Ian D. Dunkle

This paper calls on philosophers of medicine to attend to work on dispositions by metaphysicians. I make that call by drawing on recent work on dispositions to show several things. First, I show that the concept has been undertheorized by a wide range of theories of health and disease. Specifically, I discuss Boorse’s influential biostatistical theory of health, Werkhoven’s recent dispositional theory, and Aas and Wasserman’s neglected revision to Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis. I also show how applying a careful analysis of dispositions clarifies and strengthens each theory. But I show, lastly, that objections to each of these views are more easily grasped by virtue of this analysis. This discussion clarifies and contributes to ongoing debates over how to analyze health and disease. And it reveals the need for these debates to be better informed by clear thinking about the nature of dispositions.

This paper discusses two views of what makes an action difficult deriving from two very different approaches. On the first view, the difficulty of an action is determined by the (physical) effort involved in performing the action. On the second view, the difficulty of an action is determined by the level of ability required to perform the action. I develop and refine a version of each approach, including an original version of the ability approach drawing on recent work on agentive abilities. Then, I subject each, in turn, to a series of problem cases and consider how each view might be further refined to address these cases. I conclude that the ability approach is more promising than the effort approach because, among other reasons, it more aptly accounts for cases where difficulty seems to arise from factors other than effort (including counterproductive habits, lack of artistic imagination, and presence of pain).

What does it mean to do wrong for its own sake, and is this even possible? I call this the puzzle of malice, and in this paper I review a historical dialectic that plays out between Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on how to address it. By reviewing each author’s account of malice, and their criticism of their respective predecessor, I reach several surprising findings: First, that Nietzsche has a positive account of malice (albeit one on which it isn’t always a vice); second, that recent attempts to defend Schopenhauer’s account of malice fail; third, that Nietzsche’s account bears more resemblance to Kant’s than to Schopenhauer’s; and fourth that Nietzsche’s broad account of malice sheds light on moral phenomena left out of more conventional approaches (e.g. willful defiance of the sacred).

What is Nietzsche’s concept of health; what is the criteria he employs when he assesses individuals as sick or healthy, when he criticizes values and institutions for their effect on human health? This Element is dedicated to answering that question. I begin by showing the importance of this question for grasping many of Nietzsche’s philosophical contributions. I carefully review the interpretive touchstones for developing an interpretation. And I assess interpretations that have been offered so far by Nietzsche scholars. I show that none are adequate to the interpretive touchstones, and I develop and defend my own interpretation, according to which an individual is healthy to the extent that they are able to perform those acts required to satisfy their drives and values. Finally, I show how this reading sheds light on Nietzsche’s criticism of morality in the Genealogy and his project of revaluing values.

Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes traditional morality for having ruined our health. This raises three questions: (1) How does Nietzsche understand human health? (2) Why are health-impacts evaluatively significant? (3) Why should these impacts override the weight of our traditional moral values? By addressing these questions, I bring clarity to Nietzsche’s ethics and new insight to contemporary philosophy of medicine. First, Nietzsche conceives of health as a balance between one’s abilities and the demands placed upon them by one's motivations. One is healthier the more one is able to meet those demands; less healthy, the less so. This view is similar to “embedded instrumentalism” in current philosophy of medicine. Second, the value health has for Nietzsche is closely related to that of “power.” Power involves the confrontation of difficulty in one’s pursuits. Nietzsche is especially interested in the diachronic value of upward trends in difficult confrontations. One is better off to the extent that one tackles more difficult versions of a task than before. Such upward trends are valuable because they prevent a form of human despair of special concern to Nietzsche. Striving after a prized goal one feels unable to realize is deeply distressing and, Nietzsche argues, leads to a form of self-alienation, resentment of others, evaluative instability, and a sense of futility in acting. This cluster of attitudes diminishes one’s welfare and undermines one’s agency. Upward trends in power contribute to one’s sense that one is able to carry out one’s dearest aims (i.e. to a sense of good health) and so prevent this dissatisfaction. Downward trends contribute to a sense of one’s impotence (of ill health). The value of avoiding this dissatisfaction and its consequences accounts for the value of health. Third, drawing on recent scholarship, I argue that Nietzsche affords health normative force for its being a constitutive aim of genuine agency. Constitutive of genuine action is the realization of a condition in which we act and do not see ourselves as impotent in acting. Therefore we have reason to avoid conditions that eradicate our (sense of our own) health, grounded in the aim of realizing genuine agency.

In this paper, I consider three accounts of what makes an action difficult stemming from recent literature on the value of achievements. On one view, an action is difficult insofar as its successful performance involves effort; on another, insofar as the probability the agent will fail is high; and on my preferred view, insofar as the ratio of comparable agents able to perform the same action in the same circumstance from among all comparable agents is low. I raise new objections to each view and defend a new version of the third. The view I defend provides a unified explanation of the widest range of uses of the concept of difficulty and captures an intuitive connection of difficulty to agentive ability. One upshot of my discussion is that none of the existing accounts of achievement-value are defensible without modification.

In this article, I explore the impact of disability on one of life’s goods: achievement. Contra Campbell, Nyholm, and Walter, I argue that construing the magnitude of achievements in terms of subjective effort trivializes what it means to achieve. This poses a problem for the authors’ argument that disability, in general, does not reduce access to this good. I draw on an alternative construal of achievement that I have proposed elsewhere in order to show that, indeed, many disabilities do not restrict access to achievement. I defend this argument against an objection that it problematically relativizes the achievements of persons with disability, and I close with general lessons for future work.

There is broad agreement in aesthetics that some artworks are greater than others despite bearing equivalent (or lesser) aesthetic value. One explanation of this difference in artistic value is that creation of the greater artwork represents a greater achievement. The aim of this article is to refine this explanation and to defend it against recent criticisms. First, I present a prima facie case in favor of the achievement explanation. Second, I draw on the history of photography to motivate three objections to it: namely, that it wrongly excludes (1) lucky, (2) easy, and (3) failed creations from being artistically great. Third, I present my refined version of the achievement explanation and show how it avoids these objections. On my view, an artistic achievement consists in creating a work it would have been especially hard for comparable artists to create. Finally, I raise and address several additional objections. In responding to these objections, I argue, among other things, that my explanation of artistic value enhances our understanding of good-bad art: specifically, it allows us to see how good-bad art is artistically great despite being aesthetically flawed.

This thesis argues for a new understanding of criticism in Foucauldian genealogy based on the role played by the values of Michel Foucault’s audience in motivating suspicion. Secondary literature on Foucault has been concerned with understanding how Foucault’s works can be critical of cultural practices in the contemporary West when his accounts take the form of descriptive history. Commentaries offered heretofore have been insufficient for explaining the basis of Foucault’s criticism of cultural practices because they have failed to articulate the relation of the genealogist to her present normative context—the social and political values and goals that, in part, define the position of the genealogist within her culture. This thesis shows why previous accounts are insufficient for explaining Foucauldian genealogical critique, and it argues for a simple alternative warranted by Foucault’s writing.

Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy of Morality (GM) that key aspects of modern European morality arose as “cures” for widespread human sickness but are ultimately making us sicker (“poisoning” us). This article provides a systematic overview of how Nietzsche believes morality has functioned as a cure and poison for European humanity. Drawing on my own previous work on Nietzsche’s concept of health, I sketch an overview of the (1) sicknesses, (2) treatments, and (3) pathogeneses discussed in each of the three treatises in terms of a single (and plausible) concept of health. The result is a systematic interpretive overview of the core polemical argument in GM.

Why does it seem better to be a pauper who becomes a king rather than a king who becomes a pauper even when each life contains an equivalent sum of goods to the other? Many argue that only the pauper-to-king life can be told as a redemption story and that it is good for you to live a redemption story. This paper calls that explanation into question and proposes an alternative: upward-trending lives reveal growth. I argue that growth is a valuable feature of a life, that redemption is not, and that growth explains intuitions cited in favor of redemption.

Nietzsche assesses values, moralities, religions, cultures, and persons in terms of health. He argues that we should reject those that are unhealthy and develop healthier alternatives. But what is Nietzsche’s conception of health, and why should it carry such normative force? In this paper I argue for reading Nietzsche’s concept of health as the overall ability to meet the demands of one’s motivational landscape. I show that, unlike other interpretations, this reading accounts for his rejection of particular features of a prevailing, then as now, model of health; for his association of health with strength and with psychic unity; and for his claim that health is compatible with, and can even be enhanced by, functional impairments such as those from which he personally suffered. Throughout I draw connections to recent literature on health and disability.

A prominent tradition in Nietzsche scholarship reads his views about will to power as a psychological thesis and his claims about the value of power as an attempt to derive normativity from psychological necessity. This article shows that these interpretations have failed to articulate a cogent reading faithful to Nietzsche’s texts, and so casts doubt on such an approach. My argument bears not only on how we read Nietzsche, but also on the viability of one recent constitutivist reading. After presenting these critical arguments, I consider an original interpretation of will to power in terms of the motivation to grow. This revised interpretation, however, still fails to support the tradition’s derivation of normativity. Thus, I conclude we should look elsewhere for Nietzsche’s normative argument.

A great achievement makes one’s life go better independently of its results, but what makes an achievement great? A simple answer is—its difficulty. I defend this view against recent, pressing objections by interpreting difficulty in terms of competitiveness. Difficulty is determined not by how hard the agent worked for the end but by how hard others would need to do in order to compete. Successfully reaching a goal is a valuable achievement because it is difficult, and it is difficult because it is competitive. Hence, both virtuosic performances and lucky successes can be valuable achievements.

"Nietzsche on art and life" is an alluring topic. As the editor of this volume, Daniel Came, puts it, art plays a central role in "the principal task [Nietzsche] set himself as a philosopher—to identify the conditions of the affirmation of life, cultural renewal, and exemplary human beings". Since the precise nature of this task, and the role of art in it, is hard to pin down, a volume that promises to clarify these issues cannot fail to attract readers of Nietzsche.The contents of Nietzsche on Art and Life largely make good on the allure of its topic. Unsurprisingly, its best contributions are those that directly engage its purported task of clarifying the role of art in Nietzsche's philosophical project....

Recent scholarship has shown Nietzsche to offer an original and insightful moral psychology centering on a motivational feature he calls ‘will to power.’ In many places, though, Nietzsche presents will to power differently, as the ‘essence of life,’ an account of ‘organic function,’ even offering it as a correction to physiologists. This paper clarifies the scope and purpose of will to power by identifying the historical physiological view at which Nietzsche directs his criticisms and by identifying his purpose in doing so. Nietzsche’s criticism, it is argued, is a widespread and pre-Darwinian description of the basic dispositions of organisms and their internal processes. The purpose of this criticism is to undermine the efforts of Herbert Spencer and Arthur Schopenhauer to derive moral-psychological insights from that description. The paper concludes that Nietzsche’s proposal to conceive of ‘organic function’ in terms of will to power is of little import for his moral psychology besides clearing away competing views.

ABSTRACT In this article, the author offers a reconstruction and criticism of Brian Leiter's interpretation of Nietzsche's criticism of conventional morality in Nietzsche on Morality. Leiter's interpretation is said to falter because it attributes to Nietzsche an implausible combination of positions. First, Nietzsche is said to be a value antirealist. But he is also said to defer to the value of the flourishing of his audience, who are limited to a certain subset of “higher” humans. The author argues that, in spite of Leiter's attempt to defend this view, he ultimately fails to explain how Nietzsche can be confident in the normative force of the higher humans' flourishing and, so, his criticism of morality. Since the author takes the problems of Leiter's reading to bear on a prevalent general reading of Nietzsche, the author concludes with a brief sketch of a plausible alternative.