Normativity and the Will to Power: Challenges for a Nietzschean Constitutivism

In this article, I critically consider the Nietzschean version of constitutivism that Paul Katsafanas has recently developed. My focus, following Katsafanas’s, is not on the exegetical issue of whether this constitutivism was indeed Nietzsche’s own view. It is rather on the philosophical question of whether the view itself is tenable. Do actions have a constitutive aim, in the way that Katsafanas supposes? If so, what is that aim? From the putative fact that actions have a constitutive aim, what would follow about the grounding of normativity in general? Will this approach yield up a tenable metaethical theory? While Nietzschean constitutivism is an ingenious and original position, it faces some serious challenges that it will have difficulty answering in a satisfactory way.