Mark Migotti

This paper raises three questions: Can Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the consciences" of masters? Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equality among human beings? and How does Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as an empirical hypothesis? The first question is answered in the affirmative, the second in the negative, and the third with the verdict "quite well". Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates is held to vindicate the affirmative answer to question one; his conception of nobility as spontaneously self-affirming to justify the negative answer to question two, and historical, anthropological and etymological evidence to support the favorable answer to question three.

In this paper I show that penalties are not prices, and explain why the difference matters. In section one, I set up the problem which the following two sections will solve: namely, that it is easy enough to make certain kinds of penalties look just like prices. In section two, I lay out and dismantle an argument for reducing the former to the latter; and in section three I dismantle an argument for taking penalties and prices to be pragmatically equivalent, on the grounds that the essential function of both is to attach costs to actions