Morality Makes Me Sick: A Criticism of Brian Leiter’s Treatment of Health in Nietzsche

In this article, the author offers a reconstruction and criticism of Brian Leiter’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticism of conventional morality in Nietzsche on Morality. Leiter’s interpretation is said to falter because it attributes to Nietzsche an implausible combination of positions. First, Nietzsche is said to be a value antirealist. But he is also said to defer to the value of the flourishing of his audience, who are limited to a certain subset of “higher” humans. The author argues that, in spite of Leiter’s attempt to defend this view, he ultimately fails to explain how Nietzsche can be confident in the normative force of the higher humans’ flourishing and, so, his criticism of morality. Since the author takes the problems of Leiter’s reading to bear on a prevalent general reading of Nietzsche, the author concludes with a brief sketch of a plausible alternative.