thoroughly convinced that science has here only to explore a matter of fact, not to criticise.[1] c
The vital omission of these investigators and historians of morality is that they do not ask what it is worth, and hence what binding quality it has for us today. Ethics is a question of norms; it means what we should do—it cannot be reduced to a set of historical or psychological propositions. And where the vital question is envisaged, Nietzsche feels that the reasoning is apt to be superficial. A consensus of peoples, or at least of civilized peoples, as to certain points in morality is asserted, and hence, it is argued, it is unconditionally binding on you and me; or, on the other hand, the differences in the valuations of different peoples are pointed out, and the conclusion is drawn that there is nothing obligatory about morality at all. Both proceedings are childishness. The worth of a prescription "thou oughtst" is independent of opinion about it, as truly as the worth of a medicament is independent of whether one thinks scientifically or like an old woman about medicine. A morality could grow out of an error, and with such an insight the problem of its value would not even be touched.[2] Even the general principle "we must act and hence must have a rule of action," cannot be taken for granted; the Buddhists said, "we must not act," and thought out a way of deliverance from action [a way to nirvana].[3] For Nietzsche morality is thus problem from top to bottom. The idea that it constitutes a realm where doubt is impossible, one indeed in which we may take refuge when doubt is assailing us in all other spheres—this idea that has played no small part in the spiritual experience of earnest men in recent times—is to his mind without warrant. There is no helping it—we must extend skeptical inquiry and critical reflection to morality itself. d
What particularly presses in this direction is the fact of varying types of morality in the world [not "types of ethical theory" merely, or principally] between which we must choose. Previous ethical writers, including the historians of morality, ordinarily stand quite unsuspectingly under the commando of
