The Download of the Week is Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche by Brian Leiter. Here is the abstract:
This
essay offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s argument for moral
skepticism (i.e., the metaphysical thesis that there do not exist any
objective moral properties or facts), an argument that should be of
independent philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche
offers a version of the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike
familiar varieties, it does not purport to exploit anthropological
reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even
garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases.
Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and
embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers
over two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured
on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent
and apparently intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of
course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and
mathematics (perhaps in kind, certainly in degree). According to
Nietzsche, the best explanation for this disagreement is that, even
though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can still construct valid
dialectical justifications for moral propositions because the premises
of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs of
at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The
essay concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this
abductive argument for skepticism based on moral disagreement and by
addressing the question whether the argument "proves too much," that
is, whether it might entail an implausible skepticism about a wide
range of topics about which there is philosophical disagreement.
There are some interesting comments on Leiter’s Nietzsche Blog.
Highly recommended. Download it while its hot!