Nietzsche’s conceptual ethics

ABSTRACT

If ethical reflection on which concepts to use has an avatar, it must be Nietzsche, who took more seriously than most the question of what concepts one should live by. Yet Nietzsche engages in two seemingly disparate modes of concept evaluation: one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express. I offer an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes. His fundamental concern, I argue, is with the effects concepts are likely to have going forward, but this concern motivates his preoccupation with what concepts express in a specific sense: he works back from a concept via the need it fills to the conditions that engender that need and thereby render the concept pointful. For a concept to be pointful is for it to serve the concerns of its users through its effects. But even when it is not pointful, a concept expresses the presuppositions of its pointfulness, which we can work back to by asking who would have need of such a concept. What emerges is a powerful approach to conceptual ethics that looks beyond the formal virtues and vices of concepts at the presuppositions we buy into by using them.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• conceptual ethics
• concepts
• needs
• expressive character

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The phrase ‘conceptual ethics’ hails from Burgess and Plunkett (2013a, 2013b), and figures prominently in the collection Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics (Burgess, Cappelen, and Plunkett 2020), in which Nietzsche receives several nods of acknowledgement from analytic philosophers of language; see Cappelen and Plunkett (2020, 1–4, 15, 19), Cappelen (2020, 133, 139–140), and Scharp (2020, 397).

2 I follow Richardson (2020) in citing Nietzsche’s Nachlass by the last two digits of the year of the notebook in which the note occurs, followed by a colon, followed by the notebook number, followed by the note number in square brackets. Translations are my own, though I have consulted translations where available, and amended them only to bring them closer to the original.

3 See, e.g. Nietzsche (69:2[10], 3[36, 86, 94]).

4 See also Queloz and Cueni (2019) for a different application of this idea of counterfactual adherence to a position to Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism, and see Williams (2006a, 187) for the notion of ‘counterfactual scientism’.

5 In addition to this Neo-Kantian line of objection to our concepts, Nietzsche also suggests – notably in ‘On Truth and Lie’ – that all our concepts systematically obfuscate differences: we use the same concept for ‘countless more or less similar cases which, strictly speaking, are never equal’ (TL 256). But this line has its own difficulties. To apply the concept leaf to two different things is not to claim that they are identical with each other, but only that they are similar to each other in certain respects. When we do want to make claims of numerical identity, we achieve this not by applying the same concept to the leaf, but by applying the concept of the same leaf. Moreover, the fact that most concepts have ‘countless more or less similar cases’ as their extension need not be taken to compromise our capacity to describe the individual case in full detail. Concepts can be combined to form indefinitely fine-grained descriptions, taking us from ‘A leaf again’ to ‘At location L and time t, there is a leaf with properties P₁–P_n.’ In fact, Nietzsche’s argument presupposes the ability to conceptualise the differences that concepts allegedly obfuscate.

6 See Breazeale (1979), Clark (1990, chs. 3–5), Williams (2002, 16–18), and Anderson (2005). For a reading on which Nietzsche was at no point committed to a falsification thesis and the metaphysical correspondence theory it requires, see Berry (2006).

7 The entry then abruptly ends with: ‘und auf ihre Erhaltbarkeit und Dauer–’, which might be taken to suggest that Nietzsche was dissatisfied with this way of articulating what the experiments would be testing for. In general, these notebook entries must be taken cum grano salis. But they also show us a Nietzsche who is not performing to an audience, and is therefore often less theatrical, more soberly analytical, and more open about his own doubts. Occasionally, as in the passages cited above, they contain particularly felicitous expressions of thoughts that seem true to much else that Nietzsche wrote and published.

8 See, e.g. Winch (1958), Taylor (1985, 1989), and MacIntyre (1978, 1988, 2013). This is not to deny that a Wittgensteinian non-foundationalism might assume a more critical form: Williams (2019) as well as Queloz and Cueni (2021) examine what assumptions would have to be made or jettisoned to give it a more critical direction.

9 These are, as I say, general modes of evaluation, each broadly shared across one of two internally diverse clusters of views. For examples of views in the first cluster, see notably Leiter (2015), Richardson (2020), and Reginster (2021); for the second, see especially Huddleston (2015, 2019), who draws on Nehamas (1985, 106–140, 200–236) and Pippin (1991, 83–85), and see also Owen (2018, 74).

10 Though this did apparently not prevent him from forgetting he had written it a year later. Thanking Meta von Salis in a letter from 22 August, 1888, for sending him her copy of the GM because he did not have one in Sils, Nietzsche writes: ‘The first look inside gave me a surprise: I discovered a long Preface to the ‘Genealogy’, the existence of which I had forgotten … Basically, I only remembered the title of the three treatises: the rest, i.e. the content, had been wiped from my memory. This as a consequence of the extreme mental activity that filled this winter and spring and which had, as it were, formed a wall in between.’ See Sommer (2019) for a detailed overview of the work’s genetic context and Nietzsche’s remarks on it.

11 On Huddleston’s (2019, 150–155) elaboration of the expressivist mode, one would presumably resist the suggestion that what is expressed in a concept is something that lies behind it – on his view, what is expressed is something enshrined in the content of the concept itself. I address this difference below.

12 This approach is as Cartesian as it is Carnapian. A concept is open-textured or ‘porous’, in Waismann’s (1945, 123) phrase, if it is not vague as things stand, but vulnerable to becoming vague (e.g. the concept mother might be rendered vague by radical changes in human reproductive technologies).

13 This referential dimension is foregrounded in, e.g. Hirsch (1993, 2013), Sider (2011), Cappelen (2013), Sawyer (2020a, 2020b), and the essays in Campbell, O’Rourke, and Slater (2011).

14 This inferential dimension is foregrounded in, e.g. Brandom (1994, 2000, 2001), Cohen (2016), Greenough (2020), Fraser (2018), Mühlebach (2021, 2022, Forthcoming), Scharp (2013, 2020, 2021), and Jorem and Löhr (2022). Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett also focus on what they call ‘the unreliable inference danger’ (2020, 283).

15 Though the exegesis of that passage is complicated by the fact that Nietzsche puts those words into the mouth of ‘a moralistic pedant and stickler for detail’.

16 See Nietzsche (GM II §§12–13). Prescott-Couch (2014, 158; 2015) draws on these passages to argue that attempts to evaluate morality based on its functional role in social life are bound to founder on the lack of continuity in these functional roles. For a qualified defence of some of those attempts, see Queloz (2020b, 2020a, 2021, 127–131; 227–231).

17 See Richardson (2004, 78–80; 2013, 767; 2020, chs. 3 and 4).

18 The example is Wittgenstein’s (1966, 5–9).

19 See Diamond (2018, 225–229).

20 See Huddleston (2019, 166).

21 This is my preferred terminology, which draws on a passing remark of Williams’s (2011, 51) contrasting ‘inner’ with ‘technological’ needs and combines it with Wiggins’s (2002, §6) more carefully worked out contrast between ‘categorical’ and ‘instrumental’ needs.

22 For a reading of Nietzsche which emphasizes ‘affective needs’, see Reginster (2021, 30). On his reading, however, the relation between such an inner need and a value judgement (and, by extension, the concept enabling the articulation of that value judgement) is functional as opposed to expressive. On the present reading, concepts are either expressive of and functional in relation to such inner needs, or merely expressive of them, but in the sense that, circumstances concurring, they would be functional in relation to them.

23 Wittgenstein (2009, §142) offers a similar example.

24 See Anscombe (1957, §21).

25 See Hyde (1973, 107).

26 See Gutzmann (2013) for a survey of varieties of expressive, non-truth-conditional meaning. Another congenial approach is ‘success semantics’ (Blackburn 2005).

27 The story is recounted in Arendt (1968, 239).

28 See Ryle (2009, 114).

29 I take it that use of this idiom need not entail unpalatable ontological commitments to possible worlds and their equally uninviting implications for modal epistemology. Talk of possible worlds can be given a deflationary gloss as an especially perspicuous and precise way of making explicit what ordinary modal talk expresses anyway. Just like ordinary modal talk itself, talk of possible worlds can be demystified by a functional account on which it ‘serves the function not of tracking features of additional worlds and reporting on their features, but rather of adding … expressive power to our language’ (Thomasson 2020, 123); see also Brandom (2008).

30 See Cueni (manuscript) for a detailed argument to that effect.

31 As Richardson (2004, 81–94; 2020, ch. 6) has emphasised.

32 A connected notion of expression which I do not go into here is the expression (as opposed to repression) of drives, which is central to Nietzsche’s notion of health and informs his conceptions of life and will to power; see May (1999, 29) and Gemes (2013, §2.2).

33 As Berry (2018, 396) argues, Nietzsche himself exploits this in his diagnoses of the ‘motivated irrationality’ he discerns in philosophical systems.

34 Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Philosophy Visiting Speakers Research Seminar at the University of Southampton and at the 2022 Meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies in Oxford. I’m grateful to Jessica Berry, Joāo Constâncio, Kaitlyn Creasy, Damian Cueni, Manuel Dries, Christopher Fowles, Ken Gemes, Alexander Greenberg, Andrew Huddleston, Christopher Janaway, Scott Jenkins, Peter Kail, Paul Katsafanas, Claire Kirwin, Thomas Lambert, Brian Leiter, Simon May, Brian McElwee, Denis McManus, Mark Migotti, David Owen, Alexander Prescott-Couch, Bernard Reginster, Mattia Riccardi, John Richardson, Sandra Shapshay, Avery Snelson, Timothy Stoll, Gudrun von Tevenar, and Daniel Whiting for their stimulating comments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [grant number P5R5PH_210902].