Is it just me or are some of Nietzsche's arguments *really* fucking facile?

Is it just me or are some of Nietzsche's arguments *really* fucking facile?

Check this shit:

> If self defence is in general held a valid justification, then nearly every manifestation of so called immoral egoism must be justified, too. Pain is inflicted, robbery or killing done in order to maintain life or to protect oneself and ward off harm. A man lies when cunning and delusion are valid means of self preservation. To injure intentionally when our safety and our existence are involved, or the continuance of our well being, is conceded to be moral. The state itself injures from this motive when it hangs criminals. In unintentional injury the immoral, of course, can not be present, as accident alone is involved. But is there any sort of intentional injury in which our existence and the maintenance of our well being be not involved?[129] Is there such a thing as injuring from absolute badness, for example, in the case of cruelty? If a man does not know what pain an act occasions, that act is not one of wickedness. Thus the child is not bad to the animal, not evil. It disturbs and rends it as if it were one of its playthings. Does a man ever fully know how much pain an act may cause another? As far as our nervous system extends, we shield ourselves from pain. If it extended further, that is, to our fellow men, we would never cause anyone else any pain (except in such cases as we cause it to ourselves, when we cut ourselves, surgically, to heal our ills, or strive and trouble ourselves to gain health). We conclude from analogy that something pains somebody and can in consequence, through recollection and the power of imagination, feel pain also. But what a difference there always is between the tooth ache and the pain (sympathy) that the spectacle of tooth ache occasions! Therefore when injury is inflicted from so called badness the degree of pain thereby experienced is always unknown to us: in so far, however, as pleasure is felt in the act (a sense of one's own power, of one's own excitation) the act is committed to maintain the well being of the individual and hence comes under the purview of self defence and lying for self preservation. Without pleasure, there is no[130] life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life.

I don't see how you can wriggle out of this argument being shit by saying I've 'misinterpreted' or 'misread' him.

His point stands alone with out any need for prior reading, and it sucks.

He's basically saying:

We can't know how much pain we're causing people unless we share their nervous system, so when somebody attacks someone else they're exempt from guilt because they don't know wtf they did.

This is just such outrageous reaching, I can't even.

Other urls found in this thread:

dignityindying.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/FOI_report_A_Hidden_Problem.pdf
masscitizensforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/assisted-suicide-fact-sheet-2-sides.pdf
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764532/
amazon.ca/Intention-G-E-M-Anscombe/dp/0674003993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462330918&sr=8-1&keywords=intention
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>I don't see how you can wriggle out of this argument being shit by saying I've 'misinterpreted' or 'misread' him.

But you have absolutely misinterpreted and misread him. At one point is this passage talking about guilt? To say that an act is not one of wickedness is not the same as saying that act is permissible.

If harming somebody in self defense is morally justifiable, then many things considered immoral becomes morally justifiable.

If harming somebody innocently/accidently is morally justifiable, then many things considered immoral becomes morally justifiable.

In general, the people Nietzsche is responding to believe the act of causing pain, injury, or death to be immoral so long as the act
a. is intentional -- exempli gratia, you are not at fault if somebody dives in front of your car and paints the pavement.
b. is understood to be causing harm -- if you play a game of football and kick around the ball, but later learn that the ball was filled with small, fluffy animals, you have not done anything wrong, as you didn't know what was in the ball.
c. is not intended to do good -- if a surgeon breaks your ribcage and rips out your organs, you are caused severe injury and pain and are at a significant risk of death, but generally, these procedures are done for your eventual benefit.
Nietzsche takes it for granted that, if an individual harms another to save himself from pain, injury, or death, then he has not committed evil, even if he causes more harm to another than he prevents in himself. If a victim cripples her rapist or murders his torturer, it would be argued, she or he has done nothing wrong, even though more harm has been done than would likely be done otherwise.

His response, then, stems from a number of observations:
1. We always learn that others feel pain, die, etcetera by analogy. We feel pain ourselves, and we in turn assume that when others exhibit the same symptoms that we do when we are in pain, that they feel pain as well. Nietzsche conjures the image of a child who tortures an animal but does not understand that the animal is in distress. Is the child at fault if it can't identify the symptoms of distress in a species that isn't even its own? Of course not! The child hasn't even been taught. Imagine a more colourful example: a creature that exhibits pain and terror by laughing uproariously and stating in plain English it's absolute pleasure, and which is driven to agony whenever fed chocolate and given sexual favours. How could you be at fault for torturing this creature if every bit of information you have learned about it informed you that it felt the opposite of pain?
2. Extending this somewhat, the child itself experiences a great deal of pleasure from tormenting a kitten, and you would feel a sense of pride and charitableness at torturing the faux-masochist. There is no biological reason at all for you to believe that you are inflicting pain.\
3. Humans have a capacity for sympathy. That is, when another individual feels pain, we feel pain also. However, we, as far as seems reasonable, don't feel as much pain as they do. Since we cannot be certain of how painful their injury is any more than a very young child can gauge the degree of a kitten's pain from the loudness and intensity of its screeches, we cannot be at fault when we misjudge the application of pain against the weighted benefit.
(1/2 Cont . . .)

(. . .2/2 Cont.)

4. Since humans in general are not given to self-harm, we will only hurt ourselves in order to gain a greater benefit or avert a greater harm. Since we do have a capacity for sympathy, we will not hurt others unless we perceive that additional benefit might arise from the harm that we inflict. A bank robber, for example, holds up a bank because he has financial needs, social debts, and so on. He may require money to pay for his medical bills, to put his children through school, or to feed his large family or to pay massive gambling debts. We cannot know his reasons. What is important is that he has them. If he had no self-interest he would not rob a bank, and he would not rob a bank if he perceived the harm he does to be greater than the harm that he prevents or the benefit that he and those around him receive. A human committing a so-called "evil-act" is no more at fault than would be a lioness feasting on a gazelle. The human is merely capable of sympathy.

The quoted passage is best read as a response to (a) Christian morality as perceived by Arthur Schopenhauer and (b) utilitarianism, specifically Mill's. I do take some issues with his approach, for example, humans do cause themselves harm intentionally without real benefit (suicide, self-harm, addiction, ad infinitum), but remember to read this aphorism within the context of the thinkers (J.S. Mill and Schopenhauer) that Nietzsche was replying to.

Reading your objections, you don't seem to have misread Freddy, but you do seem to have misrepresented him, summarizing his paragraph-long aphorism into a single, incoherent blurb. Try again.

Seems more like he's pointing out flaws with the blanket argument than condoning it. Maybe I misread it

I'm the OP but this is a really good analysis.

Have you ever taken the LSAT?

You seem like the type who'd do good on it.

The LSAT is too fucking easy. You have no business in academia if you can't score 175+.

Nietzsche never really made a dent in utilitarianism. He was effective again Christian morality, but that's like shooting fish in a barrel.

post results with timestamp

>exempli gratia

Thanks.
Never taken the LSAT. I'm not American, and I'm not interesting in showing how smart I am.

Latin makes me feel fancy. Sue me.

(Guy who went to a TTT claiming he scored 175+)

Not OP, but one of the gaps in the analysis seems to be how "wellbeing" is defined in relation to self-defense. It sounds like big N is saying, in at least one of his points, "Isn't every act done to preserve one's wellbeing?" to which one can, and I think you may have done already, offer examples like suicide, BDSM. etc. Of course one could also say that these too are done to preserve one's "wellbeing", in the sense of relieving pain.

>b. is understood to be causing harm
Can you provide some examples from the philosophers you mentioned that make this point? Just curious.

user, this was a great explanation, but suicide is just another way to cease to feel pain, seeking a more ideal balance of pain and pleasure. In many cases this could definitely benefit them, if you are being taken to the top of a cliff on which you are about to be tortured for the next 20 years, it would make sense to jump off the cliff.

Nietzsche fucking wrecks utilitarianism with the last man in Zarathustra. Brave New World or newer utilitarian dystopias like WALL-E are basically just elaborations on those few sentences.

I mean yeah, you can argue that he wasn't presenting his case in a formally logical enough way but it's pretty rare to find someone who can read about the last man and not see that utilitarianism is kind of blown the fuck out, pure pain/pleasure "utility" functions cannot fully capture what we consider to be a good, healthy society.

>facile
rite where everybody stoppedreading fyi

>Nietzsche fucking wrecks utilitarianism
No.

Compelling counterargument, consider me vanquished and utilitarianism installed as the philosophical framework under which mankind shall flourish for ten thousand years.

Yes, but notice how suicide rates of nations with higher standards of living (South Korea, Japan, the United States, Finland, Canada) are so much higher than those of the third world. Meanwhile, while the rate of suicide for people suffering from terminal illness is far greater than the rate among the general population, the majority of suicides are the result of treatable depression, not chronic illness, despair and loss of dignity in death, or severe and unending pain (see dignityindying.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/FOI_report_A_Hidden_Problem.pdf as well as masscitizensforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/assisted-suicide-fact-sheet-2-sides.pdf and ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764532/ for statistics from a variety of perspectives). While the second source has no citations, its claim of a majority of suicides involving chronic illness being treatable is backed up somewhat by the PubMed article, although to a lesser extent (90% versus just 59%).
Anecdotally, I'm inclined to agree with you. After watching for weeks as my grandfather wasted away and starved himself while immobilized and in abject agony, there are certainly times when hastened death, even early death, can be a benefit over some alternative, (even applied to foetuses -- it would be immoral under most vaguely coherent systems of ethics, sans deontology, to allow a child with Harlequin-type Ichthyosis to be born, would it not?)
However, I was speaking on more general terms, in that many (definitely not all, not necessarily most) examples of suicide are to the detriment of both the individual and to society at large and are situations in which the suicide-case is plainly able to see the illogical nature of the act, yet acts anyway due to some selection or combination of mental illness, stubbornness, religious or cultural obligations, or -- it sickens me to say -- selfishness.

It seems to me that Nietzsche's definition of well-being can be approximated as any benefit to the Subject. Although remember that while he is taking these ideas to their absurd conclusions, he is not necessarily equating momentary pleasure with preservation of life and limb; he is only placing them in the same category.
My objection was that there are common acts of self-harm that humans commit against themselves which have no apparent benefit, even to the individual who is harming himself, although one could say that these examples are driven by madness or momentary lapses in reason, rather than a desire to legitimately harm oneself, although I (and I imagine anyone else) could provide a dozen anecdotal examples which refute the point. I go into further detail in .

>Can you provide some examples from the philosophers you mentioned that make this point? Just curious.
Elizabeth Anscombe wrote a fantastic monograph on the subject which barely breaks a hundred pages. It's worth a read.
amazon.ca/Intention-G-E-M-Anscombe/dp/0674003993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462330918&sr=8-1&keywords=intention
On a more meme-worthy basis, Sam Harris, in his attempt at debate with Chomsky, gave his own twisted interpretation of intent as it applied to American bombing campaigns against soft targets in Sudan, his reason being that the American intelligence structures, supposedly, charitably, would not have bombed the area had they known that in doing so they would kill thousands -- of course they knew, but that's straying off topic.
Before Nietzsche came along, it was mostly ethical subjectivists who were seriously considering intent. A few Scholastics considered it as well, notably Abelard, though they were in the minority, as it was incoherent when considered alongside such concepts as Original Sin, but post-Reformation, quite a few Protestant thinkers adopted the idea as they dropped some of the theological trappings of Catholicism.
One group that was in its infancy as Nietzsche was writing Human, All Too Human that was seriously taking intention into consideration was the moral pragmatists.
However, most notably, intent applies to the law, as we can see in the difference between homicide and manslaughter or negligent homicide, or versus no crime at all. When an innocent person kills another, they didn't intend to kill anybody, the act was a complete accident, and they are as much a victim as the deceased, which is really the only difference separating them from a murderer, who fully intends to kill their victim. Meanwhile, in "negligent homicide", also called "manslaughter", while the guilty party may not have intended to kill anybody, they were reckless or negligent in some regard or another, and their lack of intention -- their failure to do their due diligence, if you will -- was what caused the death. The death could have been easily avoided, and is their fault.

> pure pain/pleasure "utility" functions cannot fully capture what we consider to be a good, healthy society.

I don't think many utilitarians argue for metrics of harm and happiness based exclusively on pain and/or pleasure. I'm sure there are a few, but none that I've read or heard of, nor any that I'd care to read.

A lot of them use measures like disability adjusted life years and the like. That's what Singer does. And singer is probably the worst of the meme utilitarians out there.

Thanks for the recs. I guess I should have looked up the citations for 'Intention' on the SEP. The modern (or has it always existed in the West?) legal distinction is crucial.

what is your profession?

I'm writer.
I actually just started trying to get some fiction published. I'm periodically checking this thread while working on Draft 10 of a novel. Should have it printed off tomorrow morning, and I meet with my editor in the afternoon.

Cool. Do you have an agent yet?

Not yet. If I were in Europe, I'd be more proactive. But I'm Canadian, and most of the agents available here are American, so there's quite a few scam-artists in the bunch, some of whom are craftier than others. As it stands, I want to have a publishable manuscript before I approach anyone other than my editor and my selected beta-readers. There's no sense soliciting an agent with something that I don't want on the shelves tomorrow.
I'm also leaning towards going the freelancing route, and bombing every slush-pile in the country. That's a process which is notoriously slow and debilitating, but I'm quite confident in my story, so we'll see.

Your story's shite mate, sorry. Better luck next time.

bump

i am a utilitarian and my healthy society is where nobody exists
blow me the "fuck" out please

so nobody