Moral Psychology with Nietzsche

Abstract

Abstract This book offers both a reading and defense of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, drawing on both empirical psychological results and contemporary philosophical positions and arguments. Among the views explained and defended are: anti-realism about all value, including epistemic value; a kind of sentimentalism about evaluative judgment; epiphenomenalism about certain conscious mental states, including those involved in the conscious experience of willing; and radical skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. Psychological research, from Daniel Wegner’s work on the experience of willing to the famed Minnesota Twin studies, is marshalled in support of the Nietzschean picture of moral psychology. Nietzschean views are brought into dialogue with contemporary philosophical views defended by, among many others, Harry Frankfurt, T.M. Scanlon, Gary Watson, and Derk Pereboom. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, one who repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in philosophy.

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