"Being Just Is Always a Positive Attitude": Justice in Nietzsche's Virtue Epistemology

In his early-middle works, notably in the Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche uses the concept justice (Gerechtigkeit) in an unusual way: he treats it as an individual virtue rather than a structural virtue of societies and political or legal systems; he distinguishes between practical and epistemic justice, and focuses his analysis and praise almost exclusively on the latter; and he places unusual emphasis on the distinctive feeling or affect associated with the exercise of epistemic justice. This article aims to make sense of Nietzsche's peculiar conception of justice in by contextualizing it in two respects. First I show how it fits into and supports an interpretation of Nietzsche as a virtue epistemologist. Then I show how elements of Nietzsche's epistemic and affective notion of justice persist in his later work, notably in his doctrine of perspectivism, in the more straightforwardly practical and political account of justice sketched in the Genealogy, and his conception of the role of the philosopher of the future.