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 “Normative Ethics and Moral Psychology,” 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 have chosen to focus on a handful of papers 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,”[2] the doctrine of eternal recurrence, taken by many to be of fundamental ethical significance. 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 2002 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 (2006) represents Leiter (2002) 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,”[5] Nietzsche and Morality carries on that very same effort to “make Nietzsche a live participant in contemporary debates in ethics and cognate fields” (2). 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]

Take the very beginnings of two essays that appear back to back in the section on metaethics. According to Hussain, in “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” “There is a widespread, popular view—and one I will basically endorse—that Nietzsche is, in one sense of the word, a nihilist” (157). That sense, it turns out, amounts to “the belief in valuelessness, or as Nietzsche often puts it, goallessness” (161). By contrast, Clark and Dudrick’s essay, “Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics,” “begins from the uncontroversial assumption that Nietzsche holds certain ethical or moral values and expresses them in his work. [The] question is whether his philosophy allows him to claim objectivity for these values” (192). Obviously Clark and Dudrick’s ensuing affirmative answer to this question rules out Hussain’s nihilistic Nietzsche. A key battleground for their competing interpretations is Gay Science [GS] 301: “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it.”[8]

According to Hussain, this passage may seem most naturally to lend itself to metaethical analysis in terms of what he calls “subjectivist realism,” subjectivist insofar as reference to some subjective state of the valuing agent is essential, realist insofar as “it provides a cognitivist account of the claims in question and takes the truth-conditions not to be systematically or inescapably false” (161).[9] On this view values exist, underwriting true beliefs involving them, although their existence necessarily depends upon, and cannot be understood apart from, some quality or feature of—some fact about—the agent. Hussain goes on to reject subjective realism in favor of error theory, the view that “the beliefs expressed by moral judgments are false because they involve believing in moral facts when in fact there are none” (159). Hussain admits it may not be obvious how GS 301’s straightforward talk of values squares with error theory, but he insists that “It is in order to undermine our evaluative judgments that Nietzsche emphasizes that things do not have value in themselves” (162). In other words, GS 301 emphasizes that all evaluative judgment involves error, rather than empasizing that some form of subjectivism might avoid it. Ultimately Hussain attributes to Nietzsche a “revolutionary fictionalism” (180). Given his error theory, “Nietzsche’s recommended practice for his free spirits is a simulacrum of valuing. Nietzsche’s recommended practice is a form of make-believe or pretence. Nietzsche’s free spirits pretend to value something by regarding it as valuable in itself while knowing that in fact it is not valuable in itself” (170). Such recommendations, on Hussain’s account, make available to Nietzsche’s free spirits a response to nihilism (in the form of an illusion) that nevertheless acknowledges nihilism (stays honest).

Whereas Hussain sees GS 301 forcing a choice between subjectivist realism and error theory, Clark and Dudrick see the same passage forcing a choice between “normative-subjectivism” and “normative objectivism” (205). A normative subjectivist apparently creates values ex nihilo or through the very act of valuing, while a normative objectivist relies on some normative authority apart from his or her will. As Clark and Dudrick see it, “We seem to face a dilemma here: given that Nietzsche endorses talk of values in GS, either Nietzsche is a cognitivist and so a fictionalist or he is a non-cognitivist and a normative subjectivist.” But they reject the dilemma as false and argue for an “alternative non-cognitivism,” one that combines talk of “higher human beings” creating value with “the view that things are objectively valuable, that their value does not depend on our attitude towards them” (207).[10] Perhaps it goes without saying that Clark and Dudrick’s essay lays claim to having located in Nietzsche nothing less than the holy grail of metaethics, a way to satisfactorily combine the objective authoritative pull of discovered value with the subjective motivational push of inventive agency.

Unfortunately, it would a take a separate review to do justice to their long and complex argument, which at one point has them defending against the impression of having “turned Nietzsche into a cognitivist and value realist along the lines of Thomas Nagel or John McDowell” (213). Indeed, by cashing out Nietzschean objectivity in terms of reasons validated from increasingly abstracted or impersonal standpoints, they do borrow something from Nagel’s picture in The View from Nowhere. The following lines give a taste of both their conclusions and the complexity thereof:

On the view we attribute to [Nietzsche], to say that a judgment is objective—determined by the weight of reasons rather than by something idiosyncratic in the person—is to express one’s commitment to certain norms for good judging and one’s belief that the person making the judgment satisfies them. In his perspectivism, Nietzsche puts forward an ‘epistemic story’ which offers such norms for good judging. On this view, objectivity is a matter of degree: a person’s value judgments are more or less objective to the extent that they reflect a process in which she has taken up and inhabited evaluative perspectives other than her own. (223)

I have significant reservations about both Hussain’s and Clark and Dudrick’s accounts quite apart from Williams’s challenge. My chief reservation concerning Hussain’s fictionalism has recently been articulated with admirable concision by Reginster: “In the absence of compelling evidence, and a fortiori in the presence of conflicting evidence, we cannot simply decide to believe something is the case…. But Nietzsche demands that we somehow remain aware of the evidence against our moral beliefs, and this awareness of their falsehood seems to make it impossible to maintain these beliefs.”[11] Here we have a general epistemological challenge stemming from the necessary conditions for belief formation and maintenance. My chief reservation concerning Clark and Dudrick’s normative objectivism has to do with their rationale for rejecting normative subjectivism in the first place. Normative subjectivism, remember, is the view that values are subjectively conferred, beholden to individual willing. Clark and Dudrick make quick work of this possibility:

If this is what value creation entails, however, Nietzsche’s position seems implausible: the goodness and badness of things does not seem to be conferred upon them by the valuing of human beings. Murder’s wrongness, for example, is due to the fact that it is the intentional killing of an innocent, that it causes pain and suffering, etc. Murder’s wrongness is not dependent on anyone considering it wrong. But this implies the falsity of normative subjectivism …. (205)

Wallace’s “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt” presents a “critical reconstruction” of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals [GM], which argues, against the dominant “strategic interpretation,” for a new “expressive interpretation” of the slave revolt in morality, “drawing on Nietzsche’s texts, but going beyond them to arrive at a fuller picture” of the moral psychology of ressentiment (116). While the essay ultimately fails, in my view, to eliminate the possibility that a suitably modified strategic interpretation might fulfill the tasks Wallace assigns any putative account of the slave revolt, his analysis from start to finish is a model of philosophical care, lucidity and focus. These qualities alone strongly recommend the essay to any advanced course featuring GM.

According to Wallace,

The strategic interpretation understands [ressentiment] primarily in terms of its aim. Ressentiment is negative affect of hatred on the part of the powerless toward their oppressors, involving the desire to strike out against them, in ways that will harm them and deprive them of their cultural and social advantages. The slave revolt may be thought of strategically in relation to this fundamental aim, as an undertaking that is precisely calculated to harm the powerful. (112)

For Wallace, “The fundamental emotional dynamic of the slave revolt is not the selection of means to an end that is set by one’s desires. It is the expression of one’s negative emotional orientation toward the powerful in the embrace of an evaluative framework that makes sense of that basic orientation” (118). The slaves find themselves in a volatile psychological predicament, hating the nobles whose very character and behavior reflect the prevailing standards of value. Over time the association of nobility with all that is good renders it increasingly difficult for the slaves to make sense of their ressentiment, so difficult, in fact, that they eventually revolt and adopt a new scheme of values to relieve this tension. What ultimately precipitates the slave revolt is not a strategic plan of revenge, but rather the need for emotional coherence. As Wallace puts it: “Ressentiment becomes creative and gives birth to values when the tensions that attend it lead the powerless to adopt and internalize a wholly new evaluative framework. The causal nexus linking ressentiment to this new framework does not follow the logic of means/ends rationality, but the more archaic pattern of emotional self-interpretation” (119). Here Wallace presents a sophisticated and plausible causal account of the slave revolt based on the resolution of psychic tension. Still, to my mind, an alternative strategic account, by no means a secret in the literature, in terms of the intentional plotting of the priestly caste, makes perfectly good sense of both the letter and the spirit of GM I.

Sinhababu, who shares Wallace’s resistance to seeing revaluation as the implementation of strategy, and who favors an interpretation that “treat[s] the slaves’ inversion of values as the outcome of a passive and mostly subconscious process—vengeful thinking—and not as an intended outcome of an action” (267), caricatures a priestly role in the slave revolt as follows: “’Hey guys! Let’s just get everyone to reverse all the nobles’ values, and we’ll have our revenge!’” (267) But, as Wallace readily acknowledges, other characterizations are possible. In fact, Wallace himself attributes a significant role to the priests’ clear-eyed, cynical exploitation of the slaves’ ressentiment in order to foment revolt, but insists that “such strategic rationality does not capture the primary psychological dynamic in which that revolt consists” (123). Wallace locates that primary dynamic, as we have seen, in the slaves’ move toward psychic equilibrium, making the priests’ machinations “a secondary or parasitic phenomenon” (123). But it seems to me that an account featuring priests intentionally manipulating mass ressentiment and deliberately inculcating new values in the service of their own will to power deserves at least equal billing, and, although I can only assert as much here, lends itself to a story capable of meeting Wallace’s three insuperable difficulties. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Wallace’s attempt to get the psychology right and to work out “how exactly a new table of values might be understood as the projection or symptom of an emotion such as ressentiment” (118n9) constitutes an absolutely first-rate addition to the rapidly growing literature on GM.

Of course Wallace’s aim of getting the psychology right hardly makes him unique among this volume’s contributors, a very good thing, too, given Nietzsche’s famous claim that “a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings.”[12] But whereas Wallace’s chief concern is interpretive, to present a plausible interpretation of the psychology underlying the slaves’ revaluation of values in GM I, Knobe and Leiter’s concern in “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology,” is, as they put it, “philosophical”: “to show that neglect of Nietzsche in moral psychology is no longer an option for those philosophers who accept that moral psychology should be grounded in real psychology” (84). This essay is must reading, if only because it so powerfully taps into what might well be moral philosophy’s most vibrant contemporary strain, the reconciling of the claims and ambitions of philosophical theory with the results of empirical psychological research. Knobe and Leiter possess great credentials in this regard. One of the signature features of the latter’s Nietzsche on Morality is, after all, its identification of Nietzsche with methodological naturalism, the doctrine that one’s philosophy should be continuous with the methods and results of natural science, while the former is one of the best known contributors to what has become known as “experimental philosophy.”[13] In this essay the two join forces to argue that current psychological research demonstrates that the Aristotelian and Kantian approaches “do not fare well when compared to the, hitherto, under-appreciated ‘Nietzschean’ approach to moral psychology” (85). While I am quite sympathetic to the goals of Knobe and Leiter here, being largely convinced that the Nietzschean picture of the psychology underlying moral agency beats all competitors when it comes to plausibility and explanatory power, the essay’s overall impact seems to me somewhat vitiated by three features.

First, as the authors themselves acknowledge at the outset, “Humean views have also been influential, and, in fact, have certain structural similarities to Nietzsche’s” (83n2). Given this influence and these similarities, the decision by the authors not to include Hume’s moral psychology within the essay’s purview means a great opportunity for illuminating contrast has been missed. Second, although I find Knobe and Leiter’s conclusion compelling that the empirical literature significantly undermines Aristotle’s account of character traits being successfully inculcated through childhood upbringing (as against Nietzsche’s reliance on heritable “type-facts”), more compelling, in fact, than the much better known critique of virtue ethics by Harman and Doris,[14] I would have very much welcomed some discussion here of the significant amount of work done in recent years to make Nietzsche himself into something of a virtue ethicist. Do accounts by, for example, Lester Hunt and Christine Swanton attribute the same flawed developmental story to Nietzsche that Knobe and Leiter attribute to Aristotle?[15] Third, although Nietzsche’s moral psychology may well be preferable to Kant’s, I am not convinced that this essay adequately captures the reason why.

Following J. B. Schneewind, Knobe and Leiter take the following two claims to jointly summarize the Kantian view of moral psychology: “(1) agents impose moral requirements on themselves, and (2) these self-imposed moral requirements are morally effective” (87). They go on to assert that “In order for the self-imposition of moral requirements to be genuinely autonomous it must presumably be a conscious process of self-imposition. And for these consciously imposed principles to be motivationally effective it must be the case that conscious moral principles are motivationally effective” (87). It remains, then, for the paper to demonstrate that empirical psychological research threatens the Kantian account by threatening the idea of at once consciously self-imposed and motivationally efficacious moral requirements, which it purports to do by citing research showing that action tends to be rationalized post hoc. While I agree completely that the Kantian picture faces an uphill battle in establishing the motivational force of autonomous principles, Knobe and Leiter’s insistence that such principles must be consciously adopted strikes me as misguided. Interestingly, Schneewind’s summary of Kant’s position, upon which the authors apparently rely, makes, so far as I can tell, no connection between autonomy and self-consciousness; indeed, this idea that moral principles must be conscious to the agent is clearly “presumed” by the authors (87, 100). But what exactly warrants this presumption?

Here is the article’s Kant vs. Nietzsche battle in miniature:

Recall that on the Kantian view, moral agents impose motivationally effective moral requirements upon themselves. This process of rational moral self-legislation is presumably a conscious one, and thus we must presume that these consciously imposed moral “laws” have a substantial impact on behavior, On the Nietzschean view, by contrast, conscious beliefs play no such role in moral (or immoral) agency. People’s behaviors are determined not so much by their conscious beliefs as by certain underlying type-facts. (100)

Finally, no one should miss Simon Blackburn’s brief discussion of Nietzsche and playfulness in the volume’s concluding essay “Perspectives, Fictions, Errors, Play.” Although he is concerned not to claim that admiration of, and exhortations to, play and playfulness constitute “a serious or central part of Nietzsche’s overall message” (291), it seems to me one could easily be forgiven for thinking they do, making all the more interesting Blackburn’s analysis of the topic in relation to Dickens’ Bleak House, and his conclusion that a life of play is ultimately “unrecognizable as a human life, and only even works as an ideal so long as it is not thought through” (294). The entire essay rewards Blackburn’s decision to concern himself “not so much with what Nietzsche did say, but with how ourselves should think about the things that exercised him” (282). This approach may put him at a somewhat greater distance from Nietzsche’s texts than most of his fellow contributors, who generally take themselves, as we have seen, to be bringing the letter, and not just the spirit, of Nietzsche to bear on contemporary philosophical issues. However, as Richard Schacht pointed out some years ago, “’Nietzsches’ abound,” meaning that “One can get him very wrong indeed … but one can also get him partly and interestingly right in a great many different ways.”[17] Nietzsche and Morality succeeds marvelously in getting Nietzsche right in a great many different ways, just as others have previously succeeded in getting Kant or Aristotle similarly right. Yet whether that is enough to truly make Nietzsche “a live participant in contemporary debates in ethics” remains difficult to say. He is, after all, Nietzsche.