Just want to add that these people should try reading Nietzsche seriously, and not with a 14 year old boy mentality. If they do, they'll see that Nietzsche, while by no means a supporter of an ethics of universal compassion, would have found their views- their mass produced nihilism as "self-help"- equally, if not more repulsive.
Can we have both? Can we have the mindset of the doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not suffer, but also so that they can run a half-marathon?
So
1) do have compassion
2) do care about making people happy, not suffer
3) but also do care about making them strong and vital, not weak?
Yes, I'd like a review of what Nietzsche actually said about master morality. It seems that a lot of the new Nietzscheans are adopting an attitude of hostility towards the weak, whereas Nietzsche would have recommended more pro-social attitudes as long as they didn't hamper the strong significantly.
Beyond being evil, this sort of "master morality" is, ironically enough, unnatural for human beings. Human beings come into the world completely helpless and even as adults require the constant care and support of a human culture or else they will quickly die. This sort of "struggle" rhetoric is fit for a creature that hatched from an egg with no social or family ties, like a snake or a frog, not a human being. Of course, snakes and frogs don't write dunderheaded anti-moral manifestos on the internet because creatures without social behavior do not have any need or use for language or intelligence and are served quite well by a pinhead-sized brain and a cold blooded metabolism.
E: As for a strictly *tribal* morality, bounded to a specific group, I find the idea of such repellent but I admit that for certain sorts of societies it could be potentially be viable, not optimal or even good, but viable, as a way of life, but to reject the idea of altruism and care of any kind is to be in total denial of the nature and needs of the human animal. We are not reptiles. We cannot live without caring for one another. To deny this reality is to mooch off the care of others without acknowledging any responsibility to give back or pay forward, which is quite the irony, come to think of it...
Most of the Nietzsche fanboys around here have not read the Genealogy, even if they think they have. Case in point, they only ever talk about slave and master morality, which only appears in the first third of the book. Slave morality isn't just ethics, it's the self itself; the blond beasts had no reason to pretend to be the same person one day or the next. You aren't wrong that a lot of the "Nietzscheanism" around here is a kind of whinging; slave morality, in other words.
Nonetheless, you should read Nietzsche yourself; you'll find a lot to chew on, more than his supposed fans will tell you about. The point of the Genealogy is the psychological basis of ethics, when you understand it you'll see that your "genuine desire to help out others" can be the basis for the wickedest forms of cruelty.
This entire post appears to be asserting that “master morality” is a rejection of slave morality, which is bad because slave morality is obviously good.
The first part of trivial, but the second part is just an incredulous assertion of a conclusion. Where’s the argument?
I don't understand why it should be important to anyone with such a brutal Darwinian understanding of morality to want to be someone who truly understands and best interprets Nietzsche. The guy was paralyzed and sick and wearing a diaper and being kept alive by his elderly mom before he was even 45. He was sickly and frail his whole life. He's the utter embodiment of the weak.
What is with people always choosing idols who directly embody virtually everything they rail against??
Anyway, if you're trying to convince someone dedicated to naturalistic "morality", isn't it best to take their own premises as true, and then point out the negative consequences on that basis? Like the fact that it is obviously true and quite intrinsic and natural that humans have an exquisite sensitivity to unfairness, suffering, and cruelty? And that given this natural and inherent predisposition, those who practice dominance and taking of unfair advantages arouse the fury of everyone else, and therefore put the Darwinian at severe risk of being publicly executed or humiliated, or at least having their throats slit while they sleep?
Because that is both true, and works within their existing framework (and this person almost surely engages in fantasies of taking morally indignant violence out on people, from time to time), and it's also something they wouldn't like.
"Slave morality is just the kind of morality that helps the downtrodden"
No, slave morality is the kind of morality that *empathizes* with the downtrodden. But that's different from actually helping. It has certainly achieved some wins, like the abolition of slavery. But when we zoom out to take a larger-scale historical perspective, it becomes clear that we live in a world where the best ways to help the downtrodden are scientific discovery, technological innovation, and truth-seeking. These created the abundance which was necessary for spreading the ideals of human rights worldwide. And none of them inherently require empathy for the downtrodden—in fact, if anything, they tend to be blocked or sabotaged by those who profess such empathy.
I take master and slave morality to be a criticism of the tendency to venerate weakness itself. Moreover, the point is to derive morality from those who could choose. Masters were in a position to choose what they valued and chose wealth, health, and happiness as good things. Slaves had little choice, so would invert this morality and view poverty, infirmity, and victimhood as good things. What a disaster! We should want everyone to be wealthy, healthy, and happy! Not poor, sick, and victimized.
In other words, when the wealthy give money to the poor its not moral because the wealthy are getting poorer and being poor is moral, rather, it's moral because the poor are getting wealthier and wealth is good.
When interpreting Nietzsche, I think of the paper Stages in the Evolution of Ethnocentrism, published at McGill in 2008. The researchers used computer simulations to seek insight into why collectivism exists, given that the Prisoner's Dilemma says we should never cooperate with others.
They divided the board into four teams. A collectivist only cooperates with other collectivists. An individualist (or a humanitarian, or a universalist) cooperates with everyone. An egoist cooperates with no one. A traitor cooperates with everyone except other traitors. Given enough time, the collectivists always win, though individualism/universalism can hold out for a while.
Which category does Nietzsche fall under? He's not a collectivist because he hates anything related to conformity. Despite his rebelliousness, he's not a resentful contrarian traitor, evil for the sake of being eviiillll since those types want to do dirt on life, while Nietzsche wants to affirm life. I don't think he is an egoist either since an egoist, if you think about it in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma, is something of a free-rider, a parasite, not someone who climbs the social pyramid.
Does this mean Nietzsche is some kind of warped humanitarian? He is dynamic, progressive, aretaic, seeking to uplift humanity to a higher state and wants to climb to the summit of everything. His Große Politik fits in the same category — a multicultural elite doing great things on the backs of supposed losers, seeking out churn and conflict for their own sake as a creative destiny. He's not some ethnonationalist who wants to hide in the Shire, nor does he seek a blissed, bovine, inactive Epicurean existence at the top of a racial hierarchy, and he's not playing a mustache-twirling contrarian pro wrestling heel like Richard Spencer either. But is this really humanitarianism, or an exceedingly deceitful, maybe even self-deceitful, a variant of resentful treachery, or even a lazy parasitical fantasy run wild?
In any event, Nietzsche is worse than a fascist -- he is what today we would call a conservative. It was entirely appropriate for Corey Robin to claim that Nietzsche has a spiritual affinity with Friedrich von Hayek. ("Nietzsche's Marginalist Children" is a great essay.) The superman, a truthless person who believes they are a legend in their own mind and wills themselves to the top on that basis -- is Donald Trump. It is not a pretty sight.
Not a Nietzchean nor a philosopher but I just found this piece both unfair and unpersuasive...
"The essence of morality is slave morality. It’s caring about those who are downtrodden who cannot stand up for themselves.
"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!"
I would be surprised if a Pagan in pre-Roman Britain DIDN'T save a drowning child in his immediate vicinity. But supposing our Pagan had the power to teleport across the planet and possessed the gift of foresight, he probably wouldn't bother saving that the drowning kid in China. Nietzsche would be of the same mind. If slave morality is the essence of morality and if that is predicated on the belief that everyone deserves equal consideration, then this suggests that Pagan morality wasn't really morality
"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."
I think it's the other way around. The worry is with the "weak (the mob) dominating the strong." Something to do with effects of having a culture comprised of "Last Man" types and their values on the possibility of creative genius. I dunno, but this strikes me as kind of intuitive (maybe I've read too many Ayn Rand novels). Also, I don't think Nietzsche was in the business of making normative claims. He's basically saying "if you're an Overman like myself, you'd probably think the same about the mob"
"[On Jim poking people in the eye] Clearly, this would be silly. And it would be just as silly if lots of society felt this way"
I don't think Nietzschean Jim would even bother poking random people in the eye (unless doing so happens to be a necessary path towards greatness). Context matters. Think a better example would take things like genius and greatness into account (and I acknowledge how having to poke eyes to get there would be ridiculous). Perhaps a better way to frame this would be in terms of asking which type of endeavor would be worthy of investing billions of dollars: reducing world hunger or a mission to Alpha Centauri? Nietzsche, I think would choose the latter... and once again I'm not sure why that would be immoral
Honestly I don't really get this argument, not because morality exists so much as because moral relativism doesn't make sense in the sense of: why should you care what other people find moral?
Of course I'd care about being exiled, ostracized, or killed for wearing purple on Wednesdays if I was around people who thought wearing purple on Wednesdays was immoral.
You've literally never read Nietzsche. Or you're unaware of these guys called the ancient Greeks, or the fact that Nietzsche's day job was expounding on their writing (which contains an awful lot of material about slave morality).
"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. "
You have chosen an easy example. Ask.whether veganism is morally obligatory for ice age nomads.
Can we have both? Can we have the mindset of the doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not suffer, but also so that they can run a half-marathon?
So
1) do have compassion
2) do care about making people happy, not suffer
3) but also do care about making them strong and vital, not weak?
Also, if you actually read the Iliad and Odyssey, while not exactly consistently morally consonant with the morality of us liberal moderns (to say the least), they are *much more so* than you would expect if you took seriously the idea that all of what these people called "slave morality" came from Christianity and Judaism.
My thinking a long time ago was that Christians can use a Nietzschean argument against meager moral fruits. The idea is that if Nietzche is right then Christianity's moral fruits are the rejection of aristocratic morality in favor of a more universalist one.
The only problem is that I didn't find Nietzche persuasive after a cursory reading of the Genealogy. He has an argument from etymology. That the word for bad in German has the same etymological roots as a word for "common" people, and he believed that aristocrats used the words good and bad in a dispassioned way to refer to the non-aristocrats and themselves. I find this flawed because it seems that we naturally use words for common people in a negative light. Considerr words like "normies" or "sheeple" which are negatively loaded terms for those not in some in-group.
I at least partially agree with you, but to throw a wrench in your class assessment of terms: “normie” or “sheeple” to me are usually loaded with an implication of consumerism that demands some disposable income. I don’t think of people in poverty as normies as much as suburbanites driving their SUVs to the mall. “Normies” as I interpret the word are often people who are smart enough to get a college education and work in HR or marketing or whatever, and having a college education at all is still pretty elite.
So the denigration of the term is often directionally upward on the socioeconomic hierarchy from a slave morality perspective, “they may have a nicer car and a nicer house, but they’re shallow/vapid people,” or it’s coming from above with a master morality perspective “they tried to be excellent and set themselves apart, but they’re still mediocre/unremarkable people.”
Maybe a word like “rabble” gets more at the class dynamic you’re pointing towards, but the slave morality is dominant enough these days that if someone called others “rabble” we’d think they’re an asshole. And I’m struggling to even think of another word with the same valence as “rabble.”
I know many on the right, specially Nrxs who just water down Hume and use a kind of pragmatic cynicism so they can go against some proposition made by the progressive Zeitgeist. They just hear about the naturalistic fallacy and leave moral philosophy at that (and I am speaking as a moral realist).
As Blessed Marcel of Spínola said “If you don't live to serve, you don't serve to live”
Just want to add that these people should try reading Nietzsche seriously, and not with a 14 year old boy mentality. If they do, they'll see that Nietzsche, while by no means a supporter of an ethics of universal compassion, would have found their views- their mass produced nihilism as "self-help"- equally, if not more repulsive.
BB, also @Walt and @Philosophy Bear
Can we have both? Can we have the mindset of the doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not suffer, but also so that they can run a half-marathon?
So
1) do have compassion
2) do care about making people happy, not suffer
3) but also do care about making them strong and vital, not weak?
Yes, I'd like a review of what Nietzsche actually said about master morality. It seems that a lot of the new Nietzscheans are adopting an attitude of hostility towards the weak, whereas Nietzsche would have recommended more pro-social attitudes as long as they didn't hamper the strong significantly.
Beyond being evil, this sort of "master morality" is, ironically enough, unnatural for human beings. Human beings come into the world completely helpless and even as adults require the constant care and support of a human culture or else they will quickly die. This sort of "struggle" rhetoric is fit for a creature that hatched from an egg with no social or family ties, like a snake or a frog, not a human being. Of course, snakes and frogs don't write dunderheaded anti-moral manifestos on the internet because creatures without social behavior do not have any need or use for language or intelligence and are served quite well by a pinhead-sized brain and a cold blooded metabolism.
E: As for a strictly *tribal* morality, bounded to a specific group, I find the idea of such repellent but I admit that for certain sorts of societies it could be potentially be viable, not optimal or even good, but viable, as a way of life, but to reject the idea of altruism and care of any kind is to be in total denial of the nature and needs of the human animal. We are not reptiles. We cannot live without caring for one another. To deny this reality is to mooch off the care of others without acknowledging any responsibility to give back or pay forward, which is quite the irony, come to think of it...
Most of the Nietzsche fanboys around here have not read the Genealogy, even if they think they have. Case in point, they only ever talk about slave and master morality, which only appears in the first third of the book. Slave morality isn't just ethics, it's the self itself; the blond beasts had no reason to pretend to be the same person one day or the next. You aren't wrong that a lot of the "Nietzscheanism" around here is a kind of whinging; slave morality, in other words.
Nonetheless, you should read Nietzsche yourself; you'll find a lot to chew on, more than his supposed fans will tell you about. The point of the Genealogy is the psychological basis of ethics, when you understand it you'll see that your "genuine desire to help out others" can be the basis for the wickedest forms of cruelty.
This entire post appears to be asserting that “master morality” is a rejection of slave morality, which is bad because slave morality is obviously good.
The first part of trivial, but the second part is just an incredulous assertion of a conclusion. Where’s the argument?
I think the point is that it's really silly to criticize effective altruism for being... altruistic
I don't understand why it should be important to anyone with such a brutal Darwinian understanding of morality to want to be someone who truly understands and best interprets Nietzsche. The guy was paralyzed and sick and wearing a diaper and being kept alive by his elderly mom before he was even 45. He was sickly and frail his whole life. He's the utter embodiment of the weak.
What is with people always choosing idols who directly embody virtually everything they rail against??
Anyway, if you're trying to convince someone dedicated to naturalistic "morality", isn't it best to take their own premises as true, and then point out the negative consequences on that basis? Like the fact that it is obviously true and quite intrinsic and natural that humans have an exquisite sensitivity to unfairness, suffering, and cruelty? And that given this natural and inherent predisposition, those who practice dominance and taking of unfair advantages arouse the fury of everyone else, and therefore put the Darwinian at severe risk of being publicly executed or humiliated, or at least having their throats slit while they sleep?
Because that is both true, and works within their existing framework (and this person almost surely engages in fantasies of taking morally indignant violence out on people, from time to time), and it's also something they wouldn't like.
Nietzsche may have been physically weak but he was an intellectual giant.
You'd think someone like Theodore Roosevelt would have invented such an ethos.
"Slave morality is just the kind of morality that helps the downtrodden"
No, slave morality is the kind of morality that *empathizes* with the downtrodden. But that's different from actually helping. It has certainly achieved some wins, like the abolition of slavery. But when we zoom out to take a larger-scale historical perspective, it becomes clear that we live in a world where the best ways to help the downtrodden are scientific discovery, technological innovation, and truth-seeking. These created the abundance which was necessary for spreading the ideals of human rights worldwide. And none of them inherently require empathy for the downtrodden—in fact, if anything, they tend to be blocked or sabotaged by those who profess such empathy.
Huh I should’ve expected you to be on sub stack loved your stuff on LessWrong they helped me tons
I take master and slave morality to be a criticism of the tendency to venerate weakness itself. Moreover, the point is to derive morality from those who could choose. Masters were in a position to choose what they valued and chose wealth, health, and happiness as good things. Slaves had little choice, so would invert this morality and view poverty, infirmity, and victimhood as good things. What a disaster! We should want everyone to be wealthy, healthy, and happy! Not poor, sick, and victimized.
In other words, when the wealthy give money to the poor its not moral because the wealthy are getting poorer and being poor is moral, rather, it's moral because the poor are getting wealthier and wealth is good.
When interpreting Nietzsche, I think of the paper Stages in the Evolution of Ethnocentrism, published at McGill in 2008. The researchers used computer simulations to seek insight into why collectivism exists, given that the Prisoner's Dilemma says we should never cooperate with others.
They divided the board into four teams. A collectivist only cooperates with other collectivists. An individualist (or a humanitarian, or a universalist) cooperates with everyone. An egoist cooperates with no one. A traitor cooperates with everyone except other traitors. Given enough time, the collectivists always win, though individualism/universalism can hold out for a while.
https://www.psych.mcgill.ca/perpg/fac/shultz/personal/Recent_Publications_files/ethnocentrism08.pdf
Which category does Nietzsche fall under? He's not a collectivist because he hates anything related to conformity. Despite his rebelliousness, he's not a resentful contrarian traitor, evil for the sake of being eviiillll since those types want to do dirt on life, while Nietzsche wants to affirm life. I don't think he is an egoist either since an egoist, if you think about it in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma, is something of a free-rider, a parasite, not someone who climbs the social pyramid.
Does this mean Nietzsche is some kind of warped humanitarian? He is dynamic, progressive, aretaic, seeking to uplift humanity to a higher state and wants to climb to the summit of everything. His Große Politik fits in the same category — a multicultural elite doing great things on the backs of supposed losers, seeking out churn and conflict for their own sake as a creative destiny. He's not some ethnonationalist who wants to hide in the Shire, nor does he seek a blissed, bovine, inactive Epicurean existence at the top of a racial hierarchy, and he's not playing a mustache-twirling contrarian pro wrestling heel like Richard Spencer either. But is this really humanitarianism, or an exceedingly deceitful, maybe even self-deceitful, a variant of resentful treachery, or even a lazy parasitical fantasy run wild?
In any event, Nietzsche is worse than a fascist -- he is what today we would call a conservative. It was entirely appropriate for Corey Robin to claim that Nietzsche has a spiritual affinity with Friedrich von Hayek. ("Nietzsche's Marginalist Children" is a great essay.) The superman, a truthless person who believes they are a legend in their own mind and wills themselves to the top on that basis -- is Donald Trump. It is not a pretty sight.
If worshiping resentful losers who contribute nothing to world is the real morality, sounds like a good argument for "immorality" to me.
Not a Nietzchean nor a philosopher but I just found this piece both unfair and unpersuasive...
"The essence of morality is slave morality. It’s caring about those who are downtrodden who cannot stand up for themselves.
"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!"
I would be surprised if a Pagan in pre-Roman Britain DIDN'T save a drowning child in his immediate vicinity. But supposing our Pagan had the power to teleport across the planet and possessed the gift of foresight, he probably wouldn't bother saving that the drowning kid in China. Nietzsche would be of the same mind. If slave morality is the essence of morality and if that is predicated on the belief that everyone deserves equal consideration, then this suggests that Pagan morality wasn't really morality
"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."
I think it's the other way around. The worry is with the "weak (the mob) dominating the strong." Something to do with effects of having a culture comprised of "Last Man" types and their values on the possibility of creative genius. I dunno, but this strikes me as kind of intuitive (maybe I've read too many Ayn Rand novels). Also, I don't think Nietzsche was in the business of making normative claims. He's basically saying "if you're an Overman like myself, you'd probably think the same about the mob"
"[On Jim poking people in the eye] Clearly, this would be silly. And it would be just as silly if lots of society felt this way"
I don't think Nietzschean Jim would even bother poking random people in the eye (unless doing so happens to be a necessary path towards greatness). Context matters. Think a better example would take things like genius and greatness into account (and I acknowledge how having to poke eyes to get there would be ridiculous). Perhaps a better way to frame this would be in terms of asking which type of endeavor would be worthy of investing billions of dollars: reducing world hunger or a mission to Alpha Centauri? Nietzsche, I think would choose the latter... and once again I'm not sure why that would be immoral
Honestly I don't really get this argument, not because morality exists so much as because moral relativism doesn't make sense in the sense of: why should you care what other people find moral?
Because I'd everyone else thinks you're immoral, they have a tendency to want to lock you up, exile, ostracize, or kill you?
Of course I'd care about being exiled, ostracized, or killed for wearing purple on Wednesdays if I was around people who thought wearing purple on Wednesdays was immoral.
You've literally never read Nietzsche. Or you're unaware of these guys called the ancient Greeks, or the fact that Nietzsche's day job was expounding on their writing (which contains an awful lot of material about slave morality).
"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. "
You have chosen an easy example. Ask.whether veganism is morally obligatory for ice age nomads.
BB, also @Walt and @Philosophy Bear
Can we have both? Can we have the mindset of the doctor who heals people's knees not only so that they do not suffer, but also so that they can run a half-marathon?
So
1) do have compassion
2) do care about making people happy, not suffer
3) but also do care about making them strong and vital, not weak?
Also, if you actually read the Iliad and Odyssey, while not exactly consistently morally consonant with the morality of us liberal moderns (to say the least), they are *much more so* than you would expect if you took seriously the idea that all of what these people called "slave morality" came from Christianity and Judaism.
My thinking a long time ago was that Christians can use a Nietzschean argument against meager moral fruits. The idea is that if Nietzche is right then Christianity's moral fruits are the rejection of aristocratic morality in favor of a more universalist one.
The only problem is that I didn't find Nietzche persuasive after a cursory reading of the Genealogy. He has an argument from etymology. That the word for bad in German has the same etymological roots as a word for "common" people, and he believed that aristocrats used the words good and bad in a dispassioned way to refer to the non-aristocrats and themselves. I find this flawed because it seems that we naturally use words for common people in a negative light. Considerr words like "normies" or "sheeple" which are negatively loaded terms for those not in some in-group.
I thought you were you going to.say "villain", which originally.meant villager.
I at least partially agree with you, but to throw a wrench in your class assessment of terms: “normie” or “sheeple” to me are usually loaded with an implication of consumerism that demands some disposable income. I don’t think of people in poverty as normies as much as suburbanites driving their SUVs to the mall. “Normies” as I interpret the word are often people who are smart enough to get a college education and work in HR or marketing or whatever, and having a college education at all is still pretty elite.
So the denigration of the term is often directionally upward on the socioeconomic hierarchy from a slave morality perspective, “they may have a nicer car and a nicer house, but they’re shallow/vapid people,” or it’s coming from above with a master morality perspective “they tried to be excellent and set themselves apart, but they’re still mediocre/unremarkable people.”
Maybe a word like “rabble” gets more at the class dynamic you’re pointing towards, but the slave morality is dominant enough these days that if someone called others “rabble” we’d think they’re an asshole. And I’m struggling to even think of another word with the same valence as “rabble.”
I know many on the right, specially Nrxs who just water down Hume and use a kind of pragmatic cynicism so they can go against some proposition made by the progressive Zeitgeist. They just hear about the naturalistic fallacy and leave moral philosophy at that (and I am speaking as a moral realist).
As Blessed Marcel of Spínola said “If you don't live to serve, you don't serve to live”