ABSTRACT
The most prominent historical advocate of evil-skepticism is the selfidentified anti-Christ philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche. I have been told that Nietzsche is such an unsystematic thinker that there is no hope in finding anything like “Nietzsche’s ethics” but merely particular things he says in particular works. One of the great Anglophone commentators on moral philosophy from the twentieth century declares that Nietzsche’s corpus is “booby-trapped not only against recovering theory from it, but, in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory.”1 True, some of Nietzsche’s works are difficult to penetrate and like any thinker who writes over an extended period it is likely that he changed his mind about some things. But much of Nietzsche’s work does cohere and some texts are explicitly related to one another: most notably, Beyond Good and Evil,2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra,3 On the Genealogy of Morals,4 Human, All Too Human,5 and (to some extent) The Will to Power.6 There is surely no one single thing that Nietzsche is attempting to
do in these works, but I contend that making the case for evil-skepticism is one of them. I submit that Nietzsche offers two distinct arguments for evil-skepticism,
only one of which has garnered much attention. Prior to considering these arguments, it is worthwhile to distance Nietzsche from an argument for evil-skepticism that some commentators are motivated to respond to. Nietzsche is sometimes regarded as a skeptic about morality; one commentator refers to the Genealogy as “a skeptical inquiry into morality generally.”7 It is true that Nietzsche does sometimes speak as though he aims to put morality itself on trial, but a fair reading of Nietzsche doesn’t clearly suggest that his aim is to dethrone morality quite generally.8 True, Nietzsche rejects some particular ethical theories, but his arguments include transparently moral arguments for abandoning or revising certain aspects of morality. On the reading that I favor, Nietzsche does not reject morality altogether. Rather, he argues on moral grounds that particular moral systems ought to be abandoned or revised; he defends a substantive variety of moral devaluation that devalues a particular class of moral values, not a broader variety according to which all moral values are rejected.9 Undoubtedly some evil-skeptics dismiss talk of evil because they dismiss talk of morality generally. But Nietzsche is not among them, and his arguments for evil-skepticism that concern me in this chapter are not based in moral irrealism. Ultimately, I contend that none of Nietzsche’s arguments for evil-
skepticism are successful. I distinguish two of his arguments for evilskepticism below – a “debunking argument” and an argument with roots in virtue theory – and respond to each. This chapter is something of a black swan: in other chapters there is at least one canonical work of literature that I focus on at some length; in this chapter I am concerned exclusively with the texts of one philosopher. Hopefully, that illustrates just how powerful I take Nietzsche’s arguments for evil-skepticism to be.
As a young man, Nietzsche was interested in the theological problem of evil but also in the origins of “our good and evil,” a very different problem concerning the origins of our moral terminology and moral concepts (GM 16). No surprise, then, that he came to ponder the following questions:
