nietzsche's superman morality

Nietzsche is a particularly interesting philosopher because, as Russell pointed out, most of the objections that are brought up against his ideas are not rational in nature: that is, they stem from deep seeded “feelings” or other kinds of arguments not based in logical argumentation. However, if there is a way to find counterexamples to his theory without the appeal to feeling, then there might be a way to logically argue against it. I’m going to try to do just that in this brief post.

“A morality of the ruling class applies the principle that one has duties only to one’s equals…”. Here, Nietzsche is summing up a discussion that deals with the distinction of different ethical systems used by individuals in a society. The first system is the one that is constructed by religion and the masses and is what Nietzsche calls the “slave morality”. This system or morality makes individualism and self-interest the “evil”. Further, it makes the interest of the common people the “good”. This system, Nietzsche suggests, was contructed only as a contrast to the “master morality”, the morality used by the success-driven individuals in a society who worry less about popular conceptions of “good” and “evil” and instead look out for whatever they want to. This kind of morality is what drives civilizations forward, Nietzsche believes, and is thus the type of morality everyone should adopt.

Special attention should be payed to the concept of the Master Morality. According to this way morality is construed, what is good to the “overman” is just whatever makes him more powerful, and weakness is what is the “bad”. More and more power will lead the overman to be more happy, and this is how morality should be conceived. There are many ways to attack this kind of reasoning, but some of the ways are limited by our method. Let me show how this is so.

The first way to try to object to these claims is that it just doesn’t seem right. More and more power is not the same as more and more good. These two words designate different things; they’re independent concepts. A Nietzsche-an would quickly retaliate that this is precisely the point he wants to bring forth. That these two concepts are not independent and attempting to make a distinction between them is just a product of our indoctrination to the slave morality. Although this move is kind of shady on the part of the Nietzche-an, Let’s let it slide and explore other routes.

Another way to try to argue against Nietzsche’s Master morality is to try to accept the distinction between the slave and master morality, yet be agnostic about which morality to prefer. After all, the more people follow the slave morality, the more people will live longer and be saved, or so it seems. If more people are looking out for the interest of the group as a whole, then more people will place the interest of their brethren as high as their own and thus people will be more likely to help each other in times of need, when other are attacking, etc. The contrasting morality will also be necessary until a certain extent, but there would be no need for a preference either way. This I feel might be a powerful argument against Nietzsche prioritization of the master morality, as Nietzsche seems to be straddling the line between relativism and objectivity about morality. On the one hand, he says all morality is relative and there is no objective basis of morality. Yet on the other hand, he says master morality is the best morality, the right morality. There May be an implicit contradiction there.

Finally, and on to what I believe to be the most powerful argument against the assimilation of “good” and “power” in Nietzsche’s master morality, is a rather simple argument by consequence. If one person in the “master” morality decides to attain as much power as he could, and then someone else has the same objectives, then it is possible that in gaining more and more “good” one of the individuals annihilates the other. Thus for that person there is no more “good.” The acquirement of power was not in the best interest of the destroyed person, as it led to his death. Of course here the Nietzsche-an could counter-argue and say something like this: “well, that the person died was just evidence of his weakness, not necessarily that power is not good. After all, the person who ended up killing the other guy now has even more power and thus he is even more good.” But would follow with this. If ethics is a relative concept, and the preferred conception of ethics is power=good and weakness=bad, then, to the person who was attempting to attain power and failed, he was in the good yet it led to the worst kind of weakness, death. So maybe, just maybe, looking for more and more power isn’t the same as goodness after all.

Obviously my arguments aren’t very refined yet nor are they knock-down, but at least I think they show that there’s either some inconsistency in the concept of the master morality or that it’s just something that needs to be worked on by Nietzsche followers. (For all I know someone has made these terms clearer but I’m not familiar with more recent literature on the subject.)