Moral Psychology with Nietzsche

Review
"Brian Leiter's second book on Nietzsche brings together ideas and arguments that have already had a significant influence on the field through their earlier formulations in his articles from the past two decades. It is thus indispensable reading for anyone interested in Leiter's evolving project of showing that Nietzsche has the correct naturalistic approach to issues in moral philosophy and moral psychology. As usual with Leiter's scholarship, this monograph is extremely clear, densely argued, and philosophically sophisticated." -- Paul Loeb, Journal of the History of Philosophy
"Leiter is one of the most important and influential Nietzsche scholars in the Anglosphere today, so this volume is a must-read for Nietzsche scholars...[I]t should also interest a more general philosophical audience...Anyone coming from contemporary analytic philosophy will appreciate the forthright, unpretentious style and argumentative rigor, as well as the broad aim not to simply re-mouth Nietzsche's phrases but rather to articulate the Nietzschean perspective." -- Alexander Prescott-Couch, European Journal of Philosophy
"engagingly written and philosophically adroit...[a] philosophically rewarding book" -- Andrew Huddleston, Journal of Nietzsche Studies
Brian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. He presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits.
In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology.