Abstract

Throughout Western philosophy, there have been frequent attempts to uncover the history of morals. The basic idea is that moral convictions may emerge through an historical process, as opposed to, say, deriving from rational deliberation. This effort to trace back the origins of morals has been pursued in different ways with different objectives. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals may be the most famous example, but it is not alone.1 Other efforts can be found within British moral philosophy, for example, and in the Marxist tradition, with roots in Hegel. All of these traditions continue to exert influence today. My goal here is to distinguish them and to identify some advantages of Nietzsche’s...