1.3 How hard is it to create values?

Abstract

This article examines what Nietzsche might mean by the proposition that “values are created”. It further raises the issue whether there is a “hard problem of value” analogous to the “hard problem” in the philosophy of mind. Nietzsche could be seen as a philosopher who tried to shift people’s views about values away from any realist-objectivist intuitions. He was optimistic that these views could be eliminated, and that eventually most or all would come to conceive of values as perspectival and created. It is shown first that Nietzsche rejects value realism in favour of a compelling anti realist conception of value, which he takes to be superior due to one specific property of values, their “aliveness”. If there is a “hard problem of value”, however, i.e. that for the realist any created value simply does not count as a value, it is unclear if Nietzsche’s conception is constructive.

Choosing Values? Williams Contra Nietzsche

“…In that sense, the revaluation of values involves not value creation, but merely the old rhetorical strategy that Quintilian termed the paradiastolic redescription of virtues as vices and vices as virtues-a redescription, moreover, which by Nietzsche's lights is just the reversal of a previous redescription along these same lines. 32 The title Der Anti-Christ, which in German can also mean The Anti-Christian, then appears 30 On Nietzsche's ambition to create values, see Clark (2015b), Dries (2015), Langsam (2018), and Lambert (2019). 31 For different attempts to explain why the rank order between truthfulness and lying is not inverted, see Owen (2007: 70) and Queloz (forthcoming-a).…”