williams’s challenge” and then only to summarily dismiss it.

In his well-known essay “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Philosophy,” Bernard Williams insists that Nietzsche’s writing “is booby-trapped not only against recovering theory from it, but, in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory. His writing achieves this partly by its choice of subject matter, partly by its manner and the attitude it expresses. These features stand against a mere exegesis of Nietzsche, or the incorporation of Nietzsche into the history of philosophy as a source of theories.”⁶ Williams’s booby-trapping charge, if true, would seem to seriously threaten the raison d’être of the entire collection, but only Hurka explicitly raises Williams’s worry (which he also calls “the common view”) that Nietzsche’s “claims have neither the content nor the organization characteristic of moral theory” (9). And even as Hurka dismisses Williams’s challenge as “the opposite of illuminating,” in no way threatening to a normative, “perfectionist theory of...