One of the most striking claims you’ve argued for is the view that Nietzsche was an immoralist: that he thought that morality was itself something bad, or harmful for us. What do you take ‘morality’ to mean for Nietzsche, and how he could make that negative judgement without himself moralizing morality?

It’s a little tricky to start with what Nietzsche means by “morality.” He distinguishes a wider and a narrower sense of the term, and it is clearly the latter against which his immoralism is directed. I think it is the same sense of the term that Anscombe was referring to when she suggested that we jettison the idea of a specifically moral obligation or goodness. But Nietzsche doesn’t just want to jettison these ideas; he wants to understand them, so that we can see what we had and what we need now. He denies that we can illuminate or pin down that use of “moral” through a definition, or set of necessary and sufficient conditions, claiming that only a genealogy will help us to unpack it.

But from the onset it should be clear that because he holds morality to be bad or harmful, he must do so from the viewpoint of some set of values that he accepts. So he can’t be a nihilist in the basic sense. And in fact, he begins his “attack on morality” only in Daybreak, which is also the beginning of his recovery from the nihilism of Human, All-Too-Human.

When I began studying Nietzsche, sympathetic interpreters took account of this point by interpreting his immoralism as a rejection of one kind of morality – say Christian morality or altruistic morality – from the viewpoint of another morality. Philippa Foot was one of the first interpreters to take Nietzsche at his word, that he rejected morality itself and not just a particular morality. She thought we could make sense of this by taking him to reject morality – which she understood in terms of a commitment to justice and the common good – from the viewpoint of aesthetic values, in particular, from an interest in producing more beautiful or splendid human beings. I argue that Foot (and others) were forced to go in this direction because they do not recognize the relevance of Bernard Williams’ distinction between ethics and morality. They did not recognize, that is, that there are other options for ethical life than morality, hence that there could be non-moral versions of justice and a concern for the common good. And, from Nietzsche’s point of view, this is because they were under the influence of morality’s presentation of itself as the only possible form of ethics.

I take from Williams that an ethics is a set of practices “for regulating the relations between people that works through informal sanctions and internalized disposition,” adding from Nietzsche (as I think Williams would agree) that such practices will include ones that differentiate the goodness of types of persons and their characteristics, as well as the permissibility of types of actions. Morality, as Williams and Nietzsche understand it, involves a specific interpretation of such ethical practices – or better, a set of such interpretations - inspired by a particular ideal. Williams refers to it as morality’s “purity,” whereas Nietzsche refers to it as “the ascetic ideal.” The upshot is that morality – for both Williams and Nietzsche – is the ascetic interpretation of a set of practices that constitute ethical life. Better, it is such sets of practices as ascetically interpreted.

A keystone in your account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality is a reading of his Genealogy of Morality. You suggest that it should be understood as a conceptual account of what ‘morality’ has come to mean for ‘we moderns’ which is not merely descriptive or analytic, but has a critical function. In what sense do you take this text to engage in a form of conceptual analysis and what does it expose about morality?

Yes, as I interpret it, Nietzsche’s Genealogy aims to illuminate both the concept and the history of morality by tracing morality’s descent. In a postcard to his friend Overbeck, Nietzsche characterizes morality as a complex structure formed from multiple and independent roots, adding that each of the three treatises that comprise the Genealogy brings to the fore one of these roots, artificially isolating it from the others, with which it is in actuality intertwined. I argue that each of the treatises traces back one of these roots to a non-moral ancestor. The first treatise traces the idea of moral goodness or worth back to the noble idea of goodness. This is clearly an evaluative notion: the good or noble are the superior ones, in contrast to the bad or common, who are inferior. But, as Nietzsche presents this orientation, we should be able to see that it does not involve our idea of moral worth, which is perhaps most obvious from the fact that the bad are not held responsible for being bad, and certainly not thought to deserve punishment for it. And since the virtues are simply the characteristics that distinguish the good from the bad, there is also no tie between virtue and reward. In addition, some of these virtues, say, being rich and powerful, do not seem like moral virtues to us. And so the possibility of a non-moral idea of virtue is revealed, something that Nietzsche thinks is likely to be hidden from us.

According to Nietzsche, the noble idea of goodness and virtue was transformed into the idea of moral goodness through what he calls the “slave revolt in morality.” This “event,” which Nietzsche makes clear was led by priests, not slaves, seems to me an abstraction from real history. It is what the history of morality looks like if we concentrate simply on what is happening to ideas of goodness or virtue, while ignoring other components of morality, especially ideas of right and wrong. Most interpreters focus on the difference the “slave revolt” made to the characteristics that were regarded as marks of the good: originally, the characteristics of nobles (e.g., pride); after the revolt, the characteristics of slaves (e.g., humility). It is equally important, however, to see the difference in terms of the explanation it offers of how virtue became connected to both free will and ideas of reward and punishment because this helps us to recognize the possibility of separating these notions once again. And such recognition is important because once that connection became established, the weakening of belief in free will, and in a God who rewards the virtuous and punishes the vicious, is bound to make virtue seem illusory. So one of the critical things Nietzsche’s genealogy exposes about morality is that, in our secularized world, holding on to its moralized conception of goodness is damaging to the recognition of and respect for goodness and virtue, and ultimately to their very existence.