The moral argument

Mark D Linville
The Blackwell companion to natural theology, 391-448, 2009
GK Chesterton once remarked that Nietzsche was unable to laugh but could only sneer. I
believe his point was that all good satire is animated by moral vision or conviction. Attempts at
satire without such conviction never rise above mere sarcasm–sneering. Whether all of this is so
is beyond the purpose of this chapter. But we certainly do find Nietzsche sneering in places, and
in some of those places, that sneering is directed at moral conviction itself. When in the midst of
a tirade against nearly anyone and everyone ever to put pen to paper, Nietzsche heaped scorn
upon “G. Eliot” and her fellow “English flatheads.” Eliot–whose actual name was Mary Anne
Evans–had long since rejected theistic belief, but she held fast to a sense of moral duty that she
regarded as “peremptory and absolute”(Myers 1881, p. 62). Morality, she thought, simply did not
require a religious foundation. Indeed, the religious impulse dilutes the moral, as thoughts of
another world distract from the duties of the present, and hope of an eternal reward reduces
moral motivation to a form of egoism. Instead, hers was a “Religion of Humanity,” involving “the
expansion of the sense of human fellowship into an impulse strong enough to compel us to live
for others, even though it be beneath the on-coming shadow of an endless night”(Myers 1881,
p. 61). At this, Nietzsche complained,“They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the
more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality”(1968, p. 69). But this “English
consistency,” he argued, is altogether inconsistent. He urged that, in giving up the Christian
faith,“one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” The “duty” to which Eliot
and her freethinking friends appealed, was actually part and parcel of the system that is
Christianity.“By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole:
nothing necessary remains in one’s hands”(Nietzsche 1968, pp. 69–70). Indeed, the moral
“intuitions” to which Eliot and others appealed were nothing more than the lingering effects of
Christianity upon that society–fading echoes of the late deity’s voice, whose churches remained
as his “tombs and sepulchers”(Nietzsche 1982, pp. 181–2).
If Eliot held out for the reality of a moral law over against the illusion of religion, Nietzsche
countered with the exclamation,“Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in
realities which are no realities”(1968, p. 55). Nietzsche’s moral nihilism is handily summarized
with his assertion,“There are altogether no moral facts”(1968, p. 55). And there are no such
facts precisely because neither are there any theological ones.