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Thursday, September 11, 2008

FREE Nietzsche and Morality, Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu

Nietzsche and Morality, Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu

Nietzsche is often regarded as a paradigmatically anti-theoretical philosopher. Bernard Williams has said that Nietzsche is so far from being a theorist that his text ‘is boobytrapped not only against recovering theory from it, but, in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory.’¹ Manywould apply this view especially to Nietzsche’smoral philosophy. They would say that even when he is making positive normative claims, as against just criticizing existing morality, his claims have neither the content nor the organization characteristic of moral theory.
To me this common view is the opposite of illuminating. I take it as uncontroversial
that Nietzsche’s positive moral views fall under the general heading of what today
is called perfectionism. They are centred on a conception of the good, which they
commend actions for instantiating or promoting, but this conception does not equate
the good with anything like pleasure or the satisfaction of desires; instead, it locates the good in objective human excellences that for Nietzsche centre on the concepts of power and strength. Like other moral views, perfectionism can be developed as a systematic theory, and when it is, a series of questions arise about its structure and content. If one reads Nietzsche with these questions in mind, it is striking how often, without formulating them explicitly, he suggests answers to them. And when one combines those answers, the result is a perfectionist theory of a distinctiveNietzschean stripe. Perfectionism has been embraced by, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Bradley, Brentano, Rashdall, and Moore. More ........

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FREE Where We Stand - A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, Seymour Garte, Ph.D.

Where We Stand - A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, Seymour Garte, Ph.D.

One of the triggers that prompted me to write this book was my attendance at a small symposium in New York on technology and democracy. The panel members were, by and large, liberal academic social scientists who talked about the loss of empowerment of ordinary people in making decisions regarding their own futures vis-a` -vis technological developments. One of the speakers concluded his remarks by saying that it is always a mistake to think that problems caused by technology, such as pollution, loss of biodiversity, or damage to the ecosystem, could ever be ‘‘fixed’’ by technological solutions. Only widespread and complete social overhaul (not defined in any further detail) could accomplish this. The speaker then went on to say that in fact ‘‘there have never been any successful attempts at reversing the declining
trend in environmental quality and public health, and therefore technology
simply cannot be trusted.’’

Not that these books are wrong. All these problems are real. But is that all there is? Hasn’t anything good happened? Where do we really stand in terms of our quality of life, both in an absolute sense and in relation to our recent past? If things have actually been getting so much worse for so long, why aren’t we all dead already? According to many environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s, by now we should all be either dead or living in a horrible world without light, air, or natural resources. In school and college curricula, courses on ecology and environmental science are often little more than catalogs of natural catastrophes.

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