Nietzsche and the Critique of Kantian Moral Psychology

Moral psychology is an important part of ethics. Some of the recent interpreters of Nietzsche’s philosophy have tried to elaborate a Nietzschean naturalistic moral psychology based on his remarks and pose it against other positions in moral psychology، especially the Kantian one with its fundamental claim that third-person accounts of moral psychology have no bearing on a morality which purportedly guides us from the first-person perspective. Two of the main related constituents of Kant’s moral psychology are the concepts of will and deliberation،which in this paper I will try to show how، according to these recent interpreters، Nietzsche explains them entirely in terms of a system of desires، without any appeal to a separate will. If the Nietzschean account is correct، then the Kantian view that deliberation proceeds from a standpoint detached from all desires could not be maintained.