If guilt is, as Nietzsche seems to suggest, an invention of the priests of Israel, then nothing prior to the priesthood should bear much resemblance to guilt. But if there's something like it in subhuman animals, then N's claim seems just plain fanciful. And if it has an analogue in the animal kingdom that a materialist would naturally imagine serves as the foundation for human guilt feelings, well, then N's commitment to naturalism is at odds with his genealogy of morals.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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