MacIntyre’s Nietzsche or Nietzschean MacIntyre?

Abstract

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project of providing grounds for morality has been a failure, and believes that as a result, we are left with one of the two options: either a revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics or an endorsement of Nietzschean emotivism, i.e. a version of moral relativism. I shall first challenge MacIntyre’s emotivist portrait of Nietzsche and suggest an alternative reading of Nietzsche. If my diagnosis is correct, then we also need to reinterpret the relation between MacIntyre and Nietzsche. This article aims to identify the difference in their characterization of the problem of morality, evaluate their proposal for a possible dissolution of the problem, and compare their method of moral enquiry.

Keywords

genealogy Alasdair MacIntyre Friedrich Nietzsche problem of morality revaluation of values tradition

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project of providing grounds for morality has been a failure, and discusses his deepest concern about the aftermath of this failure in the chapter named ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’ As the title suggests, MacIntyre basically claims that regarding morality, we are now left with one of the two options: either the approach of Aristotle or that of Nietzsche. The contrast of Nietzsche vs Aristotle, however, does not seem to be a straightforward one.¹ Even MacIntyre himself casts doubt on the rigidity of this dichotomy, for instance, when he says:

… on the modern view the justification of the virtues depends upon some prior justification of rules and principles … suppose that we need to attend to virtues in the first place in order to understand the function and authority of rules; we ought then to begin the enquiry in the quite different way from that in which it is begun by Hume or Diderot or Kant or Mill. On this interestingly Nietzsche and Aristotle agree.²

The centrality of virtues for an adequate conception of the ethical is the main thesis of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which aims to vindicate an Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics. If both Aristotle and Nietzsche agree on the centrality of virtues, as MacIntyre also acknowledges in the quotation above, then what is the real difference between MacIntyre and Nietzsche? This is the main question of this article. Accordingly, this article aims to clarify and compare the views of MacIntyre and Nietzsche on the characterization of the problem of morality, and to evaluate the method of enquiry that they propose in order to dissolve this problem.

In the first part of the article, I seek to locate how MacIntyre and Nietzsche each characterize the problem of morality. I start with a discussion on MacIntyre’s concern with morality and his diagnosis that Nietzschean emotivism is the source of the contemporary situation of moral disorder. Then I challenge his interpretation of Nietzsche as an emotivist and suggest an alternative reading with a focus on Nietzsche’s own problem with morality. In the second part, I discuss the ways in which MacIntyre and Nietzsche each cope with the problem they diagnose to be central to the conception of morality in their own time. In the last part, I evaluate their solutions, compare their methods of enquiry for understanding the ethical, and reach a conclusion on what they each accomplish.

I How to characterize the problem of morality?

1 MacIntyre’s concern about morality

The central claim of MacIntyre’s thesis concerning the problem of morality is that ‘the language of morality passed from a state of order to a state of disorder’.³ MacIntyre argues that moral arguments are rationally interminable due to this state of disorder. Our contemporary culture, says MacIntyre, is dominated by the doctrine of emotivism, according to which ‘all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling’.⁴ MacIntyre argues that emotivism emerged as a result of the failure of the Enlightenment project of morality, i.e. the project of finding a rational (and secular) foundation for morality. According to MacIntyre’s analysis, the Enlightenment project of morality not only failed but had to fail because ‘all [the Enlightenment philosophers] reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail.’⁵

The Aristotelian tradition, says MacIntyre, provided a teleological context, in which an evaluative claim functioned as a particular kind of factual claim.⁶ Although the Enlightenment philosophers inherited the content of morality from this older tradition, they rejected the teleological framework of that tradition. But out of the teleological context of this tradition the moral judgments could not function as factual claims, which, MacIntyre argues, is required for the possibility of a rational justification. That is why MacIntyre claims that the Enlightenment project not only failed but had to fail. In the lack of a teleological context and with the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project, a gap emerges between the use of (evaluative) concepts and the (factual) meaning that they used to have and, hence, emotivism prevails.⁷

MacIntyre’s diagnosis of the main problem, if not his reasons for its emergence, seems to be correct. The default moral view of late-modern western societies is, in general terms, subjectivism, and this is a crucial problem. I will present and evaluate Macintyre’s dissolution of this problem in the second part of the article. First I shall discuss MacIntyre’s interpretation of Nietzsche.

2 MacIntyre’s Nietzsche

MacIntyre portrays Nietzsche as an emotivist. He considers emotivism in the broad sense, as the common stance shared by Hume, Nietzsche, Weber, existentialists like Sartre, and non-cognitivists like Carnap. The kind of emotivism that he attributes to Nietzsche is summarized briefly in his analysis of Weber’s conception of values:

It is not surprising that Weber’s understanding of values was indebted chiefly to Nietzsche … for while he holds that an agent might be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. All faiths and evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions given to sentiment and feeling. Weber is then, in the broader sense in which I have understood the term, an emotivist …⁸

According to MacIntyre’s Nietzsche, moral evaluations are non-rational and subjective directions given to emotions. Even if one disagrees with MacIntyre’s emotivist portrait of Nietzsche, as I do, it is still hard to argue against it due to MacIntyre’s broad use of the notion of emotivist, and also due to the multidimensionality of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nevertheless, several attempts have been made to criticize MacIntyre’s interpretation of Nietzsche. One strategy has been to argue for the place of (rational) justification in Nietzsche’s evaluative approach in order to deny the radical non-rational element attributed to him by MacIntyre.⁹ Another strategy has been to point out that MacIntyre’s treatment does not do justice to the complexity of Nietzsche.¹⁰ This latter approach is perceptive as a critique but does not provide us with an alternative account of interpreting Nietzsche. The first approach, although it suggests an alternative reading of Nietzsche as opposed to MacIntyre’s interpretation, appears to be misdirected. I suspect that it would not be hard to find passages that illustrate both rational and non-rational elements in Nietzsche’s writings; it seems clear to me that Nietzsche was not concerned with giving rational arguments.

I rather argue that MacIntyre’s portrait of Nietzsche as an emotivist can be challenged if we can show that his interpretation of Nietzsche’s problem with the Enlightenment project of morality is implausible. It is from this latter interpretation that MacIntyre derives his conception of emotivist Nietzsche. Therefore, if MacIntyre’s reading of Nietzsche’s response to the Enlightenment project could be shown to be untenable, then his further claim, that through this kind of reaction to the Enlightenment project Nietzsche develops his emotivist alternative, would be unsustainable. Hence, it would, at least, require MacIntyre to support his thesis that Nietzsche is an emotivist on other grounds.

I shall first present how MacIntyre interprets Nietzsche’s response to the Enlightenment project of justifying morality. The following two passages are indispensable for a good grasp of MacIntyre’s interpretation:

… it was Nietzsche’s historical achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher – certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism – not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy. It is true that Nietzsche, as I shall later argue, illegitimately generalized from the condition of moral judgment in his own day to the nature of morality as such.¹¹

… the power of Nietzsche’s position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will. My own argument obliges me to agree with Nietzsche that the philosophers of the Enlightenment never succeeded in providing grounds for doubting his central thesis; his epigrams are deadlier than his extended arguments.¹²

According to these two passages, MacIntyre’s Nietzsche makes the following three claims: (1) the Enlightenment philosophers failed to give a rational justification of morality; (2) this is mainly because, what these philosophers ‘purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will’ – in other words, these philosophers gave ‘a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will’; (3) therefore, there cannot be any rational justification for moral judgments because moral judgments are expressions of subjective will. MacIntyre agrees with the first two claims, (1) and (2), but argues that (3) is an illegitimate generalization since MacIntyre’s Nietzsche arrives at a conclusion on morality as such merely based on the contingent condition of moral judgments in his own day.

Did Nietzsche really endorse emotivism based on his observation of the subjectivity of moral judgments in his own time? This does not seem to be a plausible interpretation given what Nietzsche says:

Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality – in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a ‘possibility’, such an ‘ought’, with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, ‘I am morality itself and nothing besides is morality.’¹³

In his own day, Nietzsche does not seem to have observed in Europe that moral judgments are actually expressions of subjective will and then make an untenable generalization that morality as such is subjective. He rather claims that the morality of Europe in his day is unanimous and considered to be the absolute morality. Actually, this constitutes the origin of Nietzsche’s criticism of the Enlightenment philosophers. According to Nietzsche, the Enlightenment philosophers insisted on the objectivity of their received morality ‘because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages’.¹⁴ Nietzsche’s comment on the ignorance of the Enlightenment philosophers about history and other cultures does not seem to be warranted. Nonetheless, in their philosophical works, the Enlightenment philosophers were not primarily concerned with alternative moralities.¹⁵ This was not their philosophical problem. Their concern was rather to give an account of (the foundations of) the moral judgments that they considered to be universal. In this sense, Hume and Kant actually agree on the universality of the principles of morality but differ on their accounts of how these principles are justified. While Hume assumed a universal human nature in order to argue for an emotional foundation of morality, Kant assumed a universal human faculty of reason in order to argue for a rational foundation of morality.

As we have argued so far, Nietzsche directly targets the Enlightenment philosophers’ belief in the absoluteness of their morality and the project of providing rational foundations for it. MacIntyre, however, argues that Nietzsche holds an emotivist thesis of morality based on a generalization of the subjectivity of moral judgments in his own day (i.e. moral judgments are expressions of subjective will). Nietzsche’s complaint about the Enlightenment philosophers is primarily based on a different reasoning and his problem with morality is actually different from MacIntyre’s characterization of it. If my analysis, introduced above and substantiated further in the next section, is plausible, then this will not only cast doubt on MacIntyre’s interpretation of Nietzsche as an emotivist but also lead us to a more fruitful reading of Nietzsche, and, as a result, to a better understanding of the problem of morality.

3 Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the problem of morality

One of the central concerns of Nietzsche’s overall project is to articulate the fundamental problem that humanity faces in order to determine the task of (future) philosophers by asking the following kind of questions. What is the main task of philosophers? What is the crucial problem that they should address? How should they address it? These questions do not actually seem to be peculiar to Nietzsche but his answers are. Before Nietzsche, the crucial task of philosophy was understood to be an epistemological project. The ancient Greek philosophers’ concern was the problem of knowledge (or the problem of justification and of truth). The majority of modern western philosophers focused on this problem in their own way.

In this regard, the Enlightenment project of morality is also an epistemological project and addresses the problem of moral knowledge. Nietzsche, however, questions the value of such a problematization. He downgrades the problem of moral knowledge, primarily because he considers that it is based on a misunderstanding. For Nietzsche, the problem of morality is not an epistemological problem as (mis)understood by the Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant; the question is not how moral judgments are justified but the value of the very values that underlie such moral judgments. As opposed to the problem of knowledge, Nietzsche introduces the problem of values as the crucial task of philosophers. Even the problematization of truth is not epistemological for Nietzsche. He rather problematizes the value of truth, as he asks ‘Why not untruth?’ in the opening page of Beyond Good and Evil.

This interpretation actually gains support from the way in which Nietzsche evaluates the failure of the Enlightenment philosophers with his paradigm of Kant. Nietzsche does not give us an argument that attempts to show the vicious circle in Kant’s transcendental arguments on the foundations of morality. Surely, this is not Nietzsche’s style of writing. But neither does Nietzsche protest the fact that Kant’s arguments do not succeed as a rational justification. What Nietzsche does instead is to question the value of Kant’s whole project with a bitter irony:

‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ Kant asked himself – and what really is his answer? ‘By virtue of a faculty’ – but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially …

But is that an answer? An explanation? … How does opium induce sleep? ‘By virtue of a faculty’, namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Molière. …

But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ by another question, ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’ – and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that!¹⁶

Although Nietzsche doubts the explanatory power of Kant’s answer here, he does not actually demand a better answer. Instead, he proposes an alternative question to be addressed; the question concerning the value of the necessity of judgments that Kant was trying to justify. In a word, Nietzsche suggests evaluating the value of the assumptions behind Kant’s project rather than the success of Kant’s justification.

Furthermore, Nietzsche notices that Kant is still working within the framework of the values of the received morality.¹⁷ According to Nietzsche, the Enlightenment project aims at a rational foundation of morality based on these values but it does not question the values themselves. This is his primary criticism of the Enlightenment philosophers; that they did not problematize the prevalent morality of their time, but assumed it to be given, to be absolute:

They [our moral philosophers] wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality – and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a foundation. Morality itself, however, was accepted as ‘given.’…

[J]ust because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages – they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all ‘science of morals’ so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called ‘a rational foundation for morality’ and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression for this faith; and thus just another fact within a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic – certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.¹⁸

Accordingly, Nietzsche’s main problem with the Enlightenment philosophers is not, as MacIntyre claims, their failure in finding a rational foundation for morality. Nietzsche rather problematizes the project of seeking a rational foundation for the morality taken to be absolute. Moreover, contrary to what MacIntyre suggests, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a version of emotivism; it does not involve subjectivity of individual moral judgments. Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment project depends on his acknowledgment of the possibility of different moral systems among different communities at different times in history. In other words, Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not arise from his observations of individuals’ moral judgments as expressions of subjective will nor does it claim that moral judgments are individual preferences, which is the basic tenet of emotivism. Rather, it has its origin in Nietzsche’s recognition of the socio-historical situatedness of morality. Accordingly, in contemporary terms, Nietzsche is neither a subjectivist nor an objectivist, but an inter-subjectivist regarding morality.¹⁹

Nietzsche’s perspectivism regarding morality basically claims that ‘there are absolutely no moral facts’;²⁰ for ‘there are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena’.²¹ Nietzsche seems to think that the moral interpretation of phenomena is based on an order of rank among values. This means that due to the possibility of different orders of rank among values there are or may be different moralities. As a result, the significant question of morality, for Nietzsche, becomes the question of values rather than the question of the rational foundation of morality.

In summary, Nietzsche problematizes not the success of the Enlightenment project but the worth of it. The real problem of morality, according to Nietzsche, ‘emerges only when we compare many moralities’.²² Hence, Nietzsche introduces the problem of values as the crucial problem concerning morality and assigns the revaluation of values (and the reconsideration of the order of rank among values) as the crucial task of the future philosophers as he declares: ‘All the sciences have from now on to prepare the way for the future task of the philosophers: this task understood as the solution of the problem of value, the determination of the order of rank among values.’²³

II How to dissolve the problem of morality?

I have so far tried to explicate the way in which MacIntyre and Nietzsche conceive the main problem concerning morality. The ways in which they define the problem partly depend on their critiques of the Enlightenment project, which, as we have discussed, are different. Furthermore, due to the difference in their depictions of the problem, their solutions to it also differ. To the explanation of their solutions I now turn.

1 MacIntyre’s tradition

In the first half of After Virtue, MacIntyre presents his diagnosis of the problem of morality. As I explained in the previous section, according to MacIntyre, the main problem of morality is the moral disorder that emerged with the rejection of the teleological framework of the pre-modern tradition and prevailed after the inescapable failure of the Enlightenment project of finding a rational foundation for morality. Therefore, MacIntyre’s project, in the second half of After Virtue, is to vindicate a pre-modern virtue ethics, which, he seems to believe, will bring with it the teleological view needed for the justification of moral judgments. We shall not worry too much about the ambiguity in MacIntyre’s suggestion here; MacIntyre actually develops his positive account in his later works that we shall discuss now.

MacIntyre argues that the incompetence of the Enlightenment project contributed to the present condition of emotivism since the failure of finding a rational justification was seen to imply that there cannot be a rational justification of morality. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre instead suggests that a rational enquiry concerning morality is possible but only as embodied in a tradition:

What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition …²⁴

If rational enquiry is tradition-bound, then it seems that there must be as many rationalities as traditions. This is indeed what MacIntyre acknowledges; he says that ‘rationality, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there is a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality’.²⁵ But he also claims that this ‘does not entail that the differences between rival and incompatible traditions cannot be rationally solved’.²⁶ How this could be possible is the central concern of MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in which he sets the stage to argue for the rational superiority of Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition over the three rival traditions: Augustinianism, Scottish Enlightenment tradition and modern liberalism.

MacIntyre’s main account (for dissolving the problem of morality) takes its final shape in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In this work, MacIntyre associates the problem of moral disorder with the lack of a proper method of moral enquiry; hence, he considers that the solution to the moral disorder requires an adequate method of moral enquiry. This work stands out as the core of MacIntyre’s account, for it goes beyond a diagnosis of the problem; it is here that MacIntyre gives philosophical arguments to show the aptness of his version of moral enquiry for dissolving the problem.

MacIntyre’s strategy of defending his method is rather indirect. First, he introduces three possible versions of moral enquiry: encyclopedia, genealogy and his own method, tradition. Then, he gives a critique of the two other methods in order to show why they are impotent. Accordingly, if MacIntyre is right that the two possible rivals to his method are inadequate moral enquiries (and that there are only three possible methods), then it follows that his method stands out as our only option (unless it is proven to be inadequate).

Before a further discussion on the strength and the weakness of MacIntyre’s method of tradition we shall first look at Nietzsche’s genealogy, since our evaluation will be comparative.

2 Nietzsche’s genealogy

Man is ‘an interesting animal’, says Nietzsche, not because he is rational but because he is able to interpret morality anew by revaluating the received values and altering the order of rank among them.²⁷ This is the insight that underlies Nietzsche’s genealogical approach. It also partly explains why Nietzsche is an amoralist: (1) that he is against dogmatism (or tyranny) of morality, i.e. taking the interpretation and rank order of values given by a particular moral tradition as absolute; (2) that he disagrees with the interpretation and rank ordering of values handed down by the received morality (of his tradition).

It would be naive to think that Nietzsche advocates immoral acts or that he is against all possible ways of understanding the ethical. This interpretation is also what Nietzsche himself seems to be afraid of as he feels the urge to clarify his position in the following way:

It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and restricted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.²⁸

The distinction between morality and ethics might be helpful here to understand Nietzsche’s amoralism. Ethics is a broader concept than morality. In other words, morality is one way of approaching the ethical. Moral theories are distinguished by the centrality of the concept of moral obligation in their analysis.²⁹ In the last 20 years, however, the ancient Greek conception of ethics, according to which virtue is the central notion, has been revitalized by the theories of virtue ethics as an alternative to the moral theories. I think Nietzsche can be seen as the first modern philosopher who opened the way to such an alternative conception of ethical life, even if he did not develop a ‘theory’ of virtue ethics. I shall not here attempt to give a defense of this interpretation.³⁰ For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to remind ourselves that MacIntyre also agrees on this, for he claims that Nietzsche and Aristotle agree on the priority of virtues instead of moral obligations for understanding the ethical realm (as I have quoted in the introduction).

In view of our distinction between morality and ethics, Nietzsche’s amoralism can further be interpreted as the denial of the centrality of the concept of moral obligation for an account of the ethical. In summary then, Nietzsche’s amoralism has three dimensions. First, Nietzsche criticizes the assumption of an absolute morality and argues that morality is culturally and historically contingent, i.e. perspectival. Second, he rejects the centrality of the concept of moral obligation. According to Nietzsche, moral rules are tied to a rank ordering of values and that is why he thinks that it is not the question of objective moral obligations but the question of values that is central for an adequate conception of the ethical. Third, Nietzsche, in his genealogies, evaluates the values of the received morality of his own culture by telling us a narrative about the psychological origins of these values. Despite their semi-fictional character, Nietzsche’s genealogies still astonish us because of their intelligible possibility as an explanation of a possible moral psychology of conceiving the ethical in a certain problematic way, rather than their historical accuracy. Although Nietzsche gives a historical narrative, he does not actually derive his diagnosis of the moral psychology of his tradition on the basis of an analysis of (accurate) historical events. Rather, he already has an idea about what it means to be part of that tradition and asks: How might this have happened? As a historical study, Nietzsche’s work may rightly be seen as a failure. But, if we at the same time argue that due to his clumsy historical analysis there can be no truth in his explanation of the psychological origins of a certain way of approaching the ethical, how are we then supposed to explain the force of his works?

Here then we shall say a few words on what we mean by Nietzsche’s psychological approach. For this, we need to give a synopsis of Nietzsche’s main genealogy that uncovers the psychology at the root of two versions of morality. As is well known, in his first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche proposes that there is a dichotomy between master morality and slave morality. He argues that according to master morality, good is defined positively with respect to the excellences that one possesses and bad is defined negatively as merely the lack of such qualities. Slave morality, according to Nietzsche, emerges as a revolt against the master morality due to the resentment of those who lack excellences. From the perspective of slave morality, evil is defined first and identified with the other (who has the qualities valued in master morality). Good is defined derivatively, as opposed to evil. And an advocate of slave morality, as opposed to the evil other, is then called good.

I have purposefully given a presentation of Nietzsche’s analysis of two moralities devoid of its historical context so as to shed light on what is left as a psychological explanation. It now becomes clear that the strength of Nietzsche’s story is his depiction of the difference in psychological attitudes behind the two ways of approaching the ethical. For that matter, we shall not take the notion of master and slave at its face value, i.e. as representative of a class distinction. It is the psychological attitude rather than the social rank in a hierarchical society that marks out who is a master. Here again, we see that Nietzsche’s conception of master morality is more akin to the ancient Greek conception of the ethical (in which the notion of excellence plays the central role) rather than to late-modern emotivist approaches (as MacIntyre suggests).

At another level, Nietzsche’s genealogies also aim to make an evaluation of the values of Europe in his own time. Nietzsche seems to believe that the received morality of his day cultivates values and ideals of slave morality. He criticizes the priority of values such as pity and the dominance of ascetic ideals such as sin and guilt. According to Nietzsche, these values and ideals are also life-denying in the sense that they turn ‘man’ against himself. Instead, Nietzsche wants to promote those values that are life-affirmative. He explains the role and significance of values in human life in the following way:

When we talk about values, we are under the inspiration, under the optic, of life: life itself forces us to posit values, life itself evaluates through us, when we posit values. It follows from this that even the anti-natural morality … is only a value judgment made by life – but which life? … I have already answered this: it is the judgment of a declining, weakened, exhausted, condemned life. Morality as it has been understood so far … is the instinct of decadence making an imperative of itself: it says: ‘be destroyed!’³¹

In brief, Nietzsche’s criteria for the evaluation of values are life-enhancement and human flourishing; and the values for an assessment of character (or virtues) that he promotes are honesty, courage, generosity, politeness, insight, sympathy and solitude.³²

From this interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethical claims, it seems to follow that Nietzsche is a realist in issues concerning the ethical. The reader may rightly ask: How is he supposed to be a realist? Does not Nietzsche declare that ‘there are no moral facts’? Is he not a moral relativist? As we have already discussed, Nietzsche indeed holds a version of moral relativism, not a subjectivist one but an inter-subjectivist moral relativism. Nonetheless, if our previous interpretation that for Nietzsche, a moral system is actually based on a particular order of rank among values is plausible, then there is no tension in our final claim that Nietzsche is a realist in issues concerning the ethical, namely, the values themselves. Nevertheless, as Nietzsche shows us, it makes no small difference how these values are organized. It is this possibility of various ways of evaluating the values resulting with a different rank ordering among them that underlies the historical actuality of many different moralities. But if indeed values are the archetypes of the ethical, as Nietzsche argues, we can then claim without any contradiction that Nietzsche is both an ethical realist (realist about the values) and moral relativist (inter-subjectivist about the order of rank among values).

III Toward a conclusion

I have started with the observation that both Nietzsche and MacIntyre agree on the centrality of virtues (i.e. values for character assessment) rather than obligations for an adequate conception of the ethical. The main concern of this article, however, is to understand the difference between Nietzsche and MacIntyre and compare their accounts in order to reach a conclusion on the adequate approach to morality. I have argued that for Nietzsche, the task of the philosopher is to solve the problem of values (i.e. to search for a life-enhancing rank ordering of values) rather than to give a rational foundation for moral obligations. In this respect, Nietzsche criticizes both the absolutist conceptions of morality dominant in his era and the rank order of values of the received morality of Europe, and invites future philosophers to work on the revaluation of these values so as to determine a new order of rank among them.

According to MacIntyre, the problem of morality is solidified by the rationally interminable moral arguments of the emotivist (late-modern) culture. In other words, the crucial problem, for MacIntyre, is the problem of (individualistic) subjectivism that undermines any genuine social agreement on moral judgments. According to MacIntyre’s analysis, the agreement on moral issues used to be provided by the teleological framework of the earlier tradition but liberal individualism undermined the social force of morality by taking moral judgments merely as preferences. As a solution, MacIntyre suggests endorsing the pre-modern European traditional framework of morality, in which, he believes, moral claims can be justified.

Both Nietzsche and MacIntyre actually criticize the dominant morality of their own time, which explains the difference in their characterization of the problem. Nietzsche criticizes the moral objectivism of his time, while MacIntyre attacks contemporary moral subjectivism. Interestingly, however, if our analysis so far is accurate, they are both inter-subjectivists; they acknowledge that there are or may be alternative moralities or traditions. According to Nietzsche, there are multiple moralities; in MacIntyre’s words, there are multiple traditions. Moreover, the crucial question that both philosophers face is how to establish the morality or the tradition to be cultivated. Here then they seem to diverge: MacIntyre and Nietzsche propose different moral enquiries. MacIntyre argues that this question can be answered by a rational enquiry embodied in a tradition, which also aims to show the rational superiority of that tradition over the others. He calls such an enquiry simply a tradition. Unlike MacIntyre, Nietzsche thinks that the answer to this question does not seek a new method of rational enquiry that would solve the problem of justification. According to Nietzsche, the real question concerns the revaluation of values and introduces genealogy as the proper method for this.

Which way of enquiry is open to us? Which one is a better method of moral enquiry? MacIntyre already gives us a comparison of these two versions of moral enquiry in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In this work, MacIntyre introduces and discusses three versions of moral enquiry: encyclopedia, genealogy and tradition. The first one is the method of the Enlightenment, the second is Nietzsche’s (and also Foucault’s) method and the last one is his own. According to MacIntyre’s critique, neither encyclopedia nor genealogy is an appropriate method of moral enquiry. Here we only need to cover his criticism of genealogy.³³

MacIntyre expresses his problem with genealogy in the following way:

The problem then for the genealogist is how to combine the fixity of particular stances, exhibited in the use of standard genres of speech and writing, with the mobility of transition from stance to stance, how to assume the contours of a given mask and then to discard it for another, without ever assenting to the metaphysical fiction of a face which has its own finally true and undiscardable representation, whether by Rembrandt or in a shaving mirror. Can it be done?³⁴

In the quotation above, and also in several other passages, MacIntyre basically raises the following question.³⁵ Given that intelligible communication requires a shared ground of language and ontology, how does a genealogist render his narrative intelligible even to himself since he refuses to appeal to the mask of a standard shared ontology? Moreover, as she changes and disposes masks how can a genealogist argue for self-identity and intelligibility?

A genealogist like Nietzsche (or Foucault), however, would consider this as the virtue of the genealogical approach. More explicitly, the success of a genealogical approach seems to depend on the movement from one mask to another without falling prey to a totalitarian mask. Nevertheless, this answer would not do justice to MacIntyre’s question. What is MacIntyre’s real concern here? I do not think that it is the highly debated metaphysical problem of personal identity since this does not pose a special problem for the intelligibility of a genealogist but is a concern for understanding the nature of personhood in general. I do not believe, either, that MacIntyre wants to claim that the genealogist loses his or her right to the tradition he or she belongs to by criticizing it.

From MacIntyre’s perspective the basic problem, as it seems, is that the genealogist does not work from within a tradition. More accurately, the genealogist aims to overcome the boundaries and tries to write out of traditions. ‘Can it be done?’ rightly asks MacIntyre. But if I understand MacIntyre correctly here, the traditionalist also needs such an ability of writing out of traditions, at least during the periods of epistemological crisis. In order to account for Thomas Aquinas’ intellectual gift of revising the Augustinian tradition with respect to the Aristotelian tradition, MacIntyre explains that ‘Aquinas avowedly writes out of a tradition, or rather out of at least two traditions, extending each as part of his task of integrating them into a single systematic mode of thought’.³⁶ Furthermore, he explains how this becomes possible in the following manner:

In controversy between rival traditions the difficulty … is that it requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight for the protagonists of such a tradition to be able to understand the theses, arguments, and concepts of their rival in such a way that they are able to view themselves from such an alien standpoint and to recharacterize their own beliefs in an appropriate manner from the alien perspective of the rival tradition.³⁷

If I am correct in my interpretation here, it follows that either self-identity is possible for both the genealogist and the (gifted) traditionalist, or neither the genealogist nor the (gifted) traditionalist has any genuine self-identity since they both need the possibility of writing out of traditions for their own versions of moral enquiry. I consider that the former view is the plausible one. We shall then turn to MacIntyre’s account of tradition in order to understand better what constitutes the difference between the two versions of moral enquiry and evaluate them accordingly.

I shall first express a significant problem with the concept of tradition as it appears in MacIntyre’s analyses. Sometimes it seems to refer to a practical tradition that constitutes the values and moral norms of a community as practised, but sometimes it seems to refer to an intellectual tradition that corresponds to a theoretical account of morality. MacIntyre occasionally distinguishes them as practical vs theoretical tradition. But he seems to consider that at bottom these two realms overlap. The problem is that there may be multiple rationalizations of a practical tradition (for instance, both of the theoretical traditions, Thomism and Augustinianism, give a theoretical account for the same practical tradition, namely, Christianity). The interaction between the practical tradition and its possible theoretical accounts seems to be more complicated than one-to-one correspondence. Finally, the rational superiority of a theoretical tradition over the alternatives, if not acknowledged in practice by the followers of the practical tradition, cannot plausibly account for the rationality of that tradition as such (or at least for its rational superiority over other alien traditions).

This also brings us to a fundamental question that we need to ask ourselves and MacIntyre in particular. Is the rational superiority of a theoretical tradition (i.e. the one shown to have the richest conceptual resources) both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the superiority of the way of life belonging to the associated practical tradition over alien practical traditions? The philosophical problem here is that even if we can show the rational superiority of a theoretical tradition over the others, the possibility of which I do not aim to discuss here, do the subtler reasons given for rational superiority also guarantee the practical superiority of that tradition? This is the assumption that seems to underlie MacIntyre’s project of rational enquiry. MacIntyre seems to believe that the tradition with richer conceptual resources will prove to be not only the theoretically superior tradition but also the tradition superior in practice. The rational superiority is, at best, a necessary condition but surely not a sufficient one for the possibility of a worthwhile (good) practical life; perhaps not even necessary if one considers that a good practical life does not need a theoretical justification and in a sense, it is already justified by and in practice.

It seems to me that Nietzsche is right; if we are concerned with the (ethical) evaluation of a way of living then the values that underlie that way of living rather than the rational or conceptual superiority of (one of the theoretical accounts of) that life should be our primary concern. In this sense, I believe that the force of MacIntyre’s work is most felt in those parts where his argument takes the form of a narrative that aims to uncover the value of his tradition rather than in other parts when he attempts to show us the rational superiority of that tradition.

In conclusion then, both genealogy and tradition actually provide us with narratives for the purposes of understanding the ethical. The genealogist Nietzsche gives us a narrative on the psychological origins of a particular morality that makes it clear why approaching the ethical in a certain manner is problematical. The traditionalist MacIntyre provides us with a narrative of a particular tradition that shows why the values of that tradition were significant for social solidarity and how the abandonment of these values led to an acute form of individualism. The interesting part is that they both give a narrative of the same (moral) tradition from a similar ethical perspective; they surely give their narratives with respect to different periods of that tradition, and also from a different historical perspective, but not from a different ethical perspective, since at bottom they agree on the centrality of virtues for the ethical and endorse ethical realism accompanied with an inter-subjective view of morality. As a result, it is not surprising that Nietzsche’s genealogy and MacIntyre’s narrative-tradition are both indispensable for having an insight into the ethical strength and weakness of their common tradition in its historical trajectory. Such an insight, however, is possible if we can go beyond MacIntyre’s Nietzsche and look at the issue from the perspective of Nietzschean MacIntyre.