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6447
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Game theory misses out the motivation arising from the impersonal standpoint [Nagel]
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Full Idea:
I do not favour the route taken by Hobbes's modern descendants, using game theory, since I believe the impersonal standpoint makes an essential contribution to individual motivation which must be addressed by any ethically acceptable theory.
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From:
Thomas Nagel (Equality and Partiality [1991], Ch.4)
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A reaction:
The assumption of self-seeking at the core of game theory seems very bizarre, and leads to moral approval of free riders. Nagel offers the best response, which is the Kantian impersonal view. Nagel may be optimistic about motivation, though.
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22475
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Moral generalisation is wrong, because we should evaluate individual acts [Nietzsche, by Foot]
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Full Idea:
Nietzsche believed that moral generalisation was impossible because the proper subject of evaluation was, instead, a person's individual act.
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From:
report of Friedrich Nietzsche (Works (refs to 8 vol Colli and Montinari) [1885]) by Philippa Foot - Nietzsche's Immoralism p.155
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A reaction:
This suggests a different type of particularism, focusing on the particular decision, rather than on the details of the situation. Presumable no two moral decisions are ever sufficiently the same to be compared. But a lie is a lie.
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22476
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Nietzsche thought our psychology means there can't be universal human virtues [Nietzsche, by Foot]
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Full Idea:
Nietzsche believed, in effect, that as the facts of human psychology really were, there could be no such thing as human virtues, dispositions good in any man.
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From:
report of Friedrich Nietzsche (Works (refs to 8 vol Colli and Montinari) [1885]) by Philippa Foot - Nietzsche's Immoralism p.157
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A reaction:
Presumably each individual can only have virtues appropriate to their individual nature, which is something like channelling their personal psychological drives. Can't we each have our individual version of courage or honesty?
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7847
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Initially nihilism was cosmic, but later Nietzsche saw it as a cultural matter [Nietzsche, by Ansell Pearson]
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Full Idea:
Nietzsche's first presentation of nihilism is an existential affair arising from cosmic problems, but he later stressed nihilism as a historical and cultural problem of values, where mankind's highest values reach a point of devaluation.
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From:
report of Friedrich Nietzsche (Works (refs to 8 vol Colli and Montinari) [1885]) by Keith Ansell Pearson - How to Read Nietzsche Ch.1
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A reaction:
The second version seems to imply a quasi-Marxist determinism about social progress. Then you would have to ask, what is the point of fighting against it? I wonder if Nietzsche's values are anti-nihilist, but his metaethics makes nihilism unavoidable?
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20124
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Reliving life countless times - this gives the value back to life which religion took away [Nietzsche]
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Full Idea:
"Is this something I want to do countless times?" ....Let us etch the image of eternity onto our own lives! This thought embodies more than all religions, which taught us to disdain life as something ephemeral and to look toward an unspecified other life.
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From:
Friedrich Nietzsche (Works (refs to 8 vol Colli and Montinari) [1885], 9.496,503), quoted by Rüdiger Safranski - Nietzsche: a philosophical biography 10
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A reaction:
You can't get away from eternal recurrence being an imaginative trick, to focus value onto our choices. For a while Nietzsche tried to persuade himself that the recurrence actually occurred, but we all know it doesn't.
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