It seems like a problem to say that love can be merited—its value is located in its transcendence of comparative judgments. However, we commonly make judgments about who is and is not worth loving. We deem certain romantic partners, friends, and family members as worth or not worth our loving time, attention, and effort. In this paper, I argue that love can be merited, and it is merited because of a person’s intrinsic valuable qualities. However, it is not the fact (...) that such qualities can be compared that is relevant. What is relevant is the fact that such qualities are gradable, and what it means for someone to merit love is that their qualities meet a threshold or standard of value for love. Moreover, love requires some amount of practical wisdom in discerning these thresholds and when someone meets or fails to meet them. This is important to recognize since we are creatures of finite love. We do not have the capacity to love everyone who is both worthy and unworthy of love. Given our finite capacities, I argue that making wise and discerning judgments about whom to love should be kept in mind when philosophizing about love. (shrink)

This paper is forthcoming in The Moral Psychology of Resentment (Rowman & Littlefield).

In the preface to GS, Nietzsche famously exclaims, "Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity!".1 And he attributes one aspect of this profound superficiality to the Greeks' "respect for the bashfulness [Scham] with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties". For Nietzsche, both the Greeks' shame and their respect for shame played important and healthy psychological and social roles. So, Nietzsche praises shame in the sense that "care [Scham] for one's reputation" is characteristic of noble types and a "highly (...) resourceful" emotion. However, Nietzsche also sometimes condemns shame. For example, in the last three aphorisms of Book 3 of GS, he makes... (shrink)

Among other things, Nietzsche considers himself a psychologist, and many of his ideas about human behaviors, dispositions, and attitudes are empirical and falsifiable. As readers of Nietzsche, we should hope that he got some of his psychological facts right. I agree with Joshua Knobe and Brian Leiter when they argue that "neglect of Nietzsche in moral psychology is no longer an option for those philosophers who accept that moral psychology should be grounded in real psychology."1 This article aims at furthering (...) this project by exploring what Nietzsche thinks about disgust.2 However, the aim is to show not only that recent studies on disgust support many of Nietzsche's observations but also that... (shrink)

In this thesis, I focus on two undervalued aspects of Nietzsche’s admiration of the ancient Greeks: the healthy psychology of the Greeks, and the origins of this health in Homeric poetry. I argue that Homer was a cultural physician for the ancient Greeks and is responsible for creating a new, healthy set of values through his epic poetry. In turn, these Homeric values brought Greece into its “tragic age”—a time during which Greek culture was “the highest authority for what we (...) may term cultural health”. Moreover, Homer’s success as a cultural physician comes from his ability to lie poetically lie. So, I also give an account of how Nietzsche thinks this kind of lying is psychologically possible through what I call Nietzschean dissimulation. (shrink)