Strangers to ourselves: a Nietzschean challenge to the badness of suffering

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3600-3629 (2024)
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Abstract

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us.

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Nicolas Delon
College of Charleston

Citations of this work

Nietzsche's Struggle Against Pessimism.Patrick Hassan - 2023 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Metaethical Experientialism.Andrew Y. Lee - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz, The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche on suffering and morality.Robert Shaver - 2024 - Philosophical Forum 55 (3):293-306.
The intelligibility and adequacy of late-stage utopian games.Joshua Rust - 2024 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 51 (3):555-574.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The Myth of Morality.Richard Joyce - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.Sharon Street - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (1):109-166.

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