![]() ![]() That is, Christianity and utilitarianism both exemplify the same ideology: the ideology of the majority, the herd, the cowardly, the conventional, the less-than-fully-human. In slave morality, “good” means “tending to ease suffering” and “evil” means “tending to inspire fear.” (In master morality, by contrast, it’s good to inspire fear.) Nietzsche believes that slave morality is expressed in the standard moral systems (particularly Christianity and utilitarianism). Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility,” i.e., a morality that values the mediocre group over the superior individual. Slave morality is timid, and favours a limited existence it “makes the best of a bad situation.” It promotes the virtues that “serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are honored - for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slaves are victims (the “abused, oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, the weary and those uncertain of themselves” but according to Nietzsche, most slaves choose to be victims. Slave morality, by contrast, is pessimistic and fearful. ![]() Superior people, in expressing the will to power, embody completely natural human functioning they live the most completely actualized human lives, and as such, are happy, energetic, and optimistic about the human condition. ![]() The superior person looks with profound suspicion on values such as compassion, pity, and selflessness, as well as on the ideal of equality of all persons. Nietzsche was concerned with the state of European culture during his lifetime and therefore focused much of his analysis on the history of master and slave morality within Europe (partly through the rise of ‘slave’ religion like Christianity. One of the main themes in Nietzsche’s work is that ancient Roman society was grounded in master morality, and that this morality disappeared as the slave morality of Christianity spread through ancient Rome. However, Nietzsche has something rather different in mind. Like Callicles, Nietzsche argued that morality was something developed by ‘weak’ people in order to defend themselves from the ‘strong’.Īt this point, we might recall the elitism of Aristotle’s ethics, where moral excellence is only available to the nobility. Nietzsche began his career as a philologist (student of ancient text and languages) and developed an overriding interest in the Ancient Greeks, who he thought represented the peak of Western civilization before the onset of ‘slave’ or ‘herd’ morality which culminated in Christian, Utilitarian and Kantian systems of ethics (among others). ![]()
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