Nietzsche and Moral Psychology

Moral Psychology is the study of the psychological conditions and preconditions that enable us to act as moral beings. Throughout history, most thinkers have been occupied with defining right and wrong, good and evil. Moral psychology inquires into the part of the human psyche that allows for these concepts to even exist. Thus, instead of asking, “What is right and wrong?” a moral psychologist would ask, “what do we know about human psychology that informs our understanding of right and wrong as well as our ability (or inability) to live according to those principles?” Traditionally, this branch of ethics has been dominated by a handful of philosophers, a club into which Nietzsche has only recently been included.

Of course, as Christians, this branch of study is immensely relevant to our theology, especially our understanding of the doctrines of sin and sanctification. In the reformed tradition, sin is universal and humans are totally depraved. “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom 3.10) means that humans lack the ability to live morally apart from the transforming knowledge of the gospel and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. This is a radical claim and is a difficult one for non-believers to accept. Certainly no one likes to be told he or she is unable to be a good person apart from becoming a Christian. I am interested in identifying a moral psychology that would provide a naturalistic explanation for this doctrine.

In this article, I will very briefly outline the beliefs of four of the most prominent moral psychologists. I argue that of these four thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche provides the most tenable system through which sin and sanctification can be explained.

 

The differences between all these moral systems can be boiled down to two issues: The nature of moral principles within an individual and how it motivates one to make moral decisions.

Some argue that the first moral psychologist was Aristotle. According to him, one makes moral decisions based on a “firm and unalterable character”. This character is a complex system of sentiments and emotional responses that determine how an individual acts in specific situations. In order to develop a morally positive disposition, one must practice making moral decisions in order to develop them into habits. These habits contribute to the individual’s entire life, allowing them to exercise proper emotional responses and to reflect intelligently on their inner motives. For Aristotle, the most important factor in developing a virtuous person is his or her childhood upbringing. Thus, one’s parents and childhood educators make the most difference in one’s moral training.

The great skeptic David Hume takes this a step further. He claims that moral nature doesn’t exist and all seemingly moral decisions are simply choices made out of emotion. For Hume, we have no inner moral nature; all our moral actions are motivated by our environmentally-produced psychological affections and aversions. In other words, there is no independently existing law of morality; all that matters in your determination of what is right and wrong is what pleases you and what disgusts you.

For Kant, moral law exists and it can be attained by pure reason. His famous Categorical Imperative (CI) is what he believes to be the universal law by which all rational moral people must live. The CI is obeyed by rationally reflecting individuals; moral motivation has nothing to do with an individual’s nurture or environment. If a person chooses certain actions out of habit that just happen to coincide with moral good, he did not actually make a moral decision. Rather, each time an individual is faced with a moral decision, he or she must choose the right one solely through his rational faculties. Kant calls this motivation the concept of duty.

Nietzsche’s moral psychology goes radically against any of the previous three thinkers. For Nietzsche, what is definitive in determining an individual’s actions is neither habit, emotion, nor reason, but hereditary psychological and physiological traits. He believes that the vast majority of the time people first behave in a certain way and then form moral principles to justify that. The primary determinant of each individual’s behavior is his or her unique genetic stamp, which give that person certain behavioral traits that are very hard to stray away from. Brian Leiter, a prominent Nietzsche scholar, summarized this in the “Doctrine of Types”, which states: “Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person” (Leiter 2008). Leiter calls this psycho-physical constitution a “type-fact” and it is a system of unconscious drives and instincts within an individual.

Of course, this is not to say that one’s upbringing and socio-cultural situation does not factor into his morals. There is a complex interplay of nature and nurture, but Nietzsche claims that nurture is far more important. This is backed up by most of the scientific data from the last few decades. It is surprising, but the fact of the matter is in recent psychology research, the idea that parental upbringing is a big factor in the moral development of an individual is going out the door. Nor is this doctrine claiming that humans are incapable of rationally reflecting on their actions. It simply states that most of the time we act first and ask questions later.

 

At first glance, Nietzsche’s claims may seem antagonistic towards Christianity. If our ability to choose right over wrong is already set in stone based on our genetic makeup, how can we have any hope for sanctification? Apart from a supernatural explanation involving the work of the Holy Spirit, it would be impossible for an individual to align his or her moral disposition towards that of Christ’s. Furthermore, how can we be held responsible for our actions, if they have been determined for us since the day we were born by forces beyond our control?

In addressing this last objection, Nietzsche does not claim that all a person’s actions are determined for him from birth in a fatalistic fashion. In fact, his writings scathingly denigrate the deterministic way of viewing the world. He believes that our actions are not primarily determined by rational reflection, but by our unconscious drives and instincts, which have been inhibited by our false conceptions of divinely-imposed moral law.

I think the fact that we are helpless in our genetic disposition towards moral wrong actually comports really well with the sin doctrine. Reformed theology states that in our actions we are completely unable to do good. This is scientifically tenable if we can show that our inability to do good is rooted in a universal defect in our type-facts. According to the reformed theologian Wayne Grudem, humankind’s fall into sin involves a fall in all dimensions of human life, including “our intellects, our emotions and desires, our hearts (the center of our desires and decision-making processes)…and even our physical bodies” (Grudem, Systematic Theology). If the center of our desires and decision-making processes is equated with type-facts, our unique set of behavioral traits, then a fall in that facet of our lives could explain the universal inability of all humans to live morally.

Given this explanation, there is still the difficulty of giving a naturalistic account of sanctification. Perhaps at this point it is appropriate to remember that as humans, we are limited in our intellectual capacity and that it is perhaps not inappropriate to say that the Holy Spirit works by supernatural means. After all, our redemption is not a redemption simply of our spirits, but of our entire bodies in Christ. If, upon accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior, there is a tangible change in our lives, perhaps the change involves a change in the plasticity of our type-facts, enabling us to make morally positive decisions and live “by the fruits of the Spirit”, so to speak.

I am particularly interested in Nietzschean ethics because I believe that it has much to add to our Christian understanding of ourselves and the of human condition . I believe that over history, the person of Nietzsche has been unjustly vilified in Christian circles because of his infamous claim that “God is dead”. Over the last century, his writings have been misunderstood, partially because of its difficulty and partially because of its (incorrect) association with Nazi doctrine. Through this mistreatment and the tendency to construct straw-man understandings of his claims, a Christians have largely left a wealth of deep spiritual insight unmined. It is my hope that we would be able to reexamine the thoughts of this intellectual giant, and use them to build up our spiritual understanding.

 

Sola Deo Gloria

Daniel Shih