Virtue and Community in Mark Alfano's Nietzsche's Moral Psychology

ABSTRACT This article, invited for presentation to the North American Nietzsche Society at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, is a commentary on Mark Alfano's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. I commend Alfano's productive, innovative use of digital humanities methods as well as his more traditional textual interpretation. But I raise some doubts about Alfano's proposed criterion of “external integration” for a drive to qualify as a Nietzschean virtue: the claim that if a drive systematically and reliably meets with condemnation from an agent's community, it cannot be a virtue. I suggest that the criterion be amended either so that it is disapproval from the agent's true community, which for a solitary moral innovator may be an imagined community of past and future peers, that disqualifies a drive from virtue status; or so that community disapproval is disqualifying only if the agent internalizes it.