The Reckoning

The finale: not a fifth answer to Glaucon but a weighing of the four — the genealogy that turns suspicion on morality itself, the trolley that neither theory can steer, the objection that fells them both, and the honest ways to live once no proof arrives.

A course on the thought of Ethics.

What you will learn

  • State how Nietzsche reframes the whole program's question: not which moral theory is correct, but what morality IS, where it came from, and what interests it serves — the shift from justification to genealogy and diagnosis.
  • Explain why Nietzsche thinks the very hunger for a rational proof of morality (Kant's, the utilitarians') is itself a symptom to be examined, not a demand to be satisfied — and connect this to Anscombe's charge that the modern 'moral ought' is a law without a lawgiver.
  • See that Nietzsche is not the 'anything goes' immoralist: he is a more demanding moralist who wants morality made conscious and deliberate, against the automatic valuations of the herd.
  • Distinguish master morality (spontaneous good/bad, where 'good' = noble/strong/life-affirming and 'bad' is an afterthought) from slave morality (reactive good/evil, which first brands the strong 'evil' and then calls its own weakness 'good').
  • Explain ressentiment and the 'slave revolt in morals': how the impotent, unable to take revenge in deed, become creative and take it in VALUES — and why Nietzsche thinks our morality (compassion, humility, equality) bears this birthmark.
  • State the challenge this poses to the whole program: if the impartial concern for all and the very category of 'evil' are the herd's triumph, then the thing the first four courses tried to justify may itself be what most needs questioning.
  • Work the core trolley contrast: most people say you MAY divert the trolley from five onto one (the switch), but you may NOT cut up one healthy patient to save five (the transplant) or push the large man off the footbridge — even though the numbers are identical.
  • State Foot's distinctions that track the difference: doing vs allowing (killing vs letting die) and the doctrine of double effect (a harm intended as means/end vs one merely foreseen as a side-effect) — and see why a pure outcome-calculus cannot draw either line.

Course outline

  1. After the Battle — The reckoning is framed. Four courses have given four answers to Glaucon and not one has compelled a man determined to disbelieve. Nietzsche refuses to add a fifth. Instead he changes the question…
  2. The Genealogy — Nietzsche's scandalous history of 'good.' There were two moralities: the noble's spontaneous good/bad, and the reactive good/evil born among the powerless out of ressentiment. The 'slave revolt in…
  3. The Trolley — Foot takes the lectern. A runaway trolley will kill five unless you divert it onto one — and the variants she and her heirs devised (the transplant surgeon, the man on the footbridge) expose a gap…
  4. One Thought Too Many — Williams takes the lectern and turns on BOTH surviving systems. Jim and the Indians: utilitarianism makes you a mere channel for the best total outcome, severing you from the projects that make you a…
  5. After Virtue — MacIntyre delivers the verdict. Modern moral debate is interminable — abortion, war, justice argued forever with no resolution — because the disputants wield fragments of incompatible traditions and…
  6. Living Without the Answer — Nietzsche returns to close the whole program. Glaucon's ring was never taken off by a proof; five courses of answers and demolitions leave no fifth theory standing. But the reckoning is not…

Works read in this course

  • On the Genealogy of Morals — Nietzsche's 1887 'polemic': master vs slave morality, ressentiment, the slave revolt in morals, and the demand that the VALUE of our values be, for the first time, called into question
  • Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche's 1886 attack on the dogmatists and the 'herd,' and the case that our morality is one type among possible types, not the moral fact itself
  • Foot, 'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967) — the paper that launched the trolley problem, and the defense of doing/allowing and double effect against a pure calculus of outcomes
  • Foot, Natural Goodness (2001) — Foot's mature return to objective ethics: goodness in a human being as a species of natural goodness, grounded in the human form of life — Anscombe's call answered
  • Williams, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism' (1973) — Jim and the Indians, George and the weapons lab, and the integrity objection to utilitarian impartiality
  • Williams, 'Persons, Character and Morality' (1976) — ground projects, and the drowning-wife case in which a moral justification for saving her is 'one thought too many' — collected in Moral Luck (1981)
  • Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) — morality as a 'peculiar institution' — a narrowed, obligation-bound successor to ethics — and the suspicion of ethical theory itself
  • MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) — the interminability of modern moral debate, emotivism as its truth, the failure of the Enlightenment project, and the return to the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues
  • (secondary spine) Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy — the ethics of virtue and its relation to right-action theories (ch. 12); what a fully satisfactory moral theory would look like (ch. 13)

Terms introduced

genealogy of morals, master morality / slave morality, ressentiment, revaluation of values, the trolley problem, doing vs allowing (and the doctrine of double effect), the integrity objection, one thought too many, emotivism, the Enlightenment project, the virtues (as a tradition-bound practice)

Part of the Simposeum course library.