Master morality

Master-slave morality is the theme of some of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, in particular the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argued that there were two fundamental types of morality: 'Master morality' and 'slave morality'. Master morality fits actions into a scale of good or bad whereas slave morality fits actions into a scale of good or evil. What Nietzsche meant by 'morality' deviates from common understanding of this term. Fundamental morality, for Nietzsche, imbibes and delineates a whole world-view; it is formative of a particular culture at its very root. This means that its language, codes and practises, its narratives and institutions - basically the very structures of intelligibility that underpin Western culture as such - are informed by the struggle between these two types of evaluation.

Master morality
Nietzsche defined master morality as the morality of the strong-willed. For these men the 'good' is the noble, strong and powerful, while the 'bad' is the weak, cowardly, timid and petty. Other qualities that are often valued in master moralities are open-mindedness, courage, truthfulness, trust and a sense of self-worth. Master morality begins in the 'noble man' with a spontaneous idea of the good, then the idea of bad develops in opposition to it. (On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, Section 11) He said: "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'; it knows itself to be that which first accords honour to things; it is value-creating." (Beyond Good and Evil). While the masters can be thought of as the creators, it can be said that the slaves merely react to the conditions created by others.

Slave morality
Slave morality begins in those people who are weak, uncertain of themselves, oppressed and abused. Understandably, characteristics of those who fall under the slave morality often include being pessimistic, distrustful and sceptical. They are particularly wary of the things that their oppressors value as "good". The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the community as a whole. Since the powerful are few in number compared to the masses of the weak, the weak gain power vis-a-vis the strong by treating those qualities that are valued by the powerful (the things that cause their own unsatisfactory condition) as "evil," and those qualities that enable sufferers to endure their lot or improve their condition as "good."

Transcendental values
The values that the noble man creates, i.e. Master morality, are in effect transcendental: they provide the horizon for our whole Western exegesis. With the Death of God, for Nietzsche, our horizons become (paradoxically) historical: we realize that they were created by Men. Thus from one perspective the noble man of Master morality was the literal creator, or evaluator, of a particular value structure that we always operate within. It is only from within this structure that things become intelligible; it engenders our thought and language from its very ground. For Nietzsche values penetrate fact, norms engender our world view to such an extent that they are transcendental - like a semantic cage, outside of which nothing makes sense except reason.

On society
This transcendental struggle between the values of the master and the slave finds continual expression in world history. One of the main themes in Nietzsche's work is that ancient Greek and Roman societies were grounded in master morality, and that this morality disappeared as the slave morality of Christianity spread through ancient Rome. Indeed he goes so far as to say that the essential struggle between cultures has always been between the Roman type and the Judean type. Furthermore there is no doubt who had, by Nietzsche's day, won this struggle. As he put it; "consider before whom one bows today in Rome as before the epitome of all the highest values…before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet-maker Paul, and the mother of the aforementioned Jesus, Mary" (sect.16 On the Genealogy of Morality).

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. He claimed that the nascent democratic and socialistic movements were engendered by much the same motivations as had impelled the first Christians in their revolt against Rome. These were the (often unconscious) motives of resentment and "priestly vindictiveness". Such movements were, to Nietzsche, inspired by "the most intelligent revenge" of the downtrodden masses. By Nietzsche's time, however, movements such as socialism were in fact both secular and naturalistic in outlook. As such, the covert use by such movements of concepts like "ethical truths" and "moral facts" was totally incongruous (in Nietzsche's view) with their outlook taken as a whole. It was not surprising that Nietzsche wrote witheringly of both the first Christians and the (secular) modern moralist as he viewed them both as having the same underlying slave morality and therefore as psychologically dishonest. Occasional references also suggest that he meant the terms "master" and "slave" to be applied both to other (non-European, non-ancient) societies and to struggles on-going within individual persons.