Chrisopher Janaway on Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Nietzsche persuades us that morality’s various tenets and constitutive attitudes are historical constructions, to which there have been (and may still be) genuine alternatives. Placing high value upon compassion, guilt, and the suppression of our more aggressively expansive instincts, believing everyone’s well-being to be of equal kind and importance, expecting everyone to be a subject of rational free choice capable of acting similarly and blameable for failure to do so—these are not absolute, eternal, or compulsory attitudes for human beings to hold, but attitudes invented and perpetuated to fulfil a host of functions and needs.
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The moral attitudes that we now take for granted as the values, as the ‘values in themselves’, were brought into existence and sustained through enormous cultural ingenuity by specific types of human beings, standing in specific power-relations to others, and governed by specific internal drives both innate and learned.
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The fact that moral values are not the values überhaupt does not exclude their being the best ones for us to have. That they are a historical construct does not show that their construction was in any way a bad thing, nor does the manner of their construction, whatever its details, decide whether it is good for us to continue having them as ours.
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The creation and elaboration of Judaeo-Christian values, centred around the promotion of selflessness, brought about the development of man as an ‘interesting’ animal with a proper history, gave rise to an inner life, expressed an unparalleled form-creating will on the part of humanity, brought forth cultural products of the highest order, and enabled us to value truthfulness, the very instrument Nietzsche uses in his project of revaluation. However, none of this negates his central charge that morality has caused us to be ill, self-conflicted, self-hating, and deluded in ways that are ugly and unnecessary for us. Morality has fostered weak and reactive tendencies in humans, elevated self-punishment to a supreme good, taught us to loathe and fear large parts of the psyche, inclined us to conform to the lowest common denominator, discouraged creativity and fullness of life, systematically deceived us about the true nature of ourselves, and subordinated the human to spurious ‘absolutes’ and ‘beyonds’ posited primarily for the gratification of blaming ourselves over our constitutional inability to live up to them. If there is such a thing as progress in values, in Nietzsche’s eyes we have not come nearly as far as we might, and only if morality withers away is there hope of our going further.
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Nietzsche has a radical message for philosophers and ‘scientific’ investigators: your conception of your own activity is at fault because you picture yourselves falsely. There is no primary drive towards knowledge and truth. We philosophers are composed of many affects and drives, and the notion of a rational self or knowing subject engaged in a self-validating exercise of pure dialectical truth-seeking is as much an insidious illusion as the notion of a realm of timeless objects waiting to be discovered. Disinterested, detached knowing is a fiction, but a persistently tempting one that we must struggle to guard ourselves against.
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That philosophers pursue the truth for its own sake, that they succeed in speaking with a universal voice freed from the influence of non-rational drives and prejudices, that pure impersonal dialectic will reliably reach an answer to the question how best to live—these are self-serving distortions. The metaphors of universality, impersonality, and purity with which they have liked to portray themselves also arise out of the valuations peculiar to morality, and philosophy in turn can function as a source of rationalizations with which morality defends itself. Along with the values of morality, philosophers need to put themselves in question. If they understood how enquiry is beholden to valuations, and valuations to affects and drives, if they enquired more into themselves and made their many affects ‘useful for knowledge’ instead of trying to evade them, they might be less estranged from themselves and not detach knowledge from ‘life’.
quote nietzsche christopher janaway metaphilosophy pragmatism metaethics
Nietzsche on metaphysics as symptom
In some, it is their weaknesses that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, be it as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation; for the latter, it is only a beautiful luxury, in the best case the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic capital letters on the heaven of concepts.
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All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies; and if such world affirmations or world negations lack altogether any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they give the historian and psychologist all the more valuable hints as symptoms of the body, of its success or failure, its fullness, power and highhandedness in history, or of its frustrations, fatigues, impoverishments, its premonitions of the end, its will to an end.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Preface to the Second Edition
We take care not to say that the world is worth less […] the whole attitude of man […] as judge of the world who finally places existence itself on his scales and finds it too light—the monstrous stupidity of this attitude has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V, §346
The realism we’re looking for
Sharon Hewitt-Rawlette writes:
The realism we’re looking for is not a realism that affirms the existence of empirical, judgment-independent intrinsic value but then allows intuition or mere personal preference to take over the task of determining how this intrinsic value ought ultimately to influence one’s decisions.
What is the realism we are looking for? And why?
People look for different things. For example, some people want to put the word “mere” before “personal preference”, while others do not. I’m not sure why.
Simon Blackburn on people who think that anti-realism entails nihilism
Such people have a defect elsewhere in their sensibilities—one that has taught them that things do not matter unless they matter to God, or throughout infinity, or to a world conceived apart from any particular set of concerns or desires, or whatever.
Blackburn, “Errors and the Phenomenology of Value” https://philpapers.org/rec/BLAEAT-3
Joshua Greeen on utiltiarianism as “deep pragmatism”
With a little perspective, we can use manual-mode thinking to reach agreements with our “heads” despite the irreconcilable differences in our “hearts.” This is the essence of deep pragmatism: to seek common ground not where we think it ought to be, but where it actually is.
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We all want to be happy. None of us wants to suffer. And our concern for happiness and suffering lies behind nearly everything else that we value, though to see this requires some reflection. We can take this kernel of personal value and turn it into a moral value by valuing it impartially, thus injecting the essence of the Golden Rule: your happiness and your suffering matter no more, and no less, than anyone else’s. Finally, we can turn this moral value into a moral system by running it through the outcome-optimizing apparatus of the human prefromal cortex. This yields a moral philosophy that no one loves but that everyone “gets” -a second moral language that members of all tribes can speak.
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If we acknowledge that our tribal feelings can’t all be right, and yet aspire to resolve our differences in a principled way, then we need some kind of “ism,” an explicit moral standard to guide us when our emotional compasses fail.
quote joshua greene moral psychology consequentialism hedonism
Joe Carlsmith on the importance of how you weigh it
Moral philosophers spend most of their time trying to identify what factors matter to at least some degree, and trying to explain why.
Surprisingly little time is spent writing on how we should weigh different factors.
In practice, the weighting is the crucial thing. And when you bear that in mind, the differences between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories become less significant. All plausible non-consequentialist theories care about consequences to a significant degree. So they still have a weighing problem, perhaps just a harder one than the consequentialists since it has more variables.
https://handsandcities.com/2021/03/28/the-importance-of-how-you-weigh-it/