Moral Psychology with Nietzsche by Brian Leiter | Notes & Summary
1. Nietzsche's Anti-Realism about Value
This chapter is about moral value and how it is not objective.
What is meant by objectivity?
A realist view would mean that there are objective values that is mind/judgement-independent. Whether I choose to affirm something as good or bad, that thing has an objective quality of being good or bad.
Nietzsche instead believes that there are few creative geniuses who are value creators.
In other words, Nietzsche’s critique does need to rely on the objective fact to be true that Christian morality prevents Goethes from forming. But there is no objective fact about whether that is good or bad.
What is his argument for objectivity?
It’s going to be explanatory in nature rather than a direct argument. Specifically, objective moral facts will be judged on the following scale:
Simplicity: no extravagant metaphysical inventions (less the better).
Conscillience: able to show that it influences many disparate phenomena.
Conservatism: not unsettling other things we have strong reason to think to be true about the world.
Nietzsche’s claim is that psychological/biological/sociological factors are going to be the best explanation. Where things fail is:
Simplicity: you have to invent this new class of thing which is moral fact.
Conscillience: moral facts are used by philosophers and no one else.
Moral explanations are also superfluous. It’s much better to appeal to the psychological/social/material forces often and no need to bring in “objective injustice”. Ie. Injustice is a label we create on top of certain conditions and not something “out there”.
Another thrust of his argument is that moral philosophy (as opposed to hard sciences) has not arrived at consensus. It hasn’t even made any progress.
Surely, we would have made some progress by now. The easiest explanation for that is that morality at its core is about taste. It’s grounded on certain intuitions that we like because of developmental/social/psychological reasons.
Not only do we disagree on whether something is good or bad (Nietzsche on suffering). We also disagree on how to weigh different things.
To defend this against three worries:
Nietzsche needs to write even more polemically in order to convince others.
Epistemology and metaphysics has also had considerable disagreement. So Nietzsche is going to bite the bullet and give up a lot of that as well.
Lastly, it’s not mere disagreement that gives cause for skepticism. It’s 1. Prolonged disagreement in ideal conditions 2. Lack of better explanation (e.g. philosophers wanting to defend their livelihoods).
2. Nietzsche's Meta-ethics
This chapter rehashes arguments from Nietzsche on morality. Copying:
Realist camp wants to say it is objectively more important to produce higher men.
Many try to use the will to power as justification.
The first issue with this is that just because everything is the will to power doesn’t meant that it is the standard of measure of value.
The deeper issue is that will to power is not an all-encompassing claim. Nietzsche is making the limited psychological claim that will-to-power tends to be a powerful psychological force even if it can’t explain everything.
Some try to say that because both higher and lower men aesthetically value higher men that serves as a basis to defend Nietzsche’s claims.
Leiter’s pushback is that it’s precisely because lower men admire and, thus, envy higher men that they want to institute this morality. Ie. Some men want to thwart higher men precisely because they find them revolting and not admirable.
3. Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects
This chapter tries to argue for the centrality of affect and drives in moral judgements (and not cognition).
Definition: drives are dispositions to have certain affects/feelings in specific conditions. Ie. It is a tendency to produce an affect and not the affect itself.
Metaphor of symptoms
For Nietzsche, moral judgements to our affects are what symptoms are to the cause.
The phenomena of moral feeling cannot be collapsed into emotion but are 1-1 indicative and caused by them.
Cognitive content
Base-layer affects do not have (maybe its weaker in that they “do not need”) cognitive component. This is aversion to offending a strong man.
Meta-layer affects do have cognitive component. This is the shame in response to one’s aversion to offend a strong man.
This is why arguing on the level of beliefs is still important for Nietzsche’s project because it can correct meta-layer affective responses.
Moral judgement is directly and solely caused by affects (base and meta) which themselves can be caused by beliefs.
Three reasons to believe that moralities are just representative of the affects.
Sincere moral judgements carry with them motivational force (which only affects have) which lends credence to the idea that moral judgements are affective at their core.
It is most compatible with an anti-realist view of morality where we project qualities onto the world.
Empirical experiments show that 1. People arrive at moral judgements and reason their way back to justify it. 2. Emotional processing centers have huge impact on moral decision making when damaged.
Nietzsche was able to anticipate our psychological research because 1. Psychological research uses folk categories (drives, desires, etc.) unlike say physics research and 2. Nietzsche was also speculating off of those categories.
My biggest issue here is that Leiter has only shown for me that affects are a part of moral judgement or, even weaker, tend to be a part of normal moral judgement. Nothing he has said so far has dismissed the Kantian view (but sounds like that’s not what he was trying to argue for):
Kant is not committed to either the claim that most people actually arrive at their moral judgments through the exercise of practical reason or that most people arrive at moral judgments that can be justified, even after the fact, by the correct exercise of practical reason. The Kantian rationalist is commit- ted, I take it, only to the claim that rational agents can, in principle, revise their moral judgments in light of practical reason, but nothing in Haidt’s research rules out that possibility—indeed, he acknowledges that sometimes reasoning can result in a revi- sion of moral judgments. But Nietzsche needs for his purposes only the descriptive thesis—that affective or emotional responses ordinarily determine moral judgment— since he has independent arguments for skepticism about practical reason against the moral rationalist like Kant that do not depend on the actual causal process by which people ordinarily arrive at moral judgments (see Chapter 1, Section 3 and Chapter 5, Sections 5 and 6).
4. Anti-Realism, Value, Perspectivism
This chapter is to defend the claim that Nietzsche’s anti-realism extends into epistemology and not just limited to morality.
What is perspectivism?
Only discussed in two places in Nietzsche.
He thinks that even the idea of space and time, causality and free will, even these are informed by the affects.
He thinks that consciousness is a hallucination that resulted from the (group-selection) need to communicate.
There is a lot of distortion happening because evolution does not select for truth-seeking behavior but, by definition, fitness (Example would be where our optical nerve enters our brain).
What is objectivity in a perspectival world?
In the perspectival world, reality itself is made possible by perspectives. By the existence of a perceiver is reality possible. Objective reality is an oxymoron like unmarried bachelor, because what makes a reality a reality is what it appears to a subject.
The example he gives is Thucydides who captured the partiality of two warring factions. That’s how you get objectivity: which is the excess of partiality. However, plato and socrates who try to give an objective account of justice to describe these events that’s actually ultimate partiality. Because it reflects the partiality of the disinterested philosopher.
How do you defend naturalism (the idea that the empirical mode of investigation as opposed to say speculative metaphysics) from perspectivism? Note: this is how BL is going to extend the perspectivism from morality into the epistemic/theoretical realm.
THEORY: Naturalism works — it gives us airplanes. And BL thinks we don’t need much more beyond that. Becuase in a naturalistic world-view when we give reasons for believing something we are really just giving causes that are compelling enough to subjects. He thinks that empirical useful/verifiability/predictability is what appeals to most subjects.
MORALITY: naturalism has not explained real morality (why it’s right or wrong to do X) but only the causal mechanisms of morality (why people think it’s right or wrong to do X). BL responds that there is no real morality. It is all just causes and not norms that explain morality. However, BL says that to a moral agent, we are forced to act under the illusion of morality, that there are things that really pull us and we aren’t just determined by certain causes … in the same way we operate under the illusion of the free will.
WHY DO THEORY AND MORALITY DIFFER? Why is there so much consensus on theoretical view of the world (science) and not the moral world. BL’s answer is that the type of knowledge in both are perspectival and similar in kind but they are different in degree. That’s because we share similar enough interests and needs as theoretical/knowing agents such that we tend to converge on similar norms. But morality-wise we are so different (because of types) and often directly contradictory (because of resentment, and conflict of types) that we naturally diverge.
What follows is that when people share the same attitudes, reason can make genuine progress. When people don’t share similar attitudes, force (rhetorical or otherwise) wins the day.
I’m quite convinced by this line of thinking, here are my questions:
What this theory really hinges on, is that humans are radically different enough in the moral world. There is a whole plethora of psychological types. Unlike in the domain of knowing.
How do we think about improvement in this domain?
One area of improvement seems to be when I better align actuality with my values: America getting rid of slaves. It’s not objectively good, but good for people with US’s values and that’s enough.
Another way of improvement is changing my values. How does this process work? (Perhaps Quinne’s boat is helpful here; perhaps it’s identifying one value that doesn’t fit in with the rest. Ie. If I value chastity and humility and patience but also conquest, I would do well by ejecting conquest).
Surely we want to say something more about atrocities than “bad-taste”.
5. Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency
This chapter is to explore all the arguments that Nietzsche gives against the free will.
Nietzsche’s position
He isn’t a determinist (determinism seems to be uprooted by quantum mechanics anyways).
He believes environment and physiological factors are better explainers for why we do the things we do. Even stronger, they exhaustively explain it. This is what BL describes as Nietzsche’s “Fatalism.” The metaphor is that of a seed growing into a plant.
He seems to suggest that even education is unimportant: “one will become only that which one is (in spite of all: that means education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)” (WP 334)
He believes that not only is the will not free its also not causal.
Argument 1: The Phenomenology of Willing
This is Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of willing
First there are bodily feelings: my muscles are contracting as I leave my chair.
Second there is the commandeering thought: I ought to go downstairs.
Third there is a meta-thought that I am the one who commanded me to go downstairs.
Interesting observation that when we say I ought to go downstairs, there is a command and an obeying. But we identify with the commanding part and not the obeying part because it increases our feeling of power. The meta-feeling arises because I want to feel powerful.
This is Nietzsche’s argument: that there is no commandeering thought to that commandeering thought so the thought arose when it wanted not when I wanted. And if there were a commandeering thought it would be an infinite regress. This is to make you distrust your phenomenology:
“So Nietzsche’s phenomenological point then comes to this: a “thought” that appears in consciousness is not preceded by the phenomenology of willing that Nietzsche has described, that is, there is no “commandeering thought” preceding the conscious thought to which the meta-feeling (the affect of superiority) attaches. (Even if there were such a commandeering thought in some instance, this would just create a regress, since not every commandeering thought will be preceded by the experience of willing.) Since we do not experience our thoughts as willed the way we experience some actions as willed, it follows that no thought comes when “I will it” because the experience to which the “I will” attaches is absent.”
My pushback against this is that there are certain thoughts that arise unwilled or even against one’s will (don’t think of a pink elephant) but there are other thoughts, like the conversation we are engaging in now that feels much more willed. So I disagree that you need a commandeering thought for this commandeering thought to be considered willed. And the example I point to is that within our phenomenology of thoughts some feel much more willed than others.
Nietzsche wants to show that the strongest evidence for why we think free will exists is misguided.
Argument 2: Cornarism / Confusing Cause and Effect
The example that Nietzsche uses is Cornaro who recommended a slender diet for a long and happy life. He thought that slender diet causes a long and happy life but it was really his extraordinary slowness of his metabolism that necessitated he eat little (would make him sick when he ate more) and also the cause of his life.
Nietzsche wants to use this as an analogy which is to say that unconscious motives and drives cause both our actions and our experience of acting. We mistake the latter for the former.
Example of the dream: where a real world siren projects a police car and sound into my dreams. I think the sound is caused by the police car, it is actually caused by the real world siren.
Someone practices christianity and feels good. Nietzsche would say it’s because of the type of person that one is that gives rise to both.
If the will is not causally efficacious, then the obvious question is why did we develop consciousness. Nietzsche’s answer is for communication with others:
In GS 354, Nietzsche argues that “the development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand,” though as Riccardi points out (2015 : 225) that is hardly plausible with respect to, say, phenomenal consciousness: one can experience color or pain without any linguistic capacity; and surely non-human animals can have conscious perceptual experiences without having language (the dog sees the squirrel and chases it). The only kind of consciousness that plausibly requires linguistic articulation would be precisely the kind that Nietzsche focuses on in GS 354, namely, that which develops “only under the pressure of the need for communication,” namely, that kind of consciousness necessary to coordinate our behavior with others. Here is what Nietzsche says: Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness— at least a part of them—that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought...[O]nly this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness. (GS 354) Riccardi suggests we view linguistic articulation as necessary for “self-consciousness,” since that is the kind of consciousness that “requires the capacity to self-refer—a capacity we acquire by learning how to use the first-person pronoun” (2015: 225).
Language is also deceitful because it doesn’t match the phenomenological richness of our inner lives.
But I don’t buy this because 1. Communication can happen without consciousness, computers communicate. 2. It’s not clear to me why communication requires any more consciousness than doing math (which you suggest empirically has been shown to be unconscious)
My bigger issue with all of this is that he has shown the extraordinary ways in which we are determined but none of these arguments need to be taken to the extreme. Yes I am determined by my type-facts but why am I exhaustively determined by my type-facts.
Argument 3: The Real Genesis of action
BL is going to discuss a series of empirical examples that show e.g. brain electroneronal activity precedes awareness of decision.
There’s no such thing as self-mastery, its just drives battling it out.
6. A Positive View of Freedom
This chapter is to defend a Nietzschean conception of positive freedom. BL will show that when Nietzsche does talk about freedom as a positive ideal, he is always re-evaluating the term significantly.
ONE: Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom is closer to Spinoza/Stoics (who were also fatalists) but gave high priority to being determined only by oneself.
Question: let’s understand this precisely because my worry is Nietzsche has a very naive view of not being determined by anything outside of oneself means. But there is negative mimesis… the much more sober picture of being self-determined is that of Rousseau. General will is not seen as a foreign exposition because I can identify with it. So it’s about a harmony of group and self.
TWO: Another way Nietzsche uses freedom is cheerful fatalism. Amor Fati (exemplified by Goethe) of not wanting to wish to be anything other than what one is. A sort of affirmation.
THREE: A sort of internal coherence.
But its important to note that all of these are determined.
7. The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology
This chapter is to try to 1. Offer Nietzsche as a tempting third option next to Aristotelean virtue ethics and Kantian Deontology by 2. Appealing to psychological research.
Aristotle: important role of habituation especially childhood upbringing.
Kant: following beliefs.
Nietzsche: genetically determined type-facts.
The main argument between Aristotle (repeating performing of virtues habituates a character) and Nietzsche is the tension between nurture and nature. Leiter offers some experiments to show just how impactful genetics is:
Heritability explains roughly 50-70% of variance while shared environment in upbringing explained 5-10% of variance.
When you look at criminality: 59 percent is explained by biological parents, 19% by adoptive parents in the case of adoption!
I think the key takeaway here is that child-rearing and self-improvement isn’t about becoming some ideal but figuring out what your nature is and designing a coherent life in accordance with that nature. This is why Nietzsche’s Ecco Hommo is subtitled “becoming what you are.”
What’s really important then is to understand what level genetic determinism operates on. It doesn’t operate on the level of actual beliefs (e.g. Gay marriage) it operates on psychological traits like need for closure which then determine beliefs and they could be polar opposite.
The main argument between Kant and Nietzsche is that Kant thinks beliefs significantly determine our action (is BL right here?) another critique he has of the Kantians are that many of them don’t care about the empirical studies and want to instead detail how moral agents ought act.
Study he shows that conscious beliefs explain very little.
If anything actions have more effects on beliefs than vice versa.