Events

2 May 2008

Nietzsche as Virtuous Egoist

Seminar

A big challenge for the interpretation of Nietzsche as some kind of virtue theorist is the existence of egoist themes in his mature ethical writings. My task in this paper is to show how an egoist reading of Nietzsche can be integrated with a virtue theoretic one. There are two basic problems.First, in contemporary analytic moral philosophy, to be an egoist is automatically to be an immoralist. Second, some interpreters of Nietzsche not only disavow the "egoist" label but go so far as to think of him as some kind of communitarian. As for the first of these problems, I shall deny the assumption that if Nietzsche is to be read as an egoist he should be read as an immoralist. On my account his view is a type of "virtuous egoism", a view opposed to non-virtuous altruisms, but not to all forms of altruism. To resolve the second problem, concerning the interpretation of Nietzsche as some kind of communitarian, I shall integrate the admitted communitarian aspects of Nietzsche's thought with the more orthodox individualist reading which I favour.

Philosophy

Organisation:

Philosophy Department, University of Auckland