[Amezarak]

What?

Nietzsche's position that "morals" are simply the "herd instinct in the individual", that is, simply the social instinct combined with the norms and customs that have built up in a culture over time due to its particular history and development. He does not assign a value to morals from this anthropological position - indeed his ultimate task was to devise a new system of valuation that would let us do this. It's hard to see how any other position could possibly be valid. Nietzsche was not entirely original here, but he was completely devastating.

There is nothing profound about utilitarianism. It's simply abstract thinkers asking "what do we value most of all, and what are the logical means of maximizing it." There's nothing particularly profound about deontologists either, except, as Nietzsche would have said, they're less decadent and more intellectually honest - right is defined by their moral intuition (which, according to N, is simply decided by the above) or God, or whatever, and that's the end of the story. Both of these, along with virtue ethics, already assume they know what good and bad, and everything falls from that based on the particular method (assumption: hurting people is bad; deontologists: hurting people is bad, don't do it, because that's the rule utilitarians: hurting people is bad unless by so doing you decrease the net amount of hurt people.) Nietzsche's question is much more fundamental. He is establishing the nature of morality, pursuing a history of moral development (which he agrees may not be accurate and certainly not anywhere near complete), asks a few questions about the consequences of different moral systems, etc.

[dvt]

> Nietzsche was not entirely original here, but he was completely devastating.

This is vastly overstating his impact on moral ethics (and philosophy in general). He will most certainly remain a historical curiosity (I put him in the same bucket as Wittgenstein and Spinoza), but the world has moved on. Elizabeth Anscombe, GE Moore, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, etc. have all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century). He doesn't even remotely stand up to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and so on.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is something that was truly devastating—putting an end to the rationalist vs. empiricist debate that had been raging for centuries. Nietzsche? Not so much.

[Amezarak]

Nietzsche's attacks on Kant are also pretty devastating. It's hard to take Kant seriously in 2021.

> all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century)

Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.

[dvt]

> Nietzsche's attacks on Kant are also pretty devastating.

His attacks on Kant are extremely surface-level. Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't. That's basically it. I mean, Nietzsche's moral theory doesn't even explain baseline moral actions (e.g. a mother's love for her child, not murdering people you don't like, paying your taxes).

> Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.

Nothing, but that's kind of the point. His meta-ethical views are empty, uninteresting, and ultimately fruitless. They don't really help us become more just or more fair, nor do they illuminate the moral world. It's not like people write deep biting critiques of stoicism or solipsism, either.

These are essentially dead philosophies, in contrast with something like Kantian ethics—which is a sort of "hardline" deontology—and probably wrong-ish, but still studied and taken somewhat seriously.

[Amezarak]

> That's basically it. I mean, Nietzsche's moral theory doesn't even explain baseline moral actions (e.g. a mother's love for her child, not murdering people you don't like, paying your taxes).

It absolutely does! That's the 'herd instinct', what we would call the social instinct. It also conveniently explains why other mothers could believe the right thing to do was sacrifice their children to Moloch, but obviously one of these exists at a "lower" level and therefore more common than the other since one is more closely tied to survival. (Though, given the frequency of ancient infanticide, it presumably had some survival benefit as well.)

It is really strange to see you making such strong statements about Nietzsche's philosophy when you are clearly completely missing his central points. It really sounds like you've just read secondary sources (like Russel) that have some extremely wrong caricature of Nietzsche's views that amount to "selfishness is the only good" or something. That is not Nietzsche's moral theory. Nietzsche's moral theory is that there are no real tables of morals, just a social instinct that manifests differently in different times and cultures according to the various historical and psychological forces that formed them. No doubt in-group altruism is a necessary prerequisite of social animals to exist at all - that doesn't mean that it has some sort of moral reality.

> Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't.

Not only is this not true, unless you meant is the sense of some real, universal objective Duty, the whole problem is that Kant never stops to consider his priors, let alone demonstrate that such a thing even exists. (And unfortunately for Kant, it didn't stop there: the thing-in-itself is broken too.)

See TGS 335.

The only way to sustain moral realism in the usual sense is to declare "this is what God commanded." If you posit omnipotent supernatural entities, they can do anything. But there's no real or logical foundation for morality otherwise, except to look at it from an anthropological view. And that's okay - humans don't need logical reasons to do things.