Nietzsche’s Moral Realism

This paper argues that, contrary to MacIntyre, Nietzsche is not an emotivist. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s rejection of the Platonic-Christian moral tradition more broadly, specifi cally his rejection of eudaimonistic and teleological ethics, suggests that he rejects all morality and certainly virtue ethics. However, recent scholarship strongly suggests that this view is mistaken. Nietzsche rejects Plato-Christian metaphysics and the slave morality of ressentiment, which he argues is the default moral stance in the West. In place of slave morality, Nietzsche offers a non-teleological, naturalistic virtue ethics. The human animal needs certain characteristics to be healthy and fl ourish. Furthermore, he is committed to a form of naturalism that goes beyond causal-mechanistic explanations of all phenomena, and he argues that all inquiry into the natural world must be guided by a will to truth. Nietzsche a kind of moral realist.