Shut Up About Slave Morality

Slave morality is just morality

“Oh, you think when you see a baby, you shouldn’t stick it in the blender, even when doing so would be funny or the baby is being annoying? Slave morality!”

There’s a lot of discussion among many people, especially fans of Nietzsche and those on the right, of master and slave morality. Master morality is supposed to be the type of morality that reveres strength and dominance, toughness and power, while slave morality is that which champions the weak and appeals to the masses. It argues against forms of oppression and domination. As Erik Torenberg says:

Prior to Christianity, value system and myths were all oriented around strength, excellence, and achievement — or Master Morality. Christianity flipped morality upside down and introduced Slave Morality: “The first shall be last, last shall be first.“

In other words, Christianity reordered values in western society from veneration of the strong (Master Morality) to veneration of the weak (Slave Morality) — from condemnation of the weak (Master Morality) to commendation of the strong (Slave Morality). “The Meek shall inherit the earth”.

There are a lot of people—especially online—who treat slave morality with a sort of disdain. They treat it as some sort of modern aberration, as though its proponents are in some way cucked. There are various people online wondering if veganism is slave morality on the grounds that it involves putting other’s interests before one’s own strength and saying similar things about utilitarianism and effective altruism.

I am deeply annoyed by this concept. The worst kinds of concepts are those that give sloppy thinking a catchy name. For example, the phrase ‘God of the gaps’ is annoying because it makes taboo a perfectly good kind of reasoning—namely, inference to the best explanation.

But the phrase slave morality is even more annoying. Because the thing it makes taboo is being in favor of good things. People who talk derisively about slave morality seem uniformly to have no idea what morality is, and act as if caring about it is something debased or cucked. For an example of this kind of reasoning, look no further than Brett Anderson’s piece calling utilitarianism slave morality:

For example, moral philosopher Peter Singer has often argued that people have a moral obligation to give some of their income to impoverished people. This argument has almost certainly influenced people to actually give money to charity. But where does this moral obligation come from? Singer might say that it comes from the self-evident truth that all lives are morally equal. If we would be willing to save a drowning child in front of us, then we should also be willing to save a starving child thousands of miles away. But then I am compelled to ask: is it really self-evident that all lives are morally equal? Where does this moral equality come from? Is it built into the structure of the universe? Can it be discovered like a mathematical formula (e.g., the Pythagorean theorem)? Is it commanded to us by God? Was it also true 5,000 years ago, before the idea of “moral equality” had occurred to anyone (and when human sacrifice was nearly universal)?

Before I address the charge of this being slave morality, let me just point out that these are extremely unconvincing challenges to moral realism. Where do the moral facts come from? Nowhere, just like numbers, modal facts (e.g. the fact that contradictions are impossible), logical facts, other mathematical facts, metaphysical facts, and whatever the first physically existent thing was.

Were the moral facts that are true today true in the past? Yes! If you see a drowning child, before finding out if you should wade in to save them, you do not have to look at what the date is! If you made a time machine, and a child was drowning in the time machine, your obligation to save them wouldn’t diminish as you went further back in time. The imperative to save a child doesn’t depend on when you’re doing it.

Imagine the following dialogue between Jim, who goes around poking people in the eye, and Fred who is against that sort of stuff.

Fred: Hey Jim, you should really stop poking people in the eye. Lots of people have sore eyes because you keep poking them with great force. You’ve also fully blinded ten people.

Jim: Now hold on a minute, where does this moral obligation come from? You might say that it comes from the self-evident truth that it’s wrong to poke people in the eye for no reason. But then I am compelled to ask: is it really self-evident that you shouldn't poke people in the eye for no reason? Where does the eye-poking principle come from? Is it built into the structure of the universe? Can it be discovered like a mathematical formula (e.g., the Pythagorean theorem)? Is it commanded to us by God? Was it also true 5,000 years ago, before the idea of “not poking people in the eye” had occurred to anyone (and when human sacrifice was nearly universal)?

Clearly, this would be silly. And it would be just as silly if lots of society felt this way. Even if you’re an anti-realist about morality, if you care about doing the right thing, you should want to not draw your moral lines based on clearly morally irrelevant distinctions. You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter. Singer’s argument shows that those who don’t care about obviously stupid things like how far away people are should care about faraway children dying of disease.

The essence of morality is slave morality. It’s caring about those who are downtrodden who cannot stand up for themselves. It is good that slavery was abolished, and those who were abolitionists were heroic, even though they were standing up for those who couldn’t repay them in return. Similarly, it is good that lots of people are trying to end the abuses on factory farms, even though they don’t get any reward from it. Caring about others involves caring about them even when they don’t benefit you materially.

Now, it’s one thing to not care about others. That makes you an asshole, but at least you’re consistent. But acting like, as those who drone endlessly about slave morality do, there’s something confused or mistaken or cucked about caring about others is very foolish. Seeing as many of these people seem fond of this meme, I will repurpose it:

It’s not a useful piece of analysis to claim that moral views that advocate helping others are slave morality, if slave morality is just the kind of morality that helps the downtrodden! That kind of morality is, in fact, good. Nothing Nietzsche says about how that historically developed jeopardizes that core claim, that it’s bad when the downtrodden suffer and we should do something about that (his historical claims also happen to be false, but that’s a story for another day).

The other thing that’s annoying about the discussion about slave morality is how confused the philosophy behind it generally is. When justifying not caring about the weak and downtrodden, people will often make these claims like “the strong dominate the weak.” Yes, this often does happen, but inferring from the fact that X happens that X ought to happen is bad reasoning, that derives normative claims from descriptive claims.

When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.

The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring. Philosophy Bear put it best:

Evil people exist

A lot of people scoff at the idea that anyone is committed to evil or consciously motivated by evil. We are encouraged to laugh at books that feature villains motivated by wickedness alone.

I think the books have a point. I think that, as a matter of empirical reality, there are plenty of people who more or less are openly devoted to evil. To be sure, there are a lot of conceptual issues here. It’s hard to think about what this means to be devoted to evil, because in a sense to think you should pursue something is to designate it good. Certainly, few, if any, people run around saying “I support evil” and mean it.

But there are plenty of people who endorse, more or less, the opposite of those things we call the good. I am not talking about people like the Aum Shinrikyo cult, or Osama bin Laden. These people are relatively close to our ethical framework by comparison.

I am talking about people who say things like “I despise weakness, the world is, and should be, a place of constant struggle for survival in which the strong displace the weak. The long peace the West has lived under is disastrous for warrior virtue. The purpose of life is not happiness, or even ‘excellence’ in some abstract sense, but mastery and domination, we should exalt in the cruelty of the strong against the weak.”

Now, to be sure, there are senses in which this does not count as an explicit commitment to evil, but, more or less, that’s what it is. Exalting war over peace and cruelty over compassion rejects almost everything about the good except perhaps the guise of the good (and even then…). And while the type I gave an example of above is relatively rare, I have had the displeasure of encountering men like this online much more often than I would like. I don’t mean people who I’ve inferred think these sorts of things, I mean people who have stated them. I’m not the only person who is aware of these odious types of course, but I think many people haven’t noticed that, in practice, 1. they’re more or less a comic book villain but without the power, and 2. they’re real.

And more there are plenty of men, perhaps even a few women, who flirt with ideas like these. Who dip their toe in this sort of thing: “Why should I have to keep justifying my politics by saying they make things better for the weak? I don’t really care about the weak”.