Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity ed. by Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (review)

Strong naturalist interpretations of Nietzsche perhaps had their heyday at the turn of the century in the Anglophone world, around the time when Brian Leiter’s influential Nietzsche on Morality was published in 2002. While Nietzsche’s commitment to some sort of naturalism is no longer seriously disputed, over the past decade commentators have asked how the naturalistic spirit that undeniably animates Nietzsche’s oeuvre also affects the normative character of his project. Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity is a decisive contribution to the literature on this subject.¹ This nine-article collection is aimed at those wishing to deepen their understanding of how Nietzsche’s naturalism can be successfully integrated with his normative framework, but it is also an excellent starting point for initiates to the debate. While most of the articles assume a working knowledge of the recent literature on Nietzsche and naturalism, the editors introduce the volume with a lucid overview of the debate so far and have ensured that contributors explain terminology drawn from analytic ethics and moral philosophy in extenso. The result is a collection that remains accessible while engaging in scholarship at the highest level. Furthermore, since the articles come from scholars working in different areas of philosophy, there is a real cross-boundary feel to this volume, one that will attract analytically minded philosophers interested in tapping into Nietzsche’s philosophical resources as well as those Nietzsche scholars curious about the recent upsurge of interest in their work within Anglo-American philosophy.

Peter Railton opens the collection with an informative discussion of what he regards as four cardinal problems with Nietzsche’s critique of morality, and his analysis provides an interesting point of reference for reading the subsequent essays. The first problem—that of reconciling Nietzsche’s perspectivism with his truth claims—will be well known to Nietzsche scholars, but Railton touches on it to draw a comparison with what he sees as the more pressing problems of “normativity” and “morality.” For Railton, there are two reasons why furnishing Nietzsche with a positive account of morality is difficult: first, there are Nietzsche’s frequent declamations against the possibility and desirability of any moral framework; second, there is the question of morality’s universal applicability, something Nietzsche invariably seems to detest. Since a necessary condition of morality is a more general account of normativity, Railton then moves to discuss what is often called the “placement problem,” asking where we are to place normativity if we assume, as Railton does, that Nietzsche is best understood as a “pioneering naturalist” (22). To elucidate this, Railton distinguishes “two families of normative concepts”: the first, normative concepts proper, he argues, share an etymological root related to “straightness and squareness (and their opposites)”; the second, evaluative concepts, derive from terms relating to “wholeness, strength, power, completeness” (25n2). For Railton, although both types of concepts are freely used within both the deontological and teleological ethical traditions, the former tends to prioritize the concepts of “right, wrong, duty, obligation,” whereas the latter—comprising figures from Aristotle to Canguilhem—prioritizes “good, bad, noble, base” and their cognates. Railton believes that Nietzsche’s contribution to moral philosophy can be understood only if he is reinstated in the teleological tradition, and this leads him to suggest that Nietzsche is best interpreted, first and foremost, as an ethicist who offers us a “theory of how to live well” (48).

By canvassing possible solutions to what has become known in the literature as the “scope problem,” Simon Robertson’s contribution also investigates how Nietzsche can underwrite his account of normativity and value without this entailing a fully fledged system of morality. Proposing that Nietzsche’s real gripe with moral discourse is that it thwarts excellence and flourishing since it sets itself up as “normatively authoritative” (92), Robertson argues that we must understand Nietzsche’s seemingly normative remarks on “higher types” as primarily making a “constitutive claim” (108) about what they are and hence what...