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> 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. |