The Phenomenology of Morals (original) (raw)

Nietzsche argued, in the Genealogy of Morals, that our moral beliefs are a function of our histories or, more precisely, the cultural histories within which we are enrolled. These cultural beliefs are conventions developed by the experiences of the culture that has them, handed down generationally and seemingly fixed but, in fact, being entirely dependent on the particular worldview of the culture which spawned them. Instead, he argued for a deeper set of value precepts, more in keeping with the true nature of men, partaking of an age when men WERE men and not slaves or suffered from the mindset of subservience. Ayn Rand picked up the same thinking and advanced her own notion that the only true morality is the one that looks first to each agent's own needs, that is to a morality of selfishness. I want to take issue here with these views and locate our sense of the moral, our claims of what counts as morally right in something else. To do it I offer a brief analysis of valuing as a human phenomenon (of which a more extensive account may be found in my book, Value and Representation) and then show how moral valuing fits into that paradigm and also how it differs from other species of valuing. In so doing, I offer what I take to be a phenomenological account to restore to moral judgments the cognitive content people like David Hume and his successors subtracted from them.