Today I want to say a few good word about Nietzsche to make up for what I wrote yesterday against him. The argument against him I might not get to today, but let me just say he is very important to read. He is part of a tradition that one needs to know in order to be literate. Much Jewish philosophical writings of the twentieth century borrows from him without mentioning his name. Certainly many of Freud's main theses are directly taken from Nietzsche. [Not just the idea but even the very name of the The Id is straight from Nietzsche]
He always has some good point. Most of what passes for "Leshem Shamim" behavior--for the sake of Heaven is 99% of the time a cover for low drives. Yet there is another side of the coin. Much of what people do quietly without fanfare is in fact for the sake of heaven. Nietzsche tried to simplify what a human being is about but one sub-level of desire for power. Sometimes human beings do thing for other motives. Sometimes these motives are compassion or a desire for knowledge or desire to do what one knows is right.
Consider an argument against moral relativism by Michael Huemer:
Consider such claims as
(a) Happiness is good.
(b) Honesty is a virtue.
(c) It is wrong to burn children just for the fun of it.
The anti-realist must disagree with such claims, not of course in the sense of asserting their contraries, but in the sense of holding them false. He would not say happiness is bad, but he must insist that happiness is not good. Yet surely, if those evaluations are either true or false, they are true, rather than false.
This objection may appear to border on begging the question. But what we have to ask ourselves is this: what arguments is the anti-realist able to offer against moral realism; and are the premises of any of these arguments more initially plausible than each of (a)-(c)? We must choose between rejecting (a)-(c) (along with all other moral claims), and rejecting the anti-realist's premises. Only if he can adduce some premises that are (jointly) more certain than any of (a)-(c) can he hope to convince us to resolve the dilemma in his favor.
Perhaps the anti-realist would deny he is committed to holding all first-order evaluations false. Perhaps moral claims contain one or more false presuppositions and are for that reason neither true nor false, just as "The King of France is bald" is neither true nor false because it presupposes but does not state that there is a King of France. Nevertheless, at least this much is clear: the anti-realist of the 'error theory' variety can not hold moral claims to be true. So whether or not he accepts the law of excluded middle and concludes that "Happiness is good" is false, he must at least maintain that it is not true. And from the point of view of maintaining our first-order moral discourse, this is no improvement. A claim that contains false presuppositions is as clearly unassertable as a claim that is false. I cannot say, "The King of France is bald, but there is no King of France." And nor can I say, "Murder is wrong, but there are no objective values," if the existence of objective values is presupposed in first-order moral claims.
Consider the statement: Value judgments are universally false
This theory is really quite outrageous. It implies, among other things, that it is not the case that people generally ought to eat when hungry; that Hitler was not a bad person; that happiness is not good; and so on. I submit that this is simply absurd. I feel much more confidence in those denied judgements, as I think nearly everybody does, than I can imagine feeling in any philosophical arguments for relativism. At least, I think it would take an extremely strong argument to shake my confidence that happiness is preferable to misery, or the like. And there does not seem to be any argument at all with that import. It is hard to see how there could be.
He always has some good point. Most of what passes for "Leshem Shamim" behavior--for the sake of Heaven is 99% of the time a cover for low drives. Yet there is another side of the coin. Much of what people do quietly without fanfare is in fact for the sake of heaven. Nietzsche tried to simplify what a human being is about but one sub-level of desire for power. Sometimes human beings do thing for other motives. Sometimes these motives are compassion or a desire for knowledge or desire to do what one knows is right.
Consider an argument against moral relativism by Michael Huemer:
Consider such claims as
(a) Happiness is good.
(b) Honesty is a virtue.
(c) It is wrong to burn children just for the fun of it.
The anti-realist must disagree with such claims, not of course in the sense of asserting their contraries, but in the sense of holding them false. He would not say happiness is bad, but he must insist that happiness is not good. Yet surely, if those evaluations are either true or false, they are true, rather than false.
This objection may appear to border on begging the question. But what we have to ask ourselves is this: what arguments is the anti-realist able to offer against moral realism; and are the premises of any of these arguments more initially plausible than each of (a)-(c)? We must choose between rejecting (a)-(c) (along with all other moral claims), and rejecting the anti-realist's premises. Only if he can adduce some premises that are (jointly) more certain than any of (a)-(c) can he hope to convince us to resolve the dilemma in his favor.
Perhaps the anti-realist would deny he is committed to holding all first-order evaluations false. Perhaps moral claims contain one or more false presuppositions and are for that reason neither true nor false, just as "The King of France is bald" is neither true nor false because it presupposes but does not state that there is a King of France. Nevertheless, at least this much is clear: the anti-realist of the 'error theory' variety can not hold moral claims to be true. So whether or not he accepts the law of excluded middle and concludes that "Happiness is good" is false, he must at least maintain that it is not true. And from the point of view of maintaining our first-order moral discourse, this is no improvement. A claim that contains false presuppositions is as clearly unassertable as a claim that is false. I cannot say, "The King of France is bald, but there is no King of France." And nor can I say, "Murder is wrong, but there are no objective values," if the existence of objective values is presupposed in first-order moral claims.
Consider the statement: Value judgments are universally false
This theory is really quite outrageous. It implies, among other things, that it is not the case that people generally ought to eat when hungry; that Hitler was not a bad person; that happiness is not good; and so on. I submit that this is simply absurd. I feel much more confidence in those denied judgements, as I think nearly everybody does, than I can imagine feeling in any philosophical arguments for relativism. At least, I think it would take an extremely strong argument to shake my confidence that happiness is preferable to misery, or the like. And there does not seem to be any argument at all with that import. It is hard to see how there could be.
