The Free Thinker

Interest, Usury, and Mortgages

I believe the prohibition of interest has been a common feature of the moral rules of several civilizations. Interest was condemned by Aristotle and generally by the ethical systems of the ancient world. It was treated as a sin by the medieval Catholic Church and subject to bans and punishments. And Islam also forbids interest today, a rule that Muslims, unlike modern Christians, still regard as binding, which has driven the emergence of "Islamic banking."

Contemporary economists, by contrast, habitually regard both legal prohibitions and moral strictures against interest as pure superstition. They regard interest, on the contrary, as both necessary to the functioning of the economy, and as morally innocuous. All the prohibitions of interest by philosophers and ecclesiastics for so many centuries they regard as based on the simple fallacy that regards it as "unfair" to get more money tomorrow for money lent today because of the inequality of the sums of money involved. But of course, money-today is not the same commodity as money-tomorrow: for one thing, prices may have changed; but even if they haven't, there is a set of opportunities between today and tomorrow to which money-today gives you access and money-tomorrow doesn't. For people to exchange money-today for money-tomorrow is perfectly sensible and rational on both sides, like trading haircuts for nails or bread for cars or any other ordinary, voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange, and there's no reason that the price should be $1:$1.

Who is right? Mostly the economists. Interest is certainly necessary; it is often innocuous and useful; prohibiting loan interest is a very bad idea; and the motive for past prohibitions has usually been simple fallacies combined with the aristocratic class prejudice and philosopherly impracticality. However, there is one valid argument on the other side. Laboratory experiments have shown that people often exhibit hyperbolic discounting behavior, a fancy term meaning that they place a higher relative value on present enjoyment than is consistent with their desires when they are taking the long view. It seems to be human nature to be somewhat impulsive and to behave in ways prejudicial to one's long-run well-being, to the extent that people sometimes invest in costly self-control mechanisms. (Example: If I remember right, it has been shown statistically that people buy gym memberships even though it would be cheaper to pay per visit; the argument is that they foresee this, but are trying to bind themselves to exercise regimens by lowering the marginal cost of visiting the gym.)

If (some) people are impulsive, other people can exploit this weakness, giving them money now for prices in future money that their long-run selves would not agree to. How to do welfare analysis when people have time-inconsistent preferences presents difficulties, but plausible intertemporal utility functions would support the folk economics idea that loan sharks harm their customers. It might be useful to define usury as lending at interest that exploits people's impulsive short-sightedness, and interest as lending at interest to rational borrowers who have good reasons to place especially high value on money-today. Of course, an external observer couldn't always tell, and you might never be completely certain, whether any given transaction was a case of usury or interest. Even the lender and the borrower might not know. Indeed they might know least of all: they would have the best information, but maybe also incentives for self-deceit.

I think the Christian attitude should favor interest, thus defined, and oppose usury. It should be regarded as a sin to lend money at interest if the lender has strong reasons to think that the borrower is being impulsively short-sighted and will regret the loan later. It might also be good for the law to prohibit usury. This is paternalistic, but perhaps not coercively so, The law could (maybe it does, I'm not sure) simply say, "We define such-and-such contracts as usurious and therefore invalid, and we will not enforce them. If a usurious lender wants to simply trust his borrowers to repay, we won't interfere, other than to make it clear to borrowers that they are entirely at liberty to walk away from such illegal debts; of course, a lender who tries to recover his money by any but purely social and moral pressure will be treated as any other extortionist."

But of course, the problem is how to prohibit usury without prohibiting interest. That can't be done perfectly. The moral usury/interest distinction will not correlate perfectly with any particular interest rate or form of contract. A loan at 0% interest might be motivated by instant gratification, while a prudent entrepreneur may occasionally have sound business reasons to borrow even at very high interest. Some entrepreneurial ventures might be recklessly self-indulgent, while other loans purely for present consumption (think of a payday loan to provide a wedding reception for one's daughter) might be quite consistent with making the best use of one's resources in the long run. The ideal might be a combination of law and moral suasion. Usury laws should prohibit the most abusive forms of lending, even at the expense of occasionally curtailing entrepreneurship; but they should allow a wide range of lending practices and rates, even though this will leave the door open to a good deal of substantive usury and exploitation. Meanwhile, churches and civil society organizations should use exhortation and stigma to shape norms so that moneyed persons will use moral discernment to try to lend only in a manner that benefits their borrowers.

A system of "morally sound" financial practices as described above would likely have prevented much of the crisis. Of course, we have some of it already: usury laws are on the books. Yet all in all our society is the opposite of the medieval Catholics: the state not only does not prohibit lending at interest, but subsidizes it. Student loans are one instance of this, and perhaps the policy of putting young people in so much debt gets less criticism than it deserves. But the most egregious example is the mortgage-interest tax deduction, which creates strong incentives for much of the population to become deeply indebted. It's clear now, in the wage of the largely mortgage-driven crisis of 2008, that much of the home mortgage industry was usurious in the sense described above, yet this industry was, and still is, being subsidized by the tax code. Surely this is perverse and should be abolished. We shouldn't go back to medieval prohibitions of usury, but perhaps something in between?

Wheat and Tares in the Soul

The following parable is usually interpreted as a description of the world and of Judgment Day, but I think it has another application:

Another parable He put forth to them, saying: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.

So the servants of the owner came and said to him, 'Sir, did you now sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?'

He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.'

The servants said to him, 'Do you want us then to go and gather them up?'

But he said, 'No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers: First, gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barns.'

The metaphor of wheat and tares applies also to the human soul, I think. Good and bad qualities exist in us side by side, and are related to one another in complicated ways. When we try to improve the way we live, we run a risk of uprooting virtues along with vices. A man who is proud of his courage, in seeking to become humble, might cease to be brave. A man whose hard work gives him little time for friends may, in trying to be sociable, become lazy. A Christian is forever being reminded that he is a sinner, and rightly so; but we may not have the insight, at any given time, to see just how we are sinning, and if we rush to judgment against ourselves, we are likely to do a bad job of it, just as if we rushed to judge others. Sometimes I think we must let the wheat and tares grow together for a time, waiting for a moment of discernment when we see a way to change our lives.

"What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?"

The question that is the title of this post may seem an innocent one.  To some extent it is, and some hostile reflections on it which occurred to me today may seem, may be, eccentric and exaggerated.  And yet I think the question expresses a way that our culture indoctrinates youth, which is false, and has a high cost.  In Plato's Republic, he proposes that the citizens of his ideal state be taught to believe a "noble lie."  Is our society based on a "noble lie," too?  The lie I have in mind is difficult to express, but the words you can be anything you want to be might capture it.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"  The question implies (a) that a kid should have some idea, at an age of ten or eleven, of his future career, and (b) that his future career can and/or should depend on his wishes, his inclinations, his daydreams ("want").  The trouble with (a) is that the economy is so complex that a kid won't know a hundredth part of the careers that exist, and to encourage such early planning might lead to a surplus of aspirants to a handful of careers that kids know about, e.g., teachers, movie stars, soldiers, president of the United States.  But of course, kids aren't making any hard-and-fast commitments when they respond to grown-ups' small talk, and some careers do require long advance planning.  So (a) is all right.

No, my problem is with (b).  Suppose grown-ups asked a different question: "What do you think you might be useful for, when you're grown up?"  This is a more wholesome question because it doesn't invite a kid to project his self-indulgent wishes and daydreams onto his plans for the future, but, instead, invites him to think of others, of service, of how he can help.  It doesn't suggest that the world owes him an interesting, exciting, or entertaining job, but that he'll owe the world valuable services in return for his room and board.  It encourages him to appraise, not his desires, but his capacities.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"  The question suggests that it matters what one wants to be, that one can choose, that you can be anything you want to be.  The truth is that the career paths that will open up to a person are a tiny fraction of those he can imagine.  It depends partly on aptitude: that is relatively easy to understand.  A tone-deaf person can't be a musician; a stupid person can't be an MIT professor.  More subtly, it depends on a thousand accidents of social connections and circumstances and which resume strikes whose fancy and whether one happened to have a good day on this or that test or interview.  Try your utmost to realize your childhood dreams, and you'll probably fail; you may waste much effort and sacrifice personal ties and innocent pleasures in the process; and, worse, you may be corrupted.  There are a thousand subtle moral compromises to which the path to success may tempt you.

And yet, for all that, for boys, it might still be right to encourage the pursuit of dreams.  It's in men's nature to take risks.  Courage is stereotypically a masculine virtue, and while the stereotype is partly false-- marriage and childbirth may require as much courage from women as battle does from men-- the occasions that call for courage in women tend to be more a matter of accepting one's lot and less a matter of going out to seek adventure.  Risk-taking has a basis in masculine biology-- in nature, males are more expendable than females-- and this biological factor is etherealized in men into cultural manifestations of honor and bravado.  And from a rational point of view, too, men can better afford to take risks, for the simple reason that a man has more time: men usually marry younger women, and they can beget children for much longer than women can bear them.  A man can pursue his dreams and fail and pick himself up and be richer for the experience.

It is in girls that I think the attitude you can be what you want to be causes the greatest unhappiness.  Our society seems to be engaged in a conspiracy not to tell girls when they are young that they may have to choose between marriage and career, or if not that, at least between the dream career that strikes their fancy, with all the complex and urgent demands it will make on them, and the settled life and strong responsibilities of motherhood.  Political correctness can prevent grown-ups from talking to kids about this but it can't change the stubborn facts that female desirability as a marriage partner tends to peak in the 20s, well before investments in high-powered careers have had time to pay off, and that there aren't enough hours in the day to spend 50 hours a week in the office and pick one's kids up after school.

All in all, though, I think we would do better not to encourage self-indulgent personal ambition in men or women.  America is indeed a land of opportunity, but the best opportunities usually come as surprises.  We should be alert for opportunities to be of use, and able to appreciate the chances that time tosses in our path.  Meanwhile, the question we should focus on is not what we want to be, but what we ought to be.

The Geithner Conundrum

Here is an ethical dilemma.  Suppose you are Tim Geithner, Secretary of the US Treasury.  It is your responsibility to organize sales of Treasury bonds to provide financing for US government spending.  In order to facilitate sales, you need to try to reassure investors that the US will not default or inflate away its debts. 

But suppose, like Ken Rogoff (hat tip: Greg Mankiw), you think that "Within a few years, western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate, partially default, or some combination of all three," and that there's no guarantee that the "raise taxes" option is going to be a big part of the solution to that trilemma.  That is, suppose you think that given the US's current fiscal trajectory and the calibre of its political class (and voters!), those who hold T-bills today are likely to regret it a few years down the line.

If you tell the Chinese and other T-bill buyers, "Don't worry, it'll be fine," you're half-lying, and they'll likely suffer if they believe you.  If you tell the truth-- "it's anybody's guess whether you guys are going to get your money back!"-- you might cause a huge dollar crash and send the world economy into chaos.  Which should you do?

"Death Panels"

Mickey Kaus:

So You Have A Death Panel in That Basket! Tom Maguire digs further into that April Bloomberg story--and the David Leonhardt NYT interview behind it--and discovers that Obama came a lot closer to talking about "death panels" back in April than I'd thought. Here's the key passage [emphasis added by Maguire]. It comes as Obama is talking about the hip replacement his grandmother got a few weeks before her death:

THE PRESIDENT: ... I don't know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she's my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn't have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life - that would be pretty upsetting.

LEONHARDT: And it's going to be hard for people who don't have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you - how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Yikes. ... I'm sure the "not determinative" part was very important to Obama. Still!  He's talking about a panel of independent experts making end-of-life recommendations in order to save costs that have an effect at an individual level. And he thought it would be in the bill that emerges. ... It's also pretty clear that something like the "IMAC" panel is what he has in mind. Whether or not the IMAC would actually do this--Harold Pollack says end-of-life issues are well down the curve-bender's list, for example--Obama thought it would do it. . .

Now here's something I don't understand.  Palin's "death panel" rhetoric seems inspired from a political, or shall we say, propaganda point of view.  It even seems to be sort of accurate.  But of course, these decisions do need to be made, and if people are not going to be responsible for their own health care costs, they have to be made by third parties, unless the choice is made by the raw facts of technical feasibility regardless of cost.  Is this what opponents of "death panels" want?

This seems to tie into the debate about euthanasia, where I have to admit I've always been a little uncomfortable with the position of the "social right" even though I also sort of agree with it.  I agree with it because I think suicide is wrong.  But what qualifies as suicide?  You have to define it carefully to ensure that you don't turn Christian martyrs, or brave soldiers, into suicides (anathema to Christians).  What about a starving mother who gives the last of her food to her child, accepting death for herself?  Is that suicide?  If not, then what about an elderly person who thinks the insurance company's $100,000 (say) could be better spent than on keeping him alive another year, or month, or day?

I would want to encourage people to see a world where elderly Americans spent hundreds of thousands keeping themselves alive by uber-expensive treatments while African infants who could be saved for a few dollars die, in the same light as socialists used to look on a world in which millionaires gorged themselves in palaces while children starved outside.  It seems to me that justice says, given scarce resources, we should save more African orphans and fewer American elderly.  Does this view contradict the social right's agitation against "euthanasia," or not?  I really don't know.  If you do, enlighten me.

An "independent group" of "doctors, scientists, and ethicists" "guiding" a "conversation" about how "the country makes decisions" about end-of-life issues does seem like something that can be crudely and tendentiously but not inaccurately described as a "death panel."  It also seems like a reasonable idea, distasteful but necessary if the public is going to foot the bills for end-of-life care without bankrupting the country.  Am I missing something?  Is there some rational and/or ethically compelling basis for the outrage?

The Paradox of Discipline

One reason some people don't like morality is that it is a system of restraints: "Thou shalt not..."  If your choices were A, B, C, D, and E, morality rules out D and E and leaves you with only A, B, and C.  That seems like a bad thing, since it's generally better to have more choices.  One more choice can't make you worse off, and if it is the best choice available, will make you better off.

But the irony-- and I think I've written about this before, but the phrase "the paradox of discipline" occurred to me today as a good label for it, so I'm writing again-- is that while in the short run morality reduces your options, in the longer run it may, and I think there is reason to think it is a sort of iron law that true morality does, increase them.  Suppose I want to execute a rather large project, to write a book, say, or to build a house, or to travel to Europe.  To do so, I must first make a fairly extensive plan.  Once I have done so, if I am to follow the plan, I have fewer options than I did before.  If A is "write five pages," B is "go to the beach," and C is "buy lumber and lay down some floorboards," my plan to write a book requires me to do A.  I might miss a day here and there, but if I regularly choose B or C, or D or E, I won't get the book written.  If I hadn't set out to write a book, I would have more options.

So there is a sense in which the disciplined man loses freedom.  And yet if we take a longer view the disciplined plan may have a wider range of, in Amartya Sen's language, "substantive freedoms," or we may say, of realistic options than the undisciplined man.  If a fairly undisciplined man is thinking what to do for the next few months, perhaps casually dating a girl or reading a light novel are options-- these don't require a lot of discipline-- but he cannot plausibly plan to write a book or build a house.  If he has self-knowledge, he knows he'll never follow through with it and won't even begin; if he lacks self-knowledge, he might let dozens of ambitious projects seize his fancy for a little while before being neglected and forgotten; but he won't get the book written.  In this sense, the disciplined man may be able to do A, B, C, D, or E, while the undisciplined one has only A or B to choose from, as C, D, and E require more persistence and willpower than he can muster.

And even if, instead of thinking about long-term projects, we think of daily activities, the disciplined man may engage in more varied activities.  "Write five pages" is an action available to the undisciplined man-- he might have a whim to scribble-- but "write the tenth chapter of a novel" is not available to him, because the nature of writing the tenth chapter of a novel requires that he has written (or at least outlined and thought through) the first nine.

The paradox of discipline becomes tenfold more acute when we think of social activities.  And, after all, most great projects do require a good deal of cooperation.  Only a man who can be relied on will be entrusted with a difficult, critically important task.  It takes a disciplined army to march with Alexander the Great through Phoenicia and Egypt and Persia and on to India.  The range of motion open to an undisciplined rabble is far less wide. 

Growing up illustrates the principle.  A child might, on a whim, shout in a church or (were he let in) run and jump and roll on the floor during a business meeting.  A very small child might start to undress on the streets, or pick leaves and rubbish up off the ground and put it in his mouth.  An adult is under all sorts of restrictions as to what he can do.  But, precisely for that reason, adults can walk around the city unsupervised, can enter many places where children are not allowed, can operate machinery, travel internationally, give speeches, etc.  They have learned discipline, and it has made them free, while the child finds his errant will blocked at every turn.

Not every discipline or morality is so fertile and, ultimately, liberating.  It is the right morality, the right rules, the right discipline that expands the scope of freedom, that make us able to do more, to make dreams come true.  But the discipline of the medieval monasteries led to prodigies in learning and the practical arts, but the caste system kept India, the Confucian classics kept China, turning on the same treadmill for a thousand years.  The wrong discipline can be a dead end, but the true discipline leads ever onward and upward, into new regions of awe, always expanding the realm of the possible.

Health Care as a Merit Good

By the way, it might be worth commenting on the idea that health care is a merit good.  As with any positive right, if we concede that a person has a right to health care, i.e., that they just ought to get the treatment they need to stay alive whether they can afford it or not, a corollary of that probably must be a right to coerce others to give up their property for ends which to which they would not rationally consent.  This is ethically problematic.  Still, the idea that it's just wrong for "society" (whatever that means) just to let a person whom medicine could save die because the person can't pay for the life-saving treatment does seem to have a certain force.  If that were the question we're faced with, I would be ambivalent.  I would have at least some qualms about rejecting the idea.

But that's not the question we're faced with.  For if health care is a merit good, i.e., if people just should get it, that moral imperative presumably applies to all mankind.  Not only Americans and West Europeans but Indians and Chinese and sub-Saharan Africans just should get the treatment they need.  But it's clearly infeasible for us to guarantee a level of health care to all of humanity that is even close to that enjoyed by middle-class Americans.  So treating health care as a merit good is not an option (unless we subscribe de facto to a wicked belief that Americans are some kind of superior race).  The real conclusion of this argument is that there is a moral imperative to shrink government and open up trade and do everything we possibly can to achieve maximum growth in the world economy, so that in some not-too-distant future there will be enough resources that everyone's basic needs can be satisfied.  Above all, we must open the borders, by far the most beneficent economic policy within the realm of possibility, compared to which the moral importance of all other economic policies put together is negligible.  In the meantime, the more ruthlessly utilitarian we are in health care policy, the better.  A person's life should be saved by medical processes if and only if the present value of the person's labor services over their remaining lifetime, net of the present value of their consumption needs, as attainable by medical procedures is greater than the present value of the costs of treatment.  This should be the goal of policy as well as personal ethics (that is, if one can only be saved at exorbitant cost, one should go quietly and save African orphans with the money you save).

Polygyny and the Meta-Ethics of "Flourishing"

How should one evaluate the ethics of polygyny (men having more than one wife) from the perspective of an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and a utilitarian ethos?

Kantian.  There are two reasons that a Kantian might regard polygyny as immoral.  First, if we restrict our attention on men as moral agents, it is largely and in most cases inconsistent to will that "Marry multiple women," be a universal maxim, because there aren't enough women for all men to marry more than one.  Strictly speaking, this is not universally true.  If population growth rates are fast enough and men marry much younger women, universal polygyny could be possible.  Also, in the wake of large wars male populations are sometimes sufficiently depleted that the remaining men could practice generalized polygyny.  Still, where populations are stable and/or spouses are roughly the same age, and where there have been no demography-altering calamities, if some men have two wives, others will have to go without. 

Second, if we extend our attention to women as moral agents, a universal maxim to "Marry multiple people," making marriage exclusive on neither side, would clearly destroy the character of marriage altogether.  However, to apply the same sexual morality to men and women is not unproblematic.  Men have a biological reason to desire exclusive devotion from their mates that does not apply to women, namely that unless their mates are faithful, men will not know the paternity of any children they bear.  More generally, women may have different sexual needs and desires than men do, such that ethical maxims appropriate for men could not be validly cross-applied.  "Don't initiate romances; let the initiative come from the other side" might be a tenable, perhaps even wise maxim for women, but would hardly produce good results if practiced by both sexes, while "In situations of danger to yourself and your mate, value the other's safety above your own to the extent of sacrificing your life if necessary," might be a correct maxim for men, but would create oddities if applied to both sexes alike.  I think the false application of universalizability to sex is one reason why the case for free love can seem so overwhelming to logical young males: since promiscuous sex appeals to the untrained masculine nature, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," combined with an assumption of gender equality, seems to be a formula for free love.  But this overemphasizes the body at the expense of the mind.  If marriage is to be a connection of minds as well as of bodies, it does make sense to demand that maxims about marriage be universalizable to women as well as men, and to condemn polygyny on the grounds that polygynous husbands don't want their wives to practice polyandry, too.

Utilitarian.  Presumably, as a rule, a man gets more (marginal) pleasure from his first wife than his second, and less still from his third.  If so, to distribute women equally among men, in pairs of one husband, one wife, would yield more happiness to men than polygynous arrangements in which some men get several wives, others none.  Polygyny can fuel social conflict, as some men are left frustrated and with "nothing to lose."  Also, although the torments of jealousy suffered by women in polygynous arrangements may (at least "selfish gene" logic gives reason to think so) be less than those suffered by lovers of unfaithful women, the tug-of-war of wives for the attentions of one husband are surely painful.  The Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern poignantly portrays the rivalries among the wives of a polygynous Chinese gentleman.  So there are, it seems, pretty strong reasons to presume that monogamy serves the "greatest good of the greatest number."  A survey of the world's monogamous and polygynous societies suggests that the former are more peaceful, dynamic and creative, as well as a possible reason: when men can have multiple wives, men's efforts may be devoted to competing for a scarce resource, what is called a "zero-sum game," whereas if they are strictly limited to one, sexual competition is greatly reduced, and competitive energies are directed more into positive-sum games like commerce, art, and scholarship.

Aristotelian.  I don't know, but I expect Aristotle disapproved of polygyny, which was not practiced in Greece, as this article observes:

To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)). Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.

However, I doubt whether an Aristotelian meta-ethics really lends itself to the rejection of polygyny.  Aristotle's measure of ethics was the realization of a man's telos, which was conceived as parallel to the "flourishing" of biological organisms.  Clearly, for a male of any species to "flourish" in the biological sense involves polygyny.  The reasoning of Darwin, or Dawkins, makes this especially clear, but the fact that polygyny for the wealthy and successful of human societies has been the general practice is evidence enough.  Thus King David and the prophet Muhammad were polygynous, as is Osama bin Laden; the Bible treats King David's polygyny unproblematically as evidence of his success and glory.  Even today, the polygynous impulse is not dead among the successful.  US presidents can't be polygamous by law but many of them-- Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton-- have been in practice.  If we see a picture of a Hollywood star with a beautiful woman on each arm, it's a symbol of success.  I once saw a crude wrestling type sport in which the contestants each came with a girl, and the victor in each match appropriated his opponent's girl, so that the winner ended up with four of them clustered around him.

I'm sure Aristotelian ethicists can find ways to argue that polygyny is not ("really") the height of human flourishing, and I'd probably agree, in a way, with the arguments they would make.  And yet it seems clear to me that the real reasons polygyny is wrong are the Kantian and utilitarian ones, namely, that to practice polygyny is inegalitarian and causes unhappiness in others.  Of course, I would also agree that man does not flourish, in the most important sense, by being polygynous: his soul does not flourish.  But that is because the flourishing of a man's soul depends on his doing what is right, and Kant and the utilitarians can tell us why polygyny is not right, and therefore, why it is harmful to the soul.  "Natural man," so to speak, flourishes by being polygynous; but man is not only a natural, but also a supernatural being.  Supernatural man flourishes better when monogamous or celibate; polygyny is a burden to him; but this is only an illustration of the more general point that the flourishing of supernatural man has hardly anything to do with the flourishing of natural man and is often opposed to it.  Man's soul may attain its utmost health just as his body is being ripped aparts by lions in the arena.

Argument versus Scorn

The first verse of Psalm 1 makes an interesting parallel:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. (Psalms 1:1)

Repetition is a frequently used poetic device in the psalms; a thought is said, then said again in different words.  So the parallel placement of "the ungodly... sinners... the scornful" suggests that the psalmist saw these three as almost synonyms, or at least closely related.  I have also seen the last word translated "the mockers."  I should add that ungodly sinners do not have a monopoly on mockery in the Psalms, for Psalm 2 says:

He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision. (Psalms 2:4)

Still, I think Psalms 1's identification of scorn as a defining trait of the wicked is more typical, and it reminds me of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is certainly "scornful" and a "mocker," and this is an important if not the principal mode of persuasion he uses.  I think his heavy reliance on this mode of persuasion should be regarded as illegitimate, and should go a long way towards discrediting him as a major philosopher.  Furthermore, I think a worldview as evil and insane as Nietzsche's could not be advocated solely or primarily by argument.  Argument as a mode of persuasion cannot always be cleanly distinguished from rhetoric or poetry or scorn.  It is prone to error, and also, perhaps, has a tendency to lead to excessive skepticism and abdication of truth-claims.  Yet it has a sufficiently stubborn and persistent tendency towards truth that a capable and devoted practitioner of argument could never become as far gone as Nietzsche.

The following passage from Beyond Good and Evil was chosen more or less at random as an illustration:

228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything else;

Nietzsche, the mocker, attacks moral philosophers by calling them boring.  To an arguer, this is irrelevant: some truths may be boring, some falsehoods interesting, but one's business is to look for truth.  Statistics is a very boring subject but useful for understanding the world.

at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! But let us not be afraid! Things still remain today as they have always been: I see no one in Europe who has (or DISCLOSES) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that CALAMITY might be involved therein.

More mockery: Nietzsche suggests that moral philosophers are either cowards and hypocrites or playing the fool, performing a function of putting the mind to sleep which is the opposite of their stated mission yet which earns their bread.  There are also, of course, tantalizing hints here of arguments that might be interesting if they were developed.  Why and for whom is it "desirable" that few should reflect about morals?  He might be saying, like Voltaire, that one should not doubt the existence of God in front of the servants lest they steal the spoons.  Or, if Nietzsche is being ironic, what real view is he hinting at and masking?  None of this rises to the level of argument, however.

Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani).

Let me submit that to mock is essentially to devalue something, and this may consist of little more than conveying to one's interlocutor a low estimate of its value.  "Indefatigable" literally means something like not easily tired and thus ought to be something good, but a mocker uses the phrase as a means of devaluing it.  "Inevitable," a value-neutral word in itself, is if anything value-positive to an arguer, to say that B follows inevitably from A is (provided that we believe A) as much as to say that B is true.  Yet Nietzsche manages to suggest that the very inevitability of English utilitarians somehow devalues them.  Nietzsche gives "respectable" a negative connotation by coupling it with ponderous, and he uses "dangerous" with a positive connotation.  Such tricks illuminate the "ungodly... sinners... mockers" parallel in Psalm 1.  The mocker devalues the holy and the good, and thus spares the ungodly and the sinners from any pangs of conscience they might have.  No arguments are needed.

No new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief.

If Bentham and other utilitarians never expressed a new thought, nor fine-tuned or better expressed an old thought, why did anyone read them?  Yet people did.  So perhaps Nietzsche is missing something.  But the claim is, anyway, irrelevant.  Whether or not the English utilitarians were original has nothing to do with whether they were right.

In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one MUST read them),

Why?  Aren't ad hominem attacks invalid?  If someone makes a good argument with bad motives, it is no less true.  Of course, if we are to interrogate the motives of the utilitarians, we might also interrogate those of Nietzsche, the pathetic, lonely, sexually inactive invalid, comforting himself by persuading himself he was better than others, enjoying the pleasures of scorn to compensate for lacking those of health and family and friendship that others enjoy.  Nietzsche seems rather more vulnerable than the utilitarians on this score.  But it's better to put all questions of motives to one side.

concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals.

Again: ad hominem, therefore irrelevant.  But perhaps persuasive, as mockery.

(Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-immoral?)

This remark is a display of ignorance.  It is common, even typical, for puritanical men and women to interrogate their morality, as history shows.

In the end, they all want English morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number,"--no! the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best served thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness, I mean after COMFORT and FASHION (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving.

A charge like this certainly would need to be backed up.  The claim that utilitarians identify "the happiness of the greatest number" with the happiness of England is obviously and grossly unjust-- clearly Bentham's principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain applies to all humans, not just Englishmen.  Any utilitarian knows that people might derive pleasure from many things, not just comfort and fashion, and that there are differences among people and cultures as to what brings pleasure.  Certainly pleasure and pain are concepts readily intelligible to people of all cultures.  The charge of English ethnocentrism is singularly inapt as a critique of utilitarianism.

Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,

Nietzsche has been building up to this, and we may credit him here with a shred of something that might be characterized as argument.  Nietzsche is, in his vague and hysterical way, making a point which was made by his contemporary Vilfredo Pareto and is now more cogently expressed in the standard doctrines of mainstream economics.  Utility can be deduced from behavior, but we have no compelling grounds for defining utility in such a way as to be amenable to cardinal rather than ordinal representation (that is, to say "x gives Person A twice as much (as opposed to simply more) satisfaction than y), or to regard it as inter-personally comparable.  Unfortunately, he exaggerates to the point of making his claim untenable.  People possess and can express some notion of their own good, can derive from analogy to themselves and from listening to what other people say some notion of the good of others, and can, by observing people's consumption of market commodities and summing up total consumption across the economy, arrive at some concrete measures of the general welfare.  Certainly there can be differences of opinion about how to define and measure the general welfare, and there may even be fundamental and fatal flaws in the concept that careful argument could expose-- ultimately I might even agree that there are-- but to say it is only a "nostrum" and that it cannot "at all be grasped" is simply naive. 

The phrase "herding-animals" is one of Nietzsche's favorite expressions of mockery.  It is, as usual, singularly inapt.  Modern European civilization places unique emphasis on the individual's welfare and liberty, where most other civilizations have been more inclined to subordinate the individual to the society, or, to put it in Nietzschean terms, the "herd."

--that what is fair to one MAY NOT at all be fair to another,

Notice the switch from talk of "the general welfare" to talk of what is "fair."  Nietzsche is either confused or sloppy here, for he seems to treat considerations of justice and utility as synonymous.  They are, of course, distinct: a claim of justice characteristically overrides considerations of utility at least in the immediate sense.  Of course, many moral philosophers would deny that "what is fair to one may not... be fair to another," arguing instead that actions and decisions are just or unjust objectively, independently of anyone's point of view.  Nietzsche's relativistic alternative is asserted here as if it were revealed truth, with no argument in its support. 

that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a DISTINCTION OF RANK between man and man, and consequently between morality and morality.

If Nietzsche had offered a clear explanation of what "higher men" are, of why we should believe in (innate?) "distinctions of rank" in some fundamental sense, then we could have an argument about (a) whether "the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men," and (b) if so, whether that is a cogent point against it-- for one might, after all, say that yes, the requirement of one morality hurts higher men, but it benefits the rest of us, and that is more important.  But Nietzsche does not, and could not, define what "higher men" are.  To the "higher man" we apply the criticism which Nietzsche unwarrantedly made of the concept of the "general welfare": it is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum."

Nietzsche's words here eerily suggest the philosophy of Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.  Raskolnikov thought that morality is binding on most people, on ordinary people, but that some higher personalities are entitled to step over obstacles.  He acts on this philosophy by murdering an old woman, and the novel describes (among other things) this act and the breakdown of Raskolnikov's personality under the weight of secrecy and remorse thereafter.  Strangely, Nietzsche seems to have bought into Raskolnikov's personal philosophy, without irony.

On the other hand, Nietzsche is in another sense right, even unproblematically right.  There are indeed distinctions of rank (vertical) and of profession (horizontal) in life, and sometimes certain differences in morality attach to them.  Thus, unconsidered, opinionated outbursts might be a great sin for a statesman, but a small sin or even an appealing foible in a carpenter.  The same utterance might be a valiant effort from the mouth of a schoolboy, but an appalling lapse from the mouth of a professor.  To sell his services to the highest bidder is meritorious in a businessman but wicked in a judge.  All this can be quite consistent with a utilitarian meta-ethics.

They are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. One ought even to ENCOURAGE them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:--

Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
"Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!

Again note the mocking tone, exemplified by the word "mediocre," an odd word which superficially means merely average or moderate, but which has come to have a highly derogatory connotation.  The verse certainly makes the English utilitarians seem ridiculous, but what does it have to do with the validity of their arguments?

Mockery can be an effective form of persuasion because it makes people want to be on the side of the mocker rather than the mocked.  In sixth grade, I found myself in an environment in which mockery was the dominant mode of social competition.  Kids were always "making fun of" each other, often in new, sexual ways which they were just becoming old enough to know about.  Those who were best at it rose to the top of the cool hierarchy, because others were intimidated.  Losers and pariahs had a role to play because they were the objects on which others practiced, and demonstrated, their skills of insulting others.  One could, of course, present evidence that one is not, say, a "faggot," but in that climate of discourse, one would only be laughed at all the more. 

Nietzsche relies heavily on these schoolyard-bully tactics.  Those tempted to agree with the English utilitarians are threatened with being called "unenraptured, never jesting," "mediocre," "ponderous" and "inevitable," guilty of "cant" and "tartuffism," ethnocentric and narrow-minded "herding animals."  Those who agree with Nietzsche are enticed with the promise of being classified as "higher men," "distinguished by rank" from the "mediocre;" they are addressed elsewhere as "ye free spirits" and "philosophers of the future."  To snobs, this incentive is hard to resist.  (Might this explain why Nietzsche is overrated by academic philosophers?)

Joyless Moralist, who has some credibility because she does not agree with Nietzsche herself, writes that "I have to recognize Nietzsche as a thinker of a very high order, because he simply is. Very few have had such deep insight into the character of modern philosophy, or levied such cutting criticisms."  If such is Nietzsche's specialty, a passage like the above, where Nietzsche is levying "cutting criticisms" against an important school of modern philosophy, should represent Nietzsche at his best.  Am I suppose to believe, then, that this is a powerful critique of utilitarianism? 

But it isn't.  In the middle of Beyond Good and Evil (228), Nietzsche gestures towards an argument against utilitarianism, which he expresses in an exaggerated way that renders it untenable.  His sneer that the general welfare is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum" might serve as a provocation to some clarifications by utilitarians, but only a gullible and foolish reader would simply be convinced by the claim.  Granted, a related argument, subtler and less exaggerated, was made by economists of the "marginal revolution," roughly contemporary with Nietzsche, and became a point of departure for significant revisions of utilitarianism as a meta-ethics and a retreat from some of its stronger claims, but we can't give Nietzsche credit for that, since he does not indicate he could have understood, let alone originated the arguments of Pareto (or of Menger, his chronological predecessor).  A hint of mediocre argument is embedded in sentence after sentence of sneering, which account for most of the persuasive force of the paragraph, yet which must be regarded as so many wasted words unless we are ready to concede that scorn is a valid mode of philosophizing.  Should we?  (Meanwhile, a few words about "the higher man" that are thrown in may help to persuade via snob appeal.)

This is one of hundreds of paragraphs in Beyond Good and Evil, and notice how laboriously I have had to answer it.  Nietzsche is like a philosophical guerrilla warrior: he can't win a fair fight, but he can make so many sneak attacks that he might achieve a sort of victory through attrition if you try to argue with him.  His fans never have to concede defeat, because one can always respond to a rout of this or that paragraph by saying that it needs to be understood in the context of his broader work.  (One would not have to do this with a philosopher who persuades by argument, of course.  He can be attacked at any point and is obliged to defend his claims.)  That's why I think what is needed is to disqualify him ex ante by conceiving the philosophical enterprise in such a way that philosophers can refuse to let themselves be baited by Nietzsche's tactics.  Joyless Moralist challenges me:

But it does seem pretty funny to me that you want to insist that Nietzsche isn't really a philosopher when pretty much the whole philosophical world agrees that he is. Perhaps you should lay out more clearly and exactly what the guidelines are for being a philosopher.

Sure.  What is philosophy?  The paradigmatic philosophers, as I see it, are Socrates and Descartes.  Not that they are the best philosophers, but more than others they embody the spirit of inquiry.  In each case, the type of man, and the enterprise he represented, has an importance separate from the content of his thought.  Doubt everything, or question everything, is the ideal Socrates and Descartes represent, and it marks an ethic definitive of philosophy even if it is also, perhaps, an unattainable ideal.  Of course, there are things one finds one can't doubt-- cogito ergo sum-- but a good philosopher does not simply dismiss his own doubts, or those expressed by others, and he often anticipates and answers those that others might express.  A good philosopher tries not to make lots of unwarranted claims.  He relies on reason to persuade, because he does not believe or take himself to know lots of things that cannot be rationally arrived at.  Or, if he does accept some things on non-rational grounds, he accepts that he does not quite have a right to do so as a philosopher, and makes apologies and disclaimers where appropriate.  We might say, without condemnation, that he is, to that extent, not a philosopher.

This way of defining philosophy is somewhat consistent with traditional intellectual history.  Historically, Descartes' challenge is usually taken as the starting-point of modern philosophy.  Greek philosophy preceded Socrates, but the pre-Socratics were, for the most part, more like forerunners of the natural sciences than philosophers in our sense.  I get the sense that few contemporary philosophers feel they owe much to thinkers before Plato and Aristotle.  (A few might be indebted to Heraclitus or Pythagoras.)  Socrates and Descartes can thus be taken as symbols or representatives of traditions, the traditions of ancient and modern philosophy respectively.  Of course, this leaves medieval Catholic philosophy out in the cold, which won't quite do.  It seems to me that academic philosophers do tend to regard medieval Catholic philosophy a bit condescendingly or dismissively, because these philosophers were willing to accept religious authority as decisive evidence, which strikes them as morally cowardly and/or rationally invalid.  Yet the medieval scholastics were assiduous reasoners and arguers, and on the strength of that may be counted among philosophers despite a somewhat unphilosopherly epistemology.

Not surprisingly, Nietzsche, who hated Socrates and the modern philosophy that Nietzsche saw as vitiated by Platonist habits, does not fit in these traditions.  The fact that Nietzsche is demanding a change in the rules seems to make JM more willing to score him by different rules than other philosophers are scored by.  Believing in instinct, he writes by instinct like a prophet, and relies for persuasion on the instinct of his readers to side with the strong rather than the weak.  Believing in the Ubermensch and the will-to-power, he writes imperiously, dictating from above.  Seeing one morality as detrimental to "higher man," he refuses to accept one epistemological morality and to do battle on the level playing field of argument.  Perhaps it seems to JM and other philosophers unfair, even question-begging, to demand that Nietzsche play by rules which his philosophy repudiates.

But it is equally unfair to ask philosophers who rely on argument to persuade, to enter the arena against Nietzsche, who persuades mainly by the use of scorn.  Scorn is an easier weapon to use than argument, after all.  And argumentative philosophers could deploy scorn, as Bertrand Russell does to some extent in his appraisal of Nietzsche in History of Western Philosophy, for example, if it were not against their scruples.  (The bumper sticker "God is dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God." is another example of attacking Nietzsche via his own weapon of scornful rhetoric.)  We could easily imagine a discipline of philosophy that consisted of dueling scorners satirizing and mocking each other and impugning each other's motives.  But I don't believe that a discipline like that would be likely to lead to any truth, whereas a discipline based on argument might lead to a good deal. 

If Nietzsche is to be ranked among the philosophers without the risk of legitimizing scorn as a tactic, it would really be necessary to perform a culling operation first, separating the wheat of argument from the chaff of scorn.  But I get the impression that there would be very little wheat.  Psalm 1 compares the ungoldy to "chaff which the wind blows away."  Apt.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212:

It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day.

"It is always obvious to me..."  But if so, he should have no trouble proving it with examples.  He would not be able to do so because the claim is false.  For example.  Locke accepted much from the schoolmen.  Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants.  Jesus sought to fulfill the Jewish law.  Aristotle borrowed many ideas from Plato.  Pick any philosopher at random and you'll find that he was largely building on his predecessors, though no doubt he will have differed in certain ways (or why write?).  As for "the ideal of his day," the concept is itself crude.  Every age, and especially the creative age, is diverse enough to have many ideals.

Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement.

Prophets and philosophers have indeed often criticized much that is regarded as virtue.  But they must have some standard by which to criticize it.  And their criticism has no force unless their audience accepts, or at least sympathizes with, the standard.  Thus, Socrates accepts love of knowledge as an ideal, which his contemporary Athenians shared; but he charges them with falling short of this ideal.  Nietzsche is doing the same thing, only less honestly because he is pretending not to. 

They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was OUTLIVED,

From every pulpit in Christendom are frequently heard charges that congregations are guilty of all sorts of sins, including "hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect"-- the joke is on Nietzsche that he thinks he is doing something novel when he is (for the moment at least) following the script of the Sunday morning preacher.  But for this criticism to have any force, the moral critic's audience must already believe that hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect are vices; that is, the moral critic must borrow a standard from his audience in order to blame them for falling short of it.  He may, indeed, persuade them to see more in it than they saw; but to say that the moral philosopher proposes a "NEW greatness" is to misunderstand his role and to render him incoherent.

they have always said "We must remove hence to where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility.

But why should mere multifariousness and all-roundness be a standard of greatness?  The jack-of-all-trades as hero?  Nietzsche is proposing a standard here, and of course it is not a novel one: commonsense regards someone with many talents as better than one with few, ceteris paribus.  But it is a very inadequate one.

Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will

We have here, please note, what appears to be an empirical claim.  Is it true?  How would it be tested?  It does not strike me as a very astute opinion.  Even to define "weakness of the will" seems rather difficult, and seems to me also to require a prior notion of will, i.e., free will, as something separate from external/involuntary factors.  Since Nietzsche has elsewhere denied free will any such effort on his part would seem to be fatally flawed from the start.  Still, if we are to rely on the casual, intuitive connotations of the phrase "freedom of the will," the Europeans of Nietzsche's day, who were inventing, building, fighting, conquering, governing themselves and others, raising families, writing, distributing charity, worshipping, etc., abundantly and energetically, would seem to be, by historical standards and by objective measures to the extent that these can be contrived, unusually strong-willed.

 consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of "greatness",

This presupposes that "strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution" are virtues; for otherwise, if we thought they were lacking, we should welcome their decline.  Obviously, commonsense does regard these (except maybe "sternness") as virtues; or in other words, they are already "included in the concept of 'greatness'," with no help from Nietzsche's new philosopher.  We might credit Nietzsche with reinventing the wheel, if he explained why these things are virtues; but he does not, so we can't.

with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity,

Nietzsche seems to contrast "strength of will" with "renunciation" and "humility."  But of course, to practice renunciation as an ascetic requires precisely strength of will, and humility is not at all inconsistent with "capacity for prolonged resolution."

was suited to an opposite age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go--"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!" At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding- animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility,

Higher, higher, higher, higher.  The extent to which leans on this physical metaphor, is, as Chesterton noticed, a mark of weakness.  Note also the use of the phrase "rare, strange, and privileged" as an expression of approval.  But of course, what is rare is not necessarily good.  Is it not only not necessary but seemingly impossible that is strange is privileged, for "privilege" implies a position of routinized respect within a social system, and social norms can relate only to the familiar.  Nietzsche likes to argue via word-association.  It is possible to dissect and eviscerate the word-associations; but it is really better to simply ignore this illegitimate and invalid argumentative tactic.

the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE-- nowadays?

Nietzsche arrives at the phrase "the man beyond good and evil" via a stream of suggestive rhetoric.  We are supposed to approve of him, on the grounds that he is "noble," "capable of being different," and "living by personal initiative."  We approve, of course, of those who are noble, who are capable of being different, and who live by personal initiative, because we regard these things, at least tentatively and conditionally, as good.  "Noble" is a rather vague word, the content of which is more than usually dependent on situations and social conventions.  To be "capable of being different" is good because sometimes one ought to be different, i.e., sometimes it is good to be different.  To have "personal initiative" is good if we assume that people generally desire the good and lack of initiative is one reason they often fail to achieve it; but of course, a person who shows great initiative in seeking evil is not good.  So, in effect, Nietzsche throws out a bunch of phrases that we approve of because we regard them as connected with goodness, and then connects these rhetorically with "the man beyond good and evil."  To the extent that any reader is convinced by this he is merely confused.  Whether or not Nietzsche in general is, as I have said, a "trivial and incoherent thinker," he certainly is that in this passage. 

Joyless Moralist has written that:

This will never do. You cannot read Nietzsche this way; or if you insist that this is the only way you know how to read, then by all means, put him away and don't bother about him at all.

I do not insist that this is the only way I know how to read; I insist that this, or something like this-- that is, rational argument rather than mere suggestive rhetoric-- is the only legitimate way to read/evaluate an argument, at any rate by anyone claiming to be a philosopher or to be thinking and writing in a philosophical mode.  JM quotes a friend who says that "Nietzsche's love of truth was so great that he felt compelled to shower her in mud, lest the unworthy identify her and use her for sport."  I reject this defense of Nietzsche.  A lover of truth must have more scruples in his methods of persuasion than Nietzsche displays in Beyond Good and Evil (212) and elsewhere.

It is troubling that JM is willing to condone Nietzsche in the same way that it would be troubling if honorable soldiers were willing to condone terrorists.  The great merit of philosophers is that they try hard to think clearly, that they practice a certain high honesty, that they avoid merely opinionated or prejudiced claims, that they do not let the mere wish be father of the thought, that they explain themselves from first principles as much as possible, that they seek to be ojective, to give arguments for their views which can be acceptable to all regardless of their station in life or disposition.  Nietzsche practices none of these intellectual virtues.  As such he is entitled to none of the respect that the public traditionally grants to philosophers.  To admit Nietzsche to the company of great philosophers is to debase the currency of philosophy.