Contra Kant: Experimental ethics in Guyau and Kant

Powerful critiques of Kantian ethics are mounted towards the end of the nineteenth century by naturalistic-minded philosophers such as Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-88) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). This chapter examines the basis of these critiques and what, if anything, they have in common. The aim of such critiques is to challenge the universalist assumptions of Kantian ethics and favour instead a genuinely experimental ethics, one that is premised on a commitment to moral variability and that seeks to promote heterodox forms of living. As Nietzsche puts it in his text of 1881, Dawn, the idea of'the human being' is a 'bloodless abstraction' and 'fiction' (D 105, KSA 3.93). But on what precise grounds do figures such as Guyau and Nietzsche challenge universalism in ethics? And what kind of future for ethical life do they envisage? Here we are not so much concerned with whether these figures get Kant right, but with exploring the nature of their experimentalism and its grounds.