ABSTRACT
The first two chapters introduce the various "ways of life" considered and evaluated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and establish what each thinker considers to be the "best" way to live. Although Miles shows that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are against the impersonal nature of action and principle-centered ethics, he refuses to see these thinkers as strict moral relativists. In short, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard avoid the charge of moral relativism not by judging certain ways of life against a supposedly objective standard, but by showing that a particular way of life does not do what it sets out to do. Whereas ethics is usually associated with the challenge of determining the rightness or wrongness of a particular action, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche offer us a method of illustrating and evaluating different ways of life that often go unexplored and underemployed in modern moral discourse.
