ABSTRACT

Jesse Prinz contrasts Nietzsche's way of historicizing morals with the approaches of utilitarians and Marxist-materialists, and does so to good effect. Against a background of substantial agreement on most of what Prinz argues for, I elucidate a significant shortcoming of his interpretation of Nietzschean genealogy: namely, its reliance on a simplistic understanding of how and why Nietzsche integrates historical hypotheses about how morality emerged and developed with critical warnings about where it seems to be headed. Using Nietzsche's teasing remarks about “the English psychologists” in the opening sections of GM I as a foil, I develop an account of the difference between a simple history of morals and a true, Nietzschean genealogy of morals that does a better job than Prinz does here of achieving his stated goal of identifying the advantages of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals over the utilitarian and Marxist-materialist versions.

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