The Free Thinker

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.

What Does MacIntyre See in Nietzsche?

After reading a bit of Nietzsche I became puzzled at his high reputation, and particularly at the respect shown him from someone I respect, Alasdair MacIntyre, of which Joyless Moralist reminded me.  JM writes:

It shouldn't be so hard to understand why people like MacIntyre see Nietzsche as one of the main (perhaps THE main) interlocutors. In a way, Nietzsche is one of the only modern thinkers who poses a *real* challenge to MacIntyre's way of thinking.

This was bewildering, since after listening to a few hours of Beyond Good and Evil I didn't see how Nietzsche could pose a challenge to anyone's way of thinking.  There are snatches of reasoning here and there, but in general he scarcely presents a shred of argument for the ethos he is advocating, preferring to thrust it out there as if we are supposed to take it as revelation or prophecy, or at least as if it should have some appeal to our intuition.  The ethos is in itself grotesque, but Nietzsche is enough of an artist to give it a certain limited aesthetic appeal, so that you can see how he continues to attract a small but dedicated following, and even, perhaps, how he might have been able to drive an entire age mad.  But what appeal Nietzsche has is based on rhetoric and insults to his opponents (thus giving us motives of cowardice and/or vanity to take his side rather than be the target of his jeers).  So it seems the best answer is to offer a sober outline the logic and foreseeable evil consequences of Nietzsche's ethos, mixed with expressions of well-earned contempt, in order to make those tempted to indulge in Nietzschean vainglory will be overcome with shame and disgust and turn away from it.  And yet MacIntyre seems to want, not only to put Nietzsche on a level with Kant and Bentham, but to put him above them.  How can this be?

So I re-read the relevant chapter, Chapter 9, entitled "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" from After Virtue, to see what MacIntyre really has to say.  First, it was a relief to see that MacIntyre has only contempt for the positive ethos Nietzsche advocates:

I have already said justifiably harsh words about Nietzsche's construction of that at once absurd and dangerous fantasy, the Ubermensch... (p. 113)  For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem [of how to construct a new good], not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche's greatness lies... (p. 114)

So, MacIntyre shares my horror and contempt at Nietzsche's wicked, elitist ethos, dismissing it with casual sentences.  This is in contrast to Joyless Moralist, who plays devil's advocate, seemingly in an attempt to defend Nietzsche's status as a great philosopher even if she disagrees with him:

The kind of death he worries about (which is to his mind much worse) is the groveling, self-flagellating pitifulness of those who have been taught to loathe all that is strongest or most noble in themselves. He's thinking of the pacifist who lets himself get trampled in the mud, and then feels a self-righteous pride for doing so. Or the ascetic who forgoes all the pleasures of life but dreams greedily of the rich compensation he expects to receive in the life to come. Of course, Nietzsche doesn't believe that there's any *real* self-sacrifice or humility in the Christian sense; all of these postures are to his mind just another manifestation of the will to power, but they are a contemptible, weak, passive-aggressive sort. He would have a field day with foreign policy today, wherein America flexes its muscles around the globe, but can't stop apologizing for it, while smaller countries beg for our help, and then get prissy and aloof with us after we give it.

Joyless Moralist is being a good educator here, helping a modern mind to penetrate imaginatively into the thinking of a philosopher who, justifiably or not, is part of the canon and whom it is an educated citizen's duty to try to understand.  But of course, one can't separate "all that is... most noble" in us from mercy, advocating the former and denigrating the latter, for mercy is noble, and cruelty, ignoble.  And if Nietzsche thinks that one can't be a pacifist without feeling self-righteous pride, or that ascetics only give up the pleasures of this life for rich compensation later (as opposed to the truth, that ascetics have found a greater enjoyment in worshipping God than earthly pleasures can offer), that simply shows his stupidity and the poverty of his historical imagination.  If he is influential we may have to deal with him, but we don't have to respect him.  Here I think I am in agreement with MacIntyre, who seems to regard Nietzsche's whole Ubermensch idea as worthless nonsense.

So what does MacIntyre see in Nietzsche?  He writes:

For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher -- certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism -- not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy... 

In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other.  In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order.  But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created.  The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates.  There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  I myself must now bring into existence 'new tables of what is good.'

I'll take MacIntyre's word for it that Nietzsche is the major forerunner of MacIntyre's own conviction that the Enlightenment project to find a rational justification for morality failed.  But how is "my morality can only be what my will creates" any solution?  In early chapters, MacIntyre has knocked down the arguments of Kant and Bentham, pointing out that the categorical imperative could have almost any content you please, and that Bentham's "pleasure" and "pain" concepts are illegitimate oversimplifications of human experience.  But surely Nietzsche's argument, as MacIntyre summarizes it, can be knocked down even more easily.  Morality means something that constrains the will.  How can my will be constrained by something my will itself created?  Suppose I create morality x today, then find tomorrow that it would be more convenient to abide by morality y?  Surely if I can choose my own morality, I can re-choose it.  If my morality has no authority greater than my will, it can hardly be immoral for me to do so.  But that means morality is never binding, and therefore that it is no morality.  So the insight with which MacIntyre is crediting Nietzsche is either moral nihilism, or else it is something that stops short of moral nihilism very unwarrantedly with the incoherent suggestion that we can, as MacIntyre puts it, "make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will."

If moral nihilism is Nietzsche's insight, I can think of two better sources for it.  One is Dostoyevsky, specifically the theme that runs through The Brothers Karamazov: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."  The other is J.L. Mackie, author of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.  Both of these authors seem to perceive the idea of moral nihilism (though Dostoyevsky regards the view is an adversary to be combated) more clearly than Nietzsche, who, having destroyed the basis for believing in morality, then persists in the use of morally charged words like "noble," a word which a consistent moral nihilist cannot legitimately use, without seeming to realize that he's being inconsistent. 

A comment on Nietzsche by G. K. Chesterton, in Ch. 7 of Orthodoxy, is astute:

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

Chesterton is cleverly hitting Nietzsche where it hurts by calling him "timid," since timidity was just what Nietzsche most held in contempt.  But Chesterton is right.  Nietzsche may be a landmark figure because he was the father of modern moral relativism-- I am not intellectual historian enough to say-- but he tried to be more than that; he wanted to be the champion of a new morality.  But his new moral vision had little content and what content it had was repugnant, so he could only make it appealing with the help of rhetoric and metaphor.  The resulting line of thought, though it had a large and insidious historical influence, is really empty and even silly, or "nonsense" as Chesterton rightly puts it.

I should mention that MacIntyre never cites Beyond Good and Evil, the only work of Nietzsche's that I have (partly) read.  Perhaps Nietzsche has better arguments elsewhere.

More Nietzsche:

We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths. 

Note the word: "compel."

To teach man the future of humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, 

One "vast hazardous enterprise and collective attempt in rearing and educating" occurred in Soviet Russia.  Another occurred in Germany.

in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. 

Note this curious juxtaposition: "philosopher and commander."  The ordinary conception of a philosopher today is the professor, the scholar, the writer, the man of contemplation.  Nietzsche is looking for a man of action.  So we should not, I think, look to the universities to see whether Nietzsche's hope for a "new type of philosopher and commander" was fulfilled, but rather to the authors of What is to be Done? and Mein Kampf, who not only wrote and thought, but also took command of the destinies of nations.  And yes, in the heyday of these men, one might say that all that had previously seemed terrible was pale and dwarfed.

The image of such leaders hovers before OUR eyes:--is it lawful for me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? 

Is the phrase "free spirits" here meant ironically?  Nietzsche has already said that his heroes would "compel" mankind along new paths; the opposite of freedom.  Perhaps he means freedom for the "new type of philosopher and commander," not to be extended to, and rather to be at the expense of, "the greatest number?"

The conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis; the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a CONSTRAINT to these tasks; a transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:--these are OUR real anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! 

They were not lacking.  There occurred, indeed, a "transvaluation of values"; the Bolshevik, the Nazi, said with Milton's Satan: "Evil, be thou my good."  

these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of OUR life. There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of "man" himself DETERIORATING, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind--a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger of God" has participated!--he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern ideas," and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality--suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that could still BE MADE OUT OF MAN through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:--he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. 

But Nietzsche does not know what he means by "the greatest possibilities" or "promising developments," which is why he can only express himself vaguely and suggestively when he talks about it.

The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps also a new MISSION!

Nietzsche would no doubt be glad to know that the new type of philosopher and commander, the incarnation of the Will-to-Power, soon appeared, tearing tradition apart, despising "the greatest number," ravaging, conquering continents.  The Bolshevik and the Nazi appointed themselves the lawgiver and the master race.  They sought to "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths," to build a heaven-on-earth and a thousand-year Reich.

But then something strange happened.  Nietzsche would perhaps not be disturbed that "the greatest number" condemn the new ubermenschen of Germany and Russia as evil, as monsters.  That, he would no doubt say, is the "morality of timidity," the "herd instinct," the voice of the "rabble."  But they failed in Nietzsche's own terms, too.  The will-to-power, it turns out, does not make men strong.  It turned out that the utilitarians, the democrats, the "pigmies with equal rights and claims," the free societies (no need for quotation marks), the men animated by "idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of 'modern ideas'" and "Christo-European morality," the rabble with their "parliamentary nonsense," could squash the Nietzschean ubermenschen like bugs.  The Americans, who had so little will-to-power that even when the Europeans begged them, after WWI, to stay and lead, they brought their conquering army home with all possible speed, defeated, rather easily, the heirs of Frederick the Great.  At times, e.g., in the fire-bombing of Dresden or the nuking of Hiroshima, they even exhibited the cruelty and abandon that Nietzsche idolized; and they did it so effectively precisely because they did not desire it or enjoy it.  

Nor did the ubermenschen get the consolation prize of honor.  It turned out that even Napoleon, a century of admiration for whom did so much to plant the seeds for the world wars and Nazism, could be admired only because he had traces of Christo-European morality.  He did not exult in "the law of thousand-fold perishings"; or to be more specific, he did not commit many murders.  He claimed to be an orthodox Catholic and was crowned emperor by the pope.  For Hitler there were no garlands, no eulogies; he inspired no poets.  There was nothing noble about Hitler, precisely because he had thrown out the old morality.  No heroic death for Hitler; he died in a bunker, by suicide, after marrying a wench-- another indignity, Nietzsche, that despiser of marriage, might think.  And yet it is not that Nietzsche's "new type of philosopher and commander" merely happened to degenerate or miscarry, and I think even Nietzsche might have been honest enough to admit that, could he have witnessed the event.  It was not accidental but essential to Hitler, to the type Hitler represented, that his death was not noble, bold, grand, heroic, picturesque or inspiring, but wretched, pathetic, ignoble, cowardly, and meaningless.  This is simply what happens to men who abandon morality for the sake of the will-to-power.  Nietzsche was too stupid, too wilfully blind to grasp the great mysteries: the meek shall inherit the earth.  And You have scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

Nietzsche's hopes were fulfilled, in another, ironic way: the destiny he predicted for the ubermenschen, fell to the rabble instead.  It was the great democracies, represented by Churchill and Attlee and Roosevelt and Truman, who would "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel" -- or, persuade-- "millenniums"-- or at least, decades-- "to take NEW paths."  In founding the United Nations, in forming NATO, in "making the world safe for democracy," they led humanity into new paths of peace, burying, without honors, the age of noble savagery which of which Nietzsche was the ignominious prophet.

Nietzsche, the Manic Muddlehead

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is typical:

To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception;

To call men "defective," "diseased," etc. implies a standard compared to which men fall short.  If we apply a commonsense standard Nietzsche's claim is false.  Thus, most men are healthy; disease is the exception.  Or again, most of the obvious, material sufferings of humanity-- infant mortality, say, or hunger-- have been proven by economic growth not to be "necessary," for they have been overcome.   Nietzsche is trying to apply Darwinist biology as a metaphor for mankind, but the effort is misguided, for civilized man has escaped the old Malthusian trap, so that success in the merely biological sense is now the norm, not the exception.  If Nietzsche wants to define success in some other sense he is obliged to tell us what it is and defend it.  But he could not do so.  That's why he writes so cryptically, wrapping his thoughts in darkness; they could not stand up to the light.

and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception.

The concept of adaptation to an environment is not applicable to man, who has transcended mere dependency on an ecological niche, and makes his own environment.

But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.

What does Nietzsche mean by this physical metaphor, "the higher type?"  The metaphor will seem to some extent meaningful to readers raised in a Christian culture, because Christianity lives in the light of a lofty moral ideal, laid out in the Gospels, and compared to that standard we observe greater and lesser degrees of success which can be called "higher" or "lower."  Nietzsche wants to destroy the Gospels, and in doing so, he renders his own physical metaphor meaningless.  He is forever the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.

What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible.

Here, Nietzsche seems to have some sort of a value standard, but he refuses to tell us what it is (because, I think, he doesn't know).  Apparently, Nietzsche ascribes negative value to the life-experience of most human beings; as he makes no case, there can be no rebuttal.  One of the absurdities here is that Nietzsche is always calling his opponents "dogmatists," as if he were the Cartesian rationalist, yet he is always making emphatic claims like this one that are at best groundless and probably meaningless as well.  But here is a question.  Nietzsche claims that the great religions "treat every other experience of life as false and impossible."  Since the word "other" must "other than" something, and since that something in this case is "suffering from life as a disease," Nietzsche is claiming that religions claim any experience of life other than suffering from it as a disease.  This claim might possibly be true of Buddhism; of Christianity it is wildly false.  If we put this to one side, however, it's true that the great religions do dismiss as "false and impossible" some "experiences of life" that some "free spirits" might aspire to, e.g., free love.  A sober philosopher might ask: Are there, in fact, some experiences of life which we can dimly imagine and can desire, which are, in fact, false and impossible, e.g., free love?  Nietzsche could have presented arguments that some lifestyles forbidden by Christianity as dangerous illusions are actually possible and happy.  But honest argument is a field which he steers clear of, knowing perhaps that he would be unhorsed there at once.

However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED.

Should have, in what sense?  Where are these repugnant value-judgments coming from?  Of course, the link between Nietzsche's thought and Nazi race policy is evident here.

One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto!

Well, yes, and this line could have come from Chesterton, but what does Nietzsche mean by it?  To call for gratitude for past achievements of civilization is to appeal to some common standard of good between Nietzsche and the reader; what is that standard?

But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE?

The racism of this claim-via-rhetorical-question is not only repugnant but, I believe, empirically false.  If Nietzsche meant that Europeans would have been superior in objective respects, e.g., in intelligence, strength, courage or whatever, had European civilization been less humanitarian, this theory makes a testable prediction, namely that Europeans should be genetically inferior to Tagalog, Bantu, or Amerindian peoples where the sick and suffering were allowed to die.  I do not think there is any evidence suggesting this is the case.  If there were evidence for this, of course, it would not necessarily follow, and most people nowadays would emphatically reject, the value-judgment that it would have been better to improve the race by letting the weak die.

To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they had to do!

One can't help but be bemused here.  Nietzsche is advocating that most of mankind be allowed to perish because they are "defective, diseased," etc., and yet he is accusing Christianity of "reversing all estimates of value!"  Christianity is on the side of life for all; Nietzsche, on the side of death for most.  Who is reversing estimates of value here?

And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"-- into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction;

What is one to answer to a writer who charges the civilization and faith that came to dominate (in the Age of Imperialism during which Nietzsche was writing) most of the world through its military superiority with "shattering the strong?"  That Christianity did not shatter the strong is a lesson of history that cannot be doubted; if anything, it seems to have strengthened and emboldened them.  Nietzsche seems always to start from the claim that 2+2=5.  Of course, the identification of "manly, conquering, and imperious" with "highest and most successful" is merely question-begging and dogmatic; again, no case has been made and no rebuttal can be offered.  But the identity of conscience with self-destruction is a simple falsehood.  Suicide is forbidden by the Christian conscience.

forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment.

Hmm...  Has Nietzsche given us some notion here of the origins of his otherwise mysterious "higher man" concept?  To appropriate and repurpose this notion from Christianity even while he attacks Christianity is another case of the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.  Anyway, the charge that Christianity "hates all earthly things" is manifestly false, as is evident both from the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians who affirm the goodness of earthly things (Augustine even argues that evil is only a privation of good) and from the fact that Christian civilization has achieved more in producing and enjoying earthly things than any other, and that monastics in particular have contributed to advances of material civilization out of all proportion to their numbers.  Christianity does, in a sense, "hate" some earthly things-- not all, of course; does the Church hate the bread and wine that are used in its sacraments?-- that are good in themselves, to the extent that they get in the way of heavenly things.  But then, Nietzsche himself really does hate most earthly things, regarding them as "defective," "diseased," etc.  Here, as in many places, Nietzsche's arguments are worthless against their intended targets but cogent against himself.

If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man?

The absurdity here becomes at once so extreme and so subtle as to be a sort of marvel.  Consider: Abortion causes death.  Christian civilization has given rise to free constitutions, market economies, and technological progress which has made possible a twenty-fold increase in the human population; that is, it has caused a great increase in life.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, is explicitly advocating that most of mankind "should have perished" because it is "defective"; that is, he is advocating death, or, as we might put to do justice to his noble-sounding tone, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man."  As a criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche's claim is so obviously, utterly false that one feels he cannot have failed to understand its falsehood but rather exulted in it.  One feels the need for a new word which, like the words lie, joke, or fiction describes a false utterance, but which has a connotation of joy or exultation in carrying to virtuoso extremes the opposition between one's utterances and the truth, and does not so much deceive one's hearers as invite them to join in the exultation.  Meanwhile, as a criticism of Nietzsche's own philosophy, the claim is extremely astute.  Indeed, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man" is a good description of that historic climax of Nietzscheanism, WWII.

He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed to do!"--

This Nietzsche writes, of the civilization and the faith that built the European cathedrals, that produced Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail;

Note how Nietzsche bluters that the "law of the thousandfold failures and perishings" is "obvious" to mask his total inability to defend or even to define it.

men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.

As a minor symptom of the absurdity of this passage, we may observe that the "dwarfed" Europeans of Nietzsche's day and after are, on average, about a foot taller in stature than the prehistoric men of the age before human destinies were shaped by Platonism and Christianity.  This is characteristic.  Nietzsche's ravings are usually meaningless.  When meaning can be ascribed to them they are distinctive for being the opposite of the truth.

Nietzsche's point of departure seems to be an effort to apply a Darwinian paradigm to man and human society.  But the paradigm is inapplicable to civilized man, since modern man has more or less solved the problem of scarcity in the basic biological sense if not in the economic sense, and since in any case civilization replaces biological evolution with cultural evolution as the driving force of human development.  Nietzsche uses the rhetoric of "higher man," a metaphor somewhat useful for capture the advantages, ineffable because of their complexity, of civilization, in order to advocate the opposite of civilization, a return to savagery and the law of the jungle.  This grotesquely perverse wordplay is at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Yet Joyless Moralist says that Nietzsche is a "very great philosopher," "worth taking seriously," who "understands what is really at stake in Western philosophy."  If he's so smart, why does he have all his facts wrong and fail to make valid arguments for any of his claims?  Shouldn't philosophers treat Nietzsche as economists treat Marx, as a thinker to whom some attention must be paid because of his historical influence, and whom it is sometimes fun to refute, but who is understood to have been comprehensively wrong and to have contributed nothing of value to human knowledge?

Is Nietzsche Worth Answering?

I was recently reading Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and among other things I was struck by the respect that Bloom, a cultural conservative who might be expected not to like them, had for Nietzsche and Rousseau.  It is no doubt an indication of the narrowness and bias of my education and self-education in philosophy, but I don't think I've ever encountered a favorable treatment of Nietzsche or Rousseau before.  Bertrand Russell and Paul Johnson, for example, both regard both men with feelings of contempt, disapproval, and occasional horror.  I thought of Rousseau and Nietzsche more or less as sophists and enemies of civilization, philosophical forerunners of the French Revolution and Nazi Germany, respectively.  But Bloom finds it worthwhile to deal with Rousseau and Nietzsche at great length and in some ways sympathetically (especially towards Rousseau).

So I downloaded Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and have been listening to it.  It seems to me that Nietzsche is a lot like G.K. Chesterton: an unsystematic, aphoristic thinker, sometimes insightful, sometimes merely polemical, but full of unwarranted claims and lacking the scruples of a systematic philosopher.  Nietzsche's elitism may neutralize resistance to his arguments in a manner like that from the story The Emperor's New Clothes: one hesitates to say, or even think, What nonsense, this doesn't make any sense, for fear of feeling the knife-edge of Nietzsche's keen contempt.  But in fact, not only are Nietzsche's grounds for rejecting tradition inadequate, but they are parasitic on tradition.  Nietzsche is, in a thousand different ways.  Nietzsche is forever in the position of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch on which he himself is sitting.

I found this passage in the introduction striking:

The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its “super- terrestrial” pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when

Europe

, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered.

The rhetorical force of the word "nightmare" is felt by the reader because the reader thinks of nightmares as evil, or bad.  If Nietzsche wants us to be "beyond good and evil," that force is lost.  Elsewhere Nietzsche says that "the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life," and that "the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing?"  This seems to suggest-- but Nietzsche never deigns to express a thought so clearly-- that what matters is that ideas be useful rather than true.  By that standard, Christianity, the chrysalis in which the world's most materially successful civilization formed, would seem to be vindicated.  Of course, the real nightmare was the age following Nietzsche in which the "Will-to-Power" which he glorified seized Moscow and Rome and Berlin and burst forth to ravage Europe.  If Nietzsche wants to call two thousand years of Western civilization a "nightmare," one might wish to ask the standard by which Nietzsche judges, but he offers no ground.  My impression so far is that Nietzsche is greatly overpromoted when great thinkers like Bloom and MacIntyre make him their major interlocutor.  You see a brilliant mind at work in Nietzsche's writings, sometimes, but he wastes it on ranting.  He is an incoherent and trivial thinker.

Tyler Cowen's Skepticism About Agent-Based Modeling

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen expresses skepticism about the future of agent-based modeling.  Since I've been building my skills in this area for the past year and a half, I'll try to respond.

One request was this:
The role and future of intelligent agent modeling in economics.
Call me a stuck up sticky bit but I don't see a bright future for this technique.  We already have, and have had, computable general (and partial) equilibrium models for decades.  In those models you try to estimate the parameters from empirical data.  The models rarely impress me but there are plenty of situations, such as estimating the effects of changes in the tax code, where we don't have anything better.  And so those models survive, and will continue to survive.

I must admit that my understanding of computable general equilibrium models is partial at best.  I have a general sense that a compelling comparison-and-contrast of the approaches, showing how the approaches differ, where general equilibrium fails, and how agent-based modeling does better, could be written, maybe has been written.  I think I could recognize it if I saw it.  I've heard something along these lines argued pretty compellingly by Bob Axtell.  But I can't write it myself (yet).  

Let me note, though, that agent-based models can and do function out of equilibrium; in fact, strict equilibrium is generally unattainable, though "meta-equilibrium," in which there is ongoing micro motion and key variables fluctuate but general patterns can be described, often emerges.  This arguably makes them more realistic, of course, since the world is never in strict equilibrium, but meta-equilibrium at best; however, I don't think realism is the strongest ground on which to defend agent-based modeling.  Rather, it is worth noting that there are all sorts of holes in standard competitive equilibrium concepts.  For example, there is, strictly speaking, no competitive equilibrium when there are U-shaped cost curves.  But most economic activities probably do have U-shaped cost curves.

What's the important innovation behind intelligent agent modeling?  To introduce lots of arbitrary assumptions about behavior?  Greater realism?  Complexity?  Considerations of computability?  Learning?  

Unfortunately, "introducing lots of arbitrary assumptions about behavior" frequently occurs in agent-based models.  This is not a virtue of the method.  What I try to do is (a) stay as close as possible to standard neoclassical assumptions about behavior, and (b) introduce modifications selectively and carefully, such that they both facilitate theorizing and move the models/simulations in the direction of greater realism.  To the other four advantages: no, yes, yes, and yes.  One can certainly make the case that agent-based models are/can be more realistic, but it seems to me that decades if not generations of mathematical economics has led to a fairly nuanced understanding among mainstream economists of the relationship between models and reality, which agent-based modelers are yet to develop.  Some agent-based models have achieved impressive successes in mimicking real-world phenomena, for example the Zipf distribution in city and firm sizes, but that these distributions derive from arbitrary assumptions reduces their persuasive force.  Agent-based models do make it possible to create more complexity, however, precisely because mathematical tractability puts embarassingly narrow boundaries on what systems-of-equations style modeling can do. To cite just one crucial example, the neoclassical production function, Y = K^a * L^b, must be rigidly adhered to in many mathematical models because it alone has the requisite mathematical tractability.  Considerations of computability are another advantage: many mathematical problems cannot be solved outright, yet solutions can be estimated with an arbitrary degree of proximity to the true solution, and in a computer, very quickly.  Learning is another strong point of agent-based modeling, though not one I deal with much.  Evolution is a strength of agent-based models; in fact, my own efforts in this area have given me the impression that evolutionary economics is important but almost impossible to do without agent-based techniques.

We already have enough "existence theorems" as to what is possible in models, namely just about everything.  

I'm not quite sure what this means.  Does he just mean that people have used models to show all sorts of crazy possibilities?  If that's a critique of agent-based modeling, it probably has some force applied to some agent-based papers, which draw weird conclusions from nontransparent premises.  I agree that that's not very useful.  But our understanding of something as basic as why the economy grows is still so limited that one of the world's leading growth scholars, Elhanan Helpman, titled his recent book The Mystery of Growth.  And some of the reasons why growth remains mysterious lie at the heart of economic theory, and are related to the stringent and artificial assumptions that must be imposed on many analytical models in order to make them mathematically tractable.

The CGE models already have the problem of oversensitivity to the initial assumptions; in part they work because we use our intuition to calibrate the parameters and to throw out implausible results.  We're going to have to do the same with the intelligent agent models and the fact that those models "sound more real" is not actually a significant benefit.

Cowen's talking at a high level here, and I'm not sure I completely understand him, not because he's writing clumsily but because a lot is packed into these sentences.  I think I agree with him.  I'm not sure that it's inevitable that agent-based models will suffer from "oversensitivity to initial assumptions," however.  In particular, I think some of the models I'm working on are/will be robust to a lot of variation in initial assumptions.  Moreover, the initial assumptions that do the real work will be very closely related to familiar neoclassical assumptions: agents, firms, utility functions, production functions, etc.  The difference is that the agent-based approach will allow me to get past a lot of mathematical-tractability roadblocks that stopped theorists who didn't have the benefit of using agent-based techniques.

What can be done will be done and so people will build intelligent models for at least the next twenty years.  But it's hard for me to see them changing anyone's mind about any major outstanding issue in economics.  What comes out will be a function of what goes in.  In contrast, regressions and simple models have in many cases changed people's minds.

We'll see.  Again, I think the stuff I'm working on has very fundamental implications for the definition of capital, the theory of technological change, the relationship between capital accumulation and economic growth, the role of Austrian-style roundaboutness, and maybe a lot of other issues, such as business cycles, money, economic geography, the role of information in market economies, etc.  I think I'll write a book, people will read it, and they will think about all these things differently.  It will not be a result of what goes into the models.  I think my starting places are sensible and/or standard.  Rather, I think I will (a) be able to demonstrate stuff that people have only been able to intuit, and (b) encounter some provocative surprises.

Sometimes a theory model tells you there are many many equilibria, as in much of game theory. I believe that result is to be taken seriously and we should conclude that many different things can happen in that situation.  I am suspicious of trying to solve for the correct or most likely equilibrium by introducing many more specific assumptions.

The fact that I'm not sure why these remarks-- quite worthwhile in themselves-- should appear in a post about agent-based modeling is revealing of something.  Does Tyler think agent-based modelers introduce arbitrary assumptions to narrow multiple-equilibria results to single-equilibrium results-- and if so, that they do so more often than, say, neoclassical theorists?  That's not my impression, but Tyler is a well-read guy, and if he thinks so, it probably happens.  To make a different point, though, I think we do observe a lot of equilibrium in the world-- equilibrium that restores itself if disrupted, and therefore does not seem to be "multiple."  For example, the number of jobs in the United States closely tracks the number of workers.  Keynes seems to have thought that full employment was just one possible equilibrium state of the economy, no more natural than others, and that there was no mechanism to ensure full employment.  Putting to one side the cogent theoretical critiques of this view by Friedman, Lucas, etc., it doesn't seem to be borne out historically: the US is basically always pretty close to full employment.  There isn't some 25%-unemployment equilibrium, with the US jumping back and forth.  Since single-equilibrium seems, in many cases at least, to be the way the world works, we are justified in trying to explain it theoretically.

In my possibly overdogmatic view, economics is most useful when its models are relatively simple and intuitive.  We've run out of new models which are simple and intuitive.  So the theory game is over.

This is too big a claim for me to argue with here.  I'll just state without justification that I diametrically disagree.  More and more I find myself amazed by how large a part of the world's economic phenomena lacks really compelling theoretical explanation.  Of course I haven't read anything close to all the economic theory there is, and it would be a bit difficult to justify the rough process by which I've extrapolated from the theory I have read to guess the explanatory effectiveness of the theory I haven't read.  But my intuition, for what is worth, is that, contra "the theory game is over," the theory game has hardly begun.

Addendum: Bob Murphy asks:
It may be apocryphal for all I know, but I once read that the editor of the journal to whom Einstein sent his paper on special relativity put it down and realized that physics would never be the same (or something like that).
Is something like that even possible in economics?  What would it be like?  Say, the Lucas critique times 10?
The answer is no, in my view this is not possible, for reasons given above.

At the risk of bravado, I think a book something like that is possible in economics, that it is greatly needed, and that I'm going to write it in the next two or three years.

Economics, Theology, and the Is/Ought Distinction

I thought of another parallel between medieval theology and postmodern economics: each is the primary bridge between is and ought for public purposes.  The is-ought problem, famously raised by David Hume, is the problem that it is not obvious how one can get from statements about how the world is to how it ought to be.  MacIntyre discusses the is-ought problem in After Virtue:

To answer this question it is helpful to consider another type of counter-example to the 'No "ought" conclusions from "is" premises' thesis.  From such factual premises as 'This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping' and 'This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably', the evaluative conclusion validly follows that 'This is a bad watch.'  From such factual premises as 'He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district', 'He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known' and 'His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows', the evaluative conclusion follows that 'He is a good farmer.'

Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts, that is to say, we define both 'watch' and 'farmer' in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve.  It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer from that of a good farmer... (After Virtue, p. 58)

As far as I understand, this is MacIntyre's answer to the is-ought problem; if we then regard man as a functional concept, then a concept of a good man and a morality may follow from that, hence the importance, for MacIntyre, of the Aristotelian concept of telos.  But what is man's function?  In After Virtue he arrives at this rather unsatisfying conclusion: "the good life for man is to be spent in seeking the good life for man..." (p. 219)  The agnostic circularity, the feeble and Sisyphean quality of this conclusion, presumably would not afflict the medievals, who would, I suppose, say that the good life for man is to be spent in glorifying God, but that still seems a funny starting-place for morality, since right and wrong are obvious facts of life to everybody-- as C.S. Lewis observes, we constantly exhibit them in our habit of quarreling, which is never mere "fighting like animals" but always involves claims of right-- while the ideas of God, of praising God, and of why praising God is normative or desirable, are far more difficult, and I suspect very hard to appreciate for anyone who has not engaged in a good deal of moral effort already.

Anyway, theology was the medieval discipline which, par excellence, connected grand comprehensive theories about what the world is like-- "is"-- to prescriptive notions of how man ought to live-- "ought."  Economics does the same today: it develops "positive" law-like generalizations concerning human interaction (supply and demand) and derives "normative" conclusions about human welfare (e.g., Pareto-optimality, Kaldor-Hicks-improvement).  Welfare economics is not the only discipline to do so, of course, but it is the only one whose conclusions command general assent.  People differ on whether the rise of rock-n-roll, the decline or revival of churchgoing, the movement of women into the workplace, or even democracy is good or bad, but no one wants GDP to fall, because a higher GDP, roughly speaking, means that people can get more of whatever it is they want, at least in material/money-exchangeable terms, and probably no less of intangible/non-purchasable things they value.

Economics is, in a way, much more agnostic than theology.  It doesn't answer the question of the good life for man: it delegates it back to the individual.  Yet it still provides a source of real morality, even if economists aren't especially comfortable with the idea.  Hardly anyone would claim-- certainly it would be odd for a Christian to claim-- that helping people satisfy their own desires-- "doing unto others as they would have you do unto them," so to speak-- is irrelevant to morality.  If we can devise systems that do this, that may not be the good, but surely it's a good.  In a globalized world where consensus on religious grounds is not available, it's worthwhile to have some common standard to judge by.

Economics, Theology, and Legitimacy

In a recent post, The New Middle Ages, I suggested that there is a parallel between the role of theology in the Middle Ages and of economics in our ("postmodern?") times.  I read this in Eric Hobsbawm, and later in an interview with Robert Skidelsky, long before I was able to make sense of the idea myself.  Perhaps I can make it clearer than Hobsbawm and Skidelsky did.  What I write here is somewhat speculative: I'm trying to make sense of a large historical pattern.  Certainly it could be challenged.

Society needs people to behave themselve; economics and theology give them reasons to do so.  Not chiefly as academic disciplines: you don't need to know about indifference curves and the quantity theory of money to understand that if you spend more than you earn you'll go broke, and you don't need to master the arcana of the Trinity to understand that if you steal or kill, you'll go to hell.  Economic and religious motivations operate at the grass-roots level, but are affected in subtle yet powerful ways by macro movements like inflation or heresy.

The heresiarchs of postmodernity are first and foremost critics of the economic system: Marx most obviously, and Mao, Castro, etc. but Hitler too, who railed not only against the presumed-bourgeois Jews but explicitly against "the bourgeoisie."  And also a throng of Third World dictators.  Marx is modern, not postmodern, just as Arius, Pelagius and Nestorius were ancient, not medieval; but it is now, especially, that Marx is a heresiarch, because it is now that liberal democratic capitalism (with varying admixtures of welfare-state socialism) has become an orthodoxy.  Economic "heterodoxy" is so subversive, so able to evoke angst and fear, because if the security of property rights is overturned, the matrix of incentives that makes people behave themselves is destroyed. 

In the Middle Ages, rulers relied less on economic self-interest for social control, and more on people's obedience to God and fear of hell.  With life short and poor, with disorder frequent, with many wildernesses left for outlaws-- think Robin Hood and his Merry Men-- to escape to, temporal rulers' this-worldly sticks and carrots were weaker.  God-as-afterlife-enforcer was needed.

Now most people live to seventy years.  And public records are efficient enough that a criminal record will cast a shadow on your whole life.  And credit reports keep track of your debts.  There are enough this-worldly reasons to behave that we don't feel the need to rely on the threat of divine punishment to get people to obey the law-- provided we know how to keep the economy running all right.  I think that's at least part of the reason why economics has stepped into the role formerly played by theology as the chief intellectual ally of legitimacy.