UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff CChhiiccaaggoo LLaaww SScchhooooll CChhiiccaaggoo UUnnbboouunndd Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers Working Papers 2015 NNiieettzzsscchhee aanndd MMoorraall PPssyycchhoollooggyy Daniel Telech Brian Leiter Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/public_law_and_legal_theory Part of the Law Commons Chicago Unbound includes both works in progress and final versions of articles. Please be aware that a more recent version of this article may be available on Chicago Unbound, SSRN or elsewhere. RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Daniel Telech & Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and Moral Psychology" (University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 532, 2015). This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Working Papers at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. C H I C A G O PUBLIC LAW AND LEGAL THEORY WORKING PAPER NO. 532 NIETZSCHE AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Daniel Telech and Brian Leiter THE LAW SCHOOL THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO April 2015 This paper can be downloaded without charge at the Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/academics/publiclaw/index.html and The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2594097 To appear in J. Sytsma & W. Buckwalter (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. NIETZSCHE AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Daniel Telech & Brian Leiter April 13, 2015 A remarkable number of Nietzsche’s substantive moral psychological views have been borne out by evidence from the empirical sciences. While a priori officiating on the nature and value of psychological phenomena (e.g. belief, volition, desire) continues unchecked in some circles, Nietzsche both anticipated and would welcome the wealth of empirical research on the natural bases of our evaluative attitudes. Indeed, Nietzsche holds that “[a]ll credibility, good conscience, and evidence of truth first come from the senses” (BGE 134). Understanding that empirical evidence was likely to challenge many of our deeply held self- conceptions, it is not surprising that Nietzsche (BGE 23) calls for individuals “daring to travel” the path of psychological inquiry. Partly owing to its capacity to uproot our stultifying traditional moral prejudices, “psychology,” according to Nietzsche, “is the path to the fundamental problems”— accordingly, his hope is that psychology “be recognized as queen of the sciences.” The aim of this paper is to introduce readers to Nietzsche’s promise for empirically- informed philosophical psychology by attending to four of his claims: 1) that moral responses are products of the affects; 2) that each person has a relatively stable psycho- physiological constitution that qualifies him or her as a ‘type’; 3) that conscious acts of willing are frequently epiphenomena of the real causal mechanisms of action; and 4) in spite of an absence of volitional freedom, self-control can be usefully understood on a “strength-model” of motivational resources. We conclude with a brief discussion of how Nietzsche, without employing the contemporary methods of empirical psychology, could nonetheless be such a prescient moral psychologist.1                                                                                                                 1 We start with translations by Kaufmann, Hollingdale, Norman, and/or Clark & Swensen, making modifications based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980). Roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in Nietzsche's works; Arabic numerals refer to sections, not pages. We use the standard Anglophone abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, as follows: The Antichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of 1   EElleeccttrroonniicc ccooppyy aavvaaiillaabbllee aatt:: hhttttpp::////ssssrrnn..ccoomm//aabbssttrraacctt==22559944009977 1 Moralities are Symptoms of the Affects In opposition to Socratic moral intellectualism and the convenient Kantian ‘discovery’ of moral faculties (BGE 11), Nietzsche argues that our moral commitments are causal products of the affects. As he puts it (BGE 187), “morality is just a sign language of the affects!”2 Claims to the effect that moral judgments are ‘symptoms’ or ‘sign-languages’ of drives and affects abound in Nietzsche’s corpus (see e.g., D 119; TI, “Problem,” 2; GM “Pref”: 2; WP: 258).3 Nietzsche’s idioms of ‘symptoms’ and ‘sign-languages’ should be understood causally. To say that sweating is a symptom of a viral infection is to say that the symptom is the effect of the virus, and additionally, that the symptom provides us with inferential evidence for the existence of the virus (cf. Leiter 2013, 239). To hold that moral responses are symptoms of affects, then, is to say that moral responses are caused by, and reveal the existence of, certain affective states. In identifying moral response with affective phenomena, Nietzsche subscribes to a version of moral sentimentalism.4 We are disposed to have certain affective responses, on Nietzsche’s view, due to the organization of our drives.5 Drives are dispositions that structure our affective orientation and influence the salience of certain features in our environment (Katsafanas 2013, 740).6 Since affects are essentially valenced— they are states of inclination to or from— the motivational force of moral response is well accounted for on Nietzsche’s view. While affects are primarily noncognitive states, and so, individuated by the way they feel, i.e.,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); The Gay Science (GS); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); The Will to Power (WP). 2 Earlier in same text, Nietzsche claims (BGE 6) that the philosopher’s “morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other.” 3 In this context Nietzsche’s talk of morality as symptomatic of physiological processes amounts to the same commitment, namely to the explanation of normative judgments in terms of non-rational (and often, sub- personal) natural phenomena. This form of explanation in Nietzsche marks the influence of the German Materialists (see Leiter 2015, 50-6) and also of the role of affective force on Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, familiarity with which Nietzsche gained through Kuno Fischer’s work; see e.g., Wollenberg (2013, 625-44). 4 For a useful overview of various sentimentalist positions, see chapter 1 of Prinz (2007). The thesis we attribute to Nietzsche is in the first place one about the genesis of moral judgments, and so, talk of ‘Nietzsche’s sentimentalism’ must be sharply separated from normative sentimentalist theories, e.g. Slote (2010). 5 Nietzsche’s (rather promiscuous) ontology of drives should be approached with due caution—see Leiter (2013, 249 fn.) for discussion. 6 Recent evidence that we perceive ordinary objects as micro-valenced might prove useful in understanding how our affective dispositions can heighten the valence with which we perceive objects. See Lebrecht et al. (2012, 107). 2   EElleeccttrroonniicc ccooppyy aavvaaiillaabbllee aatt:: hhttttpp::////ssssrrnn..ccoomm//aabbssttrraacctt==22559944009977 their phenomenal characters (D 34), they do have intentional objects, and so might be construed as states of ‘feelings toward’ objects (cf. Goldie 2002, 19). Affects are only primarily noncognitive because Nietzsche holds a two-level model of affective response, one level of which is sometimes individuated by reference to phenomenal character and propositional attitudes. While “basic affects” are wholly non- cognitive states, we often display inclinations to and aversions from our basic affects, and these “meta-affects” may involve propositional attitudes. As Nietzsche claims, The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive; or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good… In itself it has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all. (D 38) Drives are morally undetermined, so the basic affects they generate will not amount to moral emotions until their bearer takes a meta-affective stance (usually culturally shaped, and often involving beliefs) towards the basic affect—in this case, aversion to dangerous enemies. Given his beliefs about the nature and significance of courage, the ancient Greek’s basic aversion towards his enemy, for example, generates the affect of shame in him, yet the same basic affect gives rise to something pleasant like humility in the Christian. On Nietzsche’s two-level view, then, moral affects are apt to be modified by cognition, yet they are nonetheless primarily noncognitive. Noncognitivism about moral responses earns support from a variety of sources. Haidt’s research on ‘harmless taboo violations’, for example, suggests that our practices of moral condemnation are ill-explained by considerations regarding harm. Rather, deep-rooted affects like disgust play an important explanatory role for many of our moral judgments (Haidt 2012, 26). Additionally, Greene’s (2007) work on moral motivation suggests that deontological reasoning is, pace the Kantian, especially influenced by affective response,7 and his more recent co-authored research (Cushman, Young, and Greene 2010, 53-4) suggests that in both deontological and consequentialist reasoning, “affect supplies the primary motivation to                                                                                                                 7 Kant does accord a central moral function to the emotion of “respect,” but since respect has as its object ‘the moral law’, Kant’s moral psychology is far too intellectualist to earn support from growing evidence in favor of noncognitivism. As Bagnoli (2014) compellingly argues, Kant cannot be charged with ignoring moral phenomenology, but Nietzsche would nonetheless object to the purportedly ahistorical status of our phenomenology of moral law. 3   Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2594097 view harm as a bad thing.” The work of Cushman et al. also strongly suggests that emotional deficits significantly inhibit the ability of subjects to arrive at (what are widely considered to be) morally appropriate judgments when confronted with traditional thought-experiments. Additionally, research on criminal populations (Blair 1995) suggests that the inability of psychopaths to distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions is due in large part to defects in a mechanism responsible for aversion to intraspecies aggression (for discussion see Nichols 2004, 12-16).8 Developmental psychology also favors noncognitivism, since it suggests that moral education initially proceeds via affective contagion and mimicry (Hoffman 2000, 36-9). Nietzsche’s own view is that, “[m]oral feelings are transmitted in this way: children observe in adults inclinations for and aversions to certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these inclinations and aversions; in later life they find themselves full of these acquired and well- exercised affects and consider it only decent to try to account for and justify them” (D 34). We not only make such post-hoc justifications to ‘render more respectable’ our deepest beliefs, there also exists evidence (Haidt 2001) that such ‘justifying’ judgments are regularly insensitive to countervailing evidence.9 Deep-rooted though they may be, affective responses and moral judgments are alterable. They better be: Nietzsche is a revisionist about both of these (as we might expect given his overarching project of “revaluing all values”; cf. Reginster 2006, 148-9). Indeed, central to Nietzsche’s project is the conviction that “[w]e have to learn to think differently—in order at least perhaps, very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently” (D 103).   It is accordingly a virtue of his view that, while basic affects are individuated by phenomenal                                                                                                                 8 Affective defect sheds light on more than the nature of our moral responses. The nature of practical reasoning is also elucidated by research on certain affective abnormalities (Damasio 1994). As Arpaly (2003, 59) helpfully reads an upshot of Damasio’s research, “[b]rain-damaged nonfeelers, despite an unharmed ability to deliberate and reflect, make bad decisions because they are denied [ordinary] feeling-based access to their own background knowledge in making those decisions.” Nietzsche’s drive psychology finds support in the view that ordinarily, one’s deliberative frame is bounded and guided by emotional cues (perhaps due to a mechanism similar to that operative with perceptual micro-valences—see fn. 6). 9 For criticism of Haidt’s overreaching, see Leiter (2013, 256). The mechanism for this post-hoc ‘justification’ might be provided by research in cognitive dissonance, according to which tension between our beliefs and actions impels us to adjust our attitudes in such a way that ameliorates inconsistency and places us in favorable light. For the original presentation of the theory, see Festinger (1957) and for a comprehensive treatment, see Cooper (2007). 4 character alone, meta-affects (and the evaluative judgments they undergird) can be gradually transmuted, upon the rejection of “life-denying” beliefs. (For more recent proposals that we alter our inherited moral emotions (e.g., “reactive attitudes”) by revising our metaphysical views, see Pereboom 2001, 187-210; Sommers 2007). The possibility of radical attitudinal revision, however, will depend upon still other facts about the individual. 2 The Doctrine of Types Moral judgments are products of affects on Nietzsche’s view, but the latter are in turn causally dependent upon more fundamental features of the individual. Nietzsche accepts a “Doctrine of Types” (Leiter 2015, 6), according to which, Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person. “Type-facts” consist in facts about the individual’s physiology and unconscious drives, and for each person, there is some set of such facts that constitute him or her as a given type (For details, see Leiter 2015, 6-8; Leiter 2001, 294). Although such facts display a certain kind of fixity, they are not immutable: they can vary significantly in strength over time. Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Types is to be distinguished from 19th-century vulgar biological determinism, since Nietzsche’s view is about the causal primacy of (unconscious) psycho- physiological states, which does not amount to the causal sufficiency of such states (cf. Leiter 2015, 72-81). Not only are type-facts mutable, a person’s type-facts at any given time do not completely determine her behavior; that is, though constitutive of who one is, type- facts stand in a non-necessitating relationship to one’s behavior.10 This is not to deny that one’s behavior is entirely necessitated. Rather, Nietzsche compares the necessity of human action to the ‘inevitability of fruits borne on the tree’ (GM “Pref”: 2). The inevitability of the course of the tree’s development is of course compatible with the fact that its seeds are alone insufficient for the existence of a mature tree. As Knobe and Leiter (2007, 90) elucidate Nietzsche’s point, Think of some seeds from a tomato plant. No amount of environmental input will yield                                                                                                                 10 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for seeking clarification on this point. 5 an apple tree from those seeds, yet the “environment” (the amount of water, sun, pests, etc.) will affect which of the trajectories possible for a tomato plant—wilting, flourishing, or any of the stages in between—will be realized. Yet still the fact is that the type tomato is the only possible outcome, even though the particular token of a tomato we get may vary quite a bit. Whether type-facts really are causally primary is a question to which we return in the following section, but the central claim of the current proposal—one that should stand notwithstanding possible points of disagreement within Nietzsche interpretation11 —is that “type-facts,” which are present at birth, “play a powerful (but not exclusive) role in determining one’s behavior and values, though a far more powerful role than education or upbringing or conscious choice” (Knobe and Leiter 2007, 90). This kind of view is largely unexplored in philosophical work in moral psychology. While upbringing and conscious choice are emphasized as contributing factors for moral motivation, the view that genetic propensities might be an essential component to, say the display of sincerity, is not countenanced. Yet there is overwhelming evidence from behavioral genetics in support of the thesis that personality traits are highly heritable. For example, according to a review of five studies conducted across five countries—with a sample size of 24,000 twins— an astonishing 60% of the variance in extraversion and 50% of the variance in neuroticism is estimated to be explained by genetic factors (astounding given that the average effect size (13-14%) identified in foundational studies in social psychological experiments (Loehlin 1992; cf. Knobe and Leiter, 92-3)). To say that genetic propensities are an important (and neglected) factor in moral motivation is not to say that genes are fully determinative of behavior. As Knobe and Leiter (2007, 93) clarify, [w]hen we say that a trait is heritable, we do not mean that it is produced entirely by a person’s genes, without any intervention from the environment. All we mean is that the differences between different people’s scores on this trait can be explained in part by differences in those people’s genetic material. This effect may not be direct. Differences in people’s genes might lead to differences in their environments, which in turn lead to differences in their scores on certain traits. Often the result will be a self-reinforcing cycle in which early behaviors that express a given trait lead the person to possess that trait to                                                                                                                 11 Cf. Gemes and Janaway (2005) and Leiter (2015, 256-7). 6 ever greater degrees. For example, a person’s initial extraverted behavior might leave her with a reputation for extraversion, which in turn makes her even more extraverted. Accordingly, some caution is needed when dealing with Nietzsche’s talk of the ‘inevitability’ or ‘necessity’ of actions that follows from certain physiological or unconscious determinants: It is utterly impossible that a person might fail to have the qualities and propensities of his elders and ancestors in his body: however much appearances might speak against it. This is the problem of race. If you know anything about the ancestors, you can draw conclusions about the child. Some sort of harmful immoderation, some sort of corner jealousy, a clumsy insistence on always being right – together, these three elements have constituted the true “vulgar” type in every age. And something like this will be passed on to the child just as certainly as contaminated blood. (BGE 264) It should not be overlooked that Nietzsche is here referring to the heritability of qualities and propensities. Token identical propensities can generate different behavior depending on facts about the environment. So, when we say that traits are heritable, we mean “broad traits,” like extraversion, and neuroticism—“traits that produce a wide variety of different types of behavior” (Knobe and Leiter 2007, 95 fn.) and the existence of which is nearly universally accepted among psychologists. There is also relatively strong evidence of the heritability of aggressive anti-social behavior in children. For example, a heritability of 70% was found in a study of 1523 pairs of twins (Eley, Lichtenstein, and Stevenson 1999).12 To say that a large causal role is played by genetic factors is not to say that there is a relationship of causal necessity between the possession of a trait and the display of certain behavior, but nor is it, pace Alfano (forthcoming), to say that it is ‘normatively necessary’ that certain behavior be displayed. Why not speak simply of tendencies? – tendencies grounded in genetics but nonetheless susceptible to influence from environmental factors? The genetic etiology of the anti-social tendencies involved in psychopathology has also received recent attention. In a study of 626 pairs of 17-year old male and female twins,                                                                                                                 12 The results of other studies on the genetic basis of violent behavior in children were lower but still too high to be written off as either experimental artifacts or measurement errors: 60%, Edelbrock et al. 1995; 49%, Deater-Deckard and Plomin 1999; 60%, Schmitz, Fulker, and Mrazek 1995. 7 significant genetic influence was found for two separate psychopathic traits: fearless dominance (66% phenotypic covariance) and impulsive anti-sociality (76% phenotypic covariance) (Blonigen et al. 2005). Early childhood education and the avoidance of certain experiences (e.g., bullying) are of considerable importance in managing the genetic influence of (especially a confluence of) psychopathic traits. In a fascinating interview with neuroscientist and pro-social psychopath James Fallon (Ohikuare 2014), Fallon offers a description of the insincerity with which he displays kind behavior, a description that nicely fits Nietzsche’s (BGE 264) (admittedly simplifying) claim that ““education” and “culture” essentially have to be the art of deception—to deceive about lineage, about the inherited vulgarity in body and soul.” Discussing the positivity with which family members respond to his indirectly motivated but nonetheless beneficent behavior, Fallon says: "[y]ou’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!" 3 Epiphenomenalism The path is short from the acceptance of the Doctrine of Types to the acceptance of epiphenomenalism, as Leiter, and more recently, Riccardi argue. Let us start with Nietzsche’s phenomenological account of willing, which serves as independent motivation for the view that Nietzsche denies the causal efficacy of conscious acts of willing.13 In opposition to the popular view that the will is a unified thing sufficient for causing action, Nietzsche argues that phenomenological scrutiny reveals each act of willing to contain three components: i) a commandeering thought; ii) the feeling of bodily movement; and iii) the meta-affect of power (BGE 19). The meta-affect of power is generated by the agent’s identification with the commandeering thought, which, owing to its temporal priority to the bodily movement, seems sufficient for causing the bodily movement. I take myself to be a free and efficacious being in identifying with the thought, e.g., “I will push the button.” The “affect of superiority” that we feel in identifying with the thought-component of acts of willing is misguided because thoughts themselves are not                                                                                                                 13 By “conscious” we mean neither phenomenal consciousness nor awareness, but “self-consciousness,” since as Riccardi (forthcoming) notes, Nietzsche describes one’s ‘becoming conscious’ in terms of “seeing itself in the mirror” (GS 354), and his sense of “consciousness” is unique to humans, while phenomenal consciousness and awareness are not. 8