Stream of Conscious wrote:
This is very interesting to me. What exactly is this "morality" that he embraces?

Stream of Conscious wrote:
Well, that's not fair Beatnik, you completely changed the scenario into something else. I agree with you by that scenario, but that's not the one I presented. I'm talking about defending myself against a sudden attacker, not one who is defending himself against what I might do to him tomorrow or the day after.

Stream of Conscious wrote:
How is it that Nietzsche would have considered killing the man about to kill me in purposeful cold-blood (be it for fun or for my money, etc) only subjectively moral? I don’t understand. It’s clear that I'm objectively in the right, as, like you said, "might makes right" is not to be found in Nietzsche's philosophy. I’m the one defending my life. And isn’t him trying to kill me like that objectively immoral? What about rape? Is that only subjective wickedness too to Nietzsche? I find that a little more than hard to swallow.

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

Well, Hume's version of compatibilism is not the only one; but yes, that is an accurate statement.

Yes, and that is the beginning of his critique of morality, religion, and society at large. Unlike the neurochemist, however, none of these things are capable of completely usurping one's (non-free!) will. The neurochemist can take away one's ability to be authentic to oneself. Morality, religion, and society, on the other hand, are merely heavy chains that require a strong person to break through. The strong may need an impetus to realize the reasons for doing so, however, and thus Nietzsche writes his philosophy. For unless we are to be fooled by the Idle Argument, Nietzsche can still be a genuine cause in the great chain of being even if he is not free in the libertarian sense of the word.

An external critique involves premises that the one being critiqued does not (at least yet) endorse, whereas an internal criticism works within the view being critiqued.

An internal critique, then, would be one that discovered a logical inconsistency within an argument or a set of beliefs (demonstrating that the argument or set of beliefs is unsound, though leaving it up to the philosopher to decide which of his premises or conclusions to abandon).

For example, Eternalism about time entails determinism, so I might criticize someone who holds both Eternalism about time and libertarianism about free will as true for holding inconsistent views. Such a criticism would not, of course, disprove either libertarianism or Eternalism, but it would force the philosopher being criticized to abandon one of his views (though which remains up to him).

If Nietzsche were only to tell his fellow Germans that they were wrong to be anti-Semites according to his system, no one who rejected his system would have reason to stop being an anti-Semite. He would have been offering merely an external criticism. But by arguing that the Germans' own commitments should disabuse them of any anti-Semitic notions, he is offering an internal criticism (and as he believes the other commitments are more fundamental to the Germans than their anti-Semitism, he would suggest that it is the latter they should give up). This is an internal criticism -- and internal criticisms are serious threats to the rationality of one's worldview.

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

I fail to see how any of these options are not equally available on a libertarian view. Even someone with a free will is susceptible to bribes, threats, torture, and direct manipulation.

The strong, on Nietzsche's view, are ultimately capable of overcoming the indirect forms of manipulation you listed -- to which he would add morality and religion -- though not every strong person will actually do so during the course of his life (indeed, many won't even realize they are being duped -- thus the need for Nietzsche's philosophy).

Neurochemistry may allow one to destroy a strong person, which Nietzsche would see as a foolish and unfortunate event, though not an impossible one (the Übermensch is neither perfect nor invincible, after all).

Nietzsche died in 1900, and thus prior to modern neurology. Moreover, he was not a philosopher of mind. So no, he made no such explicit reduction. He was a physicalist, however, and there are no Cartesian souls in his account of the will.

While his writing style is flamboyant, I do not think Nietzsche caricatures morality. Moreover, there are several moralities that he targets -- Kantian and Christian ethics among them -- one of which is the sort of cultural morality that is passed down as a tradition from one generation to the next.

Nietzsche was quite familiar with Kant's work, as well as that of Schopenhauer, and his eventual rejection of the thing-in-itself was a major transition point in Nietzsche's thought. In fact, this rejection of Kant and Schopenhauer is typically taken as the dividing point between the early and middle periods of Nietzsche's life as a philosopher (with the middle period signifying a complete break from the early period, and the late period being largely an elaboration of the middle period).

But while Nietzsche certainly shared Kant's rejection of traditional moralities, this does not constitute support for a Kantian ethic. Nietzsche rejects Kantian ethics both on the grounds that it relies on (noumenal) free will -- which Nietzsche denied -- and that he sees it as antagonistic to those conditions needed for the Übermensch to flourish (as are all moralities similar in consequence to Christian ethics).

I do not believe so. I say this because Nietzsche is not trying to deny that human beings are a product of their environment, but only that society often cajoles people into following paths that they simply do not believe in -- despite the influences of both nature and nurture.

I'm not sure what you mean by "essential" here. Obviously, I also find logical consistency to be very important. I just don't think it is always present.

I take this to mean that you would only allow something that is consciously manifest to count as a thought or a belief. I agree with you regarding thoughts, but I would suggest beliefs can be both manifest and latent. If someone asks me the date in the morning and then again in the evening, and if I am not thinking about the matter during the rest of the day, it seems obvious that I still believed it to be the particular date I said it was all along. If I had been asked what the date was at my lunch hour, I would have responded in precisely the same way; and it seems excessively odd to say that during the day I do not believe it to be that date.

That is not what I'm saying at all. What I am, and always have been, saying is: assuming 1 and 2 are true, someone who believes 3 and 4 holds views that are inconsistent with each other (and thus holds inconsistent beliefs).

No. Compatibilists quite explicitly accept 2 (since hard determinism, compatibilism/soft determinism, and libertarianism are three mutually exclusive positions on the problem of free will).

Premise 1 is an internal criticism of the conjunction of 3 and 4.

No, it supposes only that logic is a valid system of analysis and that the set of beliefs being criticized is open to such analysis.

I fail to see the problem, as Nietzsche is not forwarding any sort of objective moral system.

He's not saying that one should do anything, so there is no reason to persuade the hypocrite from his habits. Instead, he is simply recommending a way of living that he believes is the most preferable. The strong will be capable of meeting the high demands of this way of living and the weak will not. A perpetual hypocrite lacks intellectual conscience, a quintessential sign of weakness. And the weak can go off and die for all Nietzsche cares.

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

That is not true. Someone could be determined to be unwaveringly honest (absent neurochemistry, which would also render someone malleable in a libertarian universe). Just because determinists see all events as necessarily following from previous events does not mean that they see all logically possible events as physically possible.

Another misunderstanding of (hard) determinism: a given event may have multiple possible causes, and thus it is not the case that "only those conditions" can trigger the event in question.

Strength is an evolved feature, on Nietzsche's view, and so it is certainly dependent on the "forces of nature" to an extent.

Does it follow that Finland is not independent because at any time China might come in and take over the country? Of course not. Independence is a temporal property (that is, one can be independent at some times and not at others).

That is, one is sufficiently independent if one chooses (e.g. one's values) for oneself, and not because they have been endorsed (or rejected!) by others.

But that's to take an extremely partisan view and insist that anything you disagree with is not just wrong, but downright foolish. The principle of charity requires that we not take such an extreme position in order to facilitate serious philosophy.

Moreover, the overman -- and those strong men who lead up to him -- are not supposed to be "moral" in the traditional sense.

Nietzsche has an argument for rejecting the thing-in-itself, which is necessary for Kant's libertarianism. Also, particularly in the earlier mature works, he takes science to have offered a fairly strong case against the existence of libertarian free will.

"It" seems to refer to "libertarian free will" in this context. But I never said that Nietzsche finds free will to be antagonistic to the flourishing of the Übermensch. What was antagonistic was Kantian ethics -- which prohibits paths that Nietzsche thinks should be open to overmen.

that the self is transparent enough to discover its motives

a single moral code is appropriate for all people

a universal morality, after all, is necessarily harmful to some if a single moral code is not, in fact, appropriate for all

What did you mean, then, by "thought and belief are purely cognitive"?

Yes, but that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not 3 and 4 are, in fact, inconsistent with each other. If 1 and 2 are true, then 3 and 4 cannot both be true. Therefore, to argue that 3 and 4 are inconsistent is to launch an internal critique on anyone who holds both to be true. Internal critiques can fail (that is, you do not have to be correct for your critique to count as an internal one -- there are "successful" and "unsuccessful" internal critiques, though it is obviously a matter of contention which are which), they simply have to be about a certain thing (i.e., logical consistency

An internal critique, then, would be one that discovered a logical inconsistency within an argument or a set of beliefs

No, compatibilism is the position that determinism and free will are compatible. Libertarians, however, characterize free will differently than compatibilists.

No, that's just a flat out contradiction. The internal criticism is ~(3 & 4) because (1 & 2).

Nietzsche quite explicitly worries about the ways in which the weak might inhibit the strong (indeed, he believes they have done so in the forms of religion and morality). I do not rightly know what he might think about neurological research, however. He might just counsel the strong to stay away from research labs and the scientists not to try replacing the strong with neurologically altered weaklings. But he would not deny the possibility of doing so.

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

I'm not sure why you think "unwavering" is problematic at all -- after all, "determinedly" is a reasonable synonym for the word (though with a slightly different connotation on "determined"). Regardless, someone who is unwaveringly honest is someone who is honest regardless of what conditions apply. That is, given any condition -- excepting neurochemistry, I suppose -- they will still be honest.

But for the unwaveringly honest person, the only way to alter that condition is to resort to neurochemistry -- which is equally applicable in a libertarian world.

The emphasized portion is what prompted the portion of my response you are here objecting to. In the unwaveringly honest person, there is not a condition under which he will engage in dishonesty -- at least, no condition that does not equally apply in both a deterministic and a libertarian world.

keda wrote:

there is always some condition under which one will engage in any activity including being dishonest

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

I don't see how this is relevant to the above conversation.

You have been discussing conditions as if they existed outside of the person (as evidenced by your suggestion of taking the same person and placing them under different conditions). But strength, on a Nietzschean view, is an "internal condition." This is not at all at odds with a standard determinist view, in which one's own state is just as important as the state of the rest of the universe in determining the next state of existence as a whole.

It is a physical trait. To what extent Nietzsche believes it can be inherited and to what extent it can be nurtured is a matter of some debate.

But these are not analogous situations.

First, there are more conceptions of the principle of charity than the narrow one expressed above.

Second, "caricature" is a derogatory term -- particularly in the context you used it

- and does amount to saying that the alternatives are foolish

As for being similar to the categorical imperative, all objective moral systems are trivially similar to it since being categorical is a necessary feature of any objective moral system. And any quasi-moral system will have something superficially similar to the categorical imperative for much the same reason. This similarity, however, is insufficient for saying that all other moral systems are merely pale imitations (or cariacatures) of Kantian ethics. It just goes to show that Kantian ethics, unsurprisingly, has a feature that any moral system must have.

In short, he argues that the concept is incomprehensible. You can look up his reasons yourself in Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense," Human, All-too-Human, Part I of Beyond Good and Evil, and various places in the Nachlass (particularly "The Will to Power").

Nietzsche wrote:

Against determinism and teleology.-- From the fact that something ensues regularly and ensues calculably, it does not follow that it ensues necessarily. That a quantum of force determines and conducts itself in every particular case in one way and manner does not make it into an "unfree will." "Mechanical necessity" is not a fact: it is we who first interpreted it into events. We have interpreted the formulatable character of events as the consequence of a necessity that rules over events. But from the fact that I do a certain thing, it by no means follows that I am compelled to do it. Compulsion in things certainly cannot be demonstrated: the rule proves only that one and the same event is not another event as well. Only because we have introduced subjects, "doers," into things does it appear that all events are the consequences of compulsion exerted upon subjects--exerted by whom? again by a "doer." Cause and effect--a dangerous concept so long as one thinks of something that causes and something upon which an effect is produced.

a. Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.

b. When one has grasped that the "subject" is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much follows.

It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things.

There also disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms: the assumption of which always depended on the supposition that one needed subjects.

At last, the "thing-in-itself" also disappears, because this is fundamentally the conception of a "subject-in-itself." But we have grasped that the subject is a fiction.

The sore spot of Kant's critical philosophy has gradually become visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction "appearance" and "thing-in-itself"--he had deprived himself of the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to a cause of phenomena--in accordance with his conception of causality and its purely intra-phenomenal validity-- which conception, on the other hand, already anticipates this distinction, as if the "thing-in-itself" were not only inferred but given.

The properties of a thing are effects on other "things": if one removes other "things," then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no "thing-in-itself."

The "thing-in-itself" nonsensical. If I remove all the relationships, all the "properties," all the "activities" of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic, thus with the aim of defining, communication (to bind together the multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities).

Postmodern Beatnik wrote:

There are also discussions of his reasoning in chapter four of Rex Welshon's The Philosophy of Nietzsche and chapter four of Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, each containing further references to the primary literature (including more specific references to the Nachlass than I can give at the moment).

Nietzsche seems to have accepted the argument that free will has no explanatory role to play (and thus is expendable due to Occam's Razor), and that this was an empirically available fact.

It is worth noting, however, that Nietzsche is most concerned with questioning that which philosophers take for granted -- treating the most basic premises as prejudices. As such, he focuses quite a bit on our intuitions and rarely argues for things in the way someone more familiar with analytic philosophy might expect.

(For what it's worth, Nietzsche may have also accepted the logical argument for determinism, as perhaps evidenced by section 39 of Human, All-Too Human.)

At a basic level, the benefit of the overman's is to be placed above the benefit of the weak, and the overman's flourishing can be advanced at the expense of the weak. It is permissible, then, for the overman to treat a person (especially a weak person) as a means and not an end. This seems rather anti-Kantian to me.

The "Transparency of Self Thesis" is necessary in order to evaluate and "rank" (as moral or immoral) an agent's actions relative to a morality based on intention (such as Christian or Kantian ethics) as opposed to one based on consequences.

It is implicit in the search for any universal morality, which Kantian ethics proposes to be. I suppose it is a fair enough point that this is more of a conclusion that Kant reaches than a premise, but it is still an element of the theory, and one Nietzsche objects to.

All those who are inappropriately limited by the application of a moral code that should not, in fact, apply to them are harmed insofar as it prevents those who are limited from flourishing (by following a different behavioral code, one that is appropriate for them).

Brian Leiter's discussion here covers the last several points quite well. Keep in mind that the topic here is what Nietzsche believed and why he believed it, not necessarily if he was correct.

This suggests to me that you are using "cognitive" in the sense opposed to "non-cognitive." But that debate is largely over whether or not thoughts and beliefs are truth-apt. That is, a statement is a proposition (and thus "cognitive" in this sense) if it is the proper bearer of a truth value. A statement (such as, "Look out!") is not a proposition (and thus "non-cognitive") if it is not the proper bearer of a truth value (although it seems that such statements still have content). Is this closer to what you originally meant?

Are you agreeing with me, then?

In brief, libertarians believe in free will as commonly understood: as some sort of genuine agency and independence from the general drift of causality. Compatibilism is the conjunction of determinism with a particular theory of language that supposedly allows us to make sense of and justify talk about free will while not committing us to the metaphysical details of libertarianism.

That's true -- pointing out a gratuitously obvious contradiction would still technically be an internal criticism. But I doubt any serious philosopher has ever had such blatant contradictions within their theories. Arguing for 1, 2, 3, and 4 would be just such a situation, however.

Leaving the parts that sound like paranoid conspiracy theories aside, I think Nietzsche would agree with Russell and Huxley's opposition to "scientific dictatorships." This is not to deny scientific realism or the importance of science, but only to recognize that not all science need be applied.