Essay on Genealogy of Morals

In this essay, I will analyse the First Treaty of Friedrich Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals.
Firstly I will explain Nietzsches objective when writing the book and provide a summary of
the text. After that, I will try to analyse his arguments in detail, and finally, I will explore a
possible refutation and give my personal opinion.
Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, investigates the origin and evolution of our moral
standards, or, as he calls them, moral prejudices. However, he is not just theoretically
interested in the genealogy of morals. He wants to put the moral standards of his time (last
half of 19th century) into question. Furthermore, he intends to discredit them. He adopts a
strong position against the prevailing morality; hence we say his genealogy is a debunking
one. As he says in the Preface of the book: we need a critique of moral values, the value of
these values should itself, for once, be examined (Nietzsche 1887, Preface). This implies
Nietzsche is a moral relativist: he hopes for us to see morality not as a rational, universal
absolute, but rather as a human creation that has gradually evolved.
Nietzsche introduces his theory with an etymological explanation on the words good and
bad/evil. Originally, he says, good was applied to things that were noble, powerful and selfaffirming. However, eventually, this meaning was inverted. Powerful and self-affirming
things are now called evil. His objective is to explain how this inversion of moral values
happened.
The Genealogy of Morals explains that primitive, pre-moral societies were naturally divided
into masters and slaves. Masters devoted their life to the pursue of their self-satisfaction,
seeking strength, health, enjoyment of life, and power, without any ethical constraints nor a
hint of remorse. Slaves, on the other hand, were oppressed by the masters. Of course, they
developed strong negative feelings towards them: hate, and also jealousy, because they
would like to live the life that the masters live. The mix of hate, envy, and the frustrating
realization of impotence to change the status quo is what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, or
resentment. Their lives are marked by it.
Nietzsche says that the best example of a slave culture is the Jews (they were enslaved by
other cultures several times). The enslaved Jews found solace in religion: the promise that
all their suffering would be rewarded in an afterlife, and that the conduct of the masters
would be punished. This thinking consoled them and gave them a reason to live. The
popularity of this thinking led to the rise of the priestly caste, and to the inversion of moral
values: slaves embraced their lives and condemned the master lifestyle. Thus, what was
called good by masters (anything self-affirming) started to be called evil by slave morality,
and what was called bad by masters (anything self-sacrificing) started to be called good by
slave morality. The leaders of the Jews were priests; for Nietzsche, they represent all that
was wrong with the inversion of values: they were rulers, but instead of living a masters life,
encouraged their people to embrace the slave morality.
The culmination of this inversion came with Christ, according to Nietzsche. Christ proclaimed
that we all should love each other, including our enemies; Nietzsche sees this as the
ultimate refinement of the ressentiment. The hate of the Jews towards their oppressors was
open: they considered themselves the only Gods chosen people, destined to Salvation by
God, and that their oppressors were destined to hell. However, Christians proclaimed that

Salvation was for everyone, Jew or not, and so, extended slave morality throughout the
known world of their time. Since then, slave morality has evolved in Europe. It prevailed after
the rejection of religion by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, in the form of different
humanistic ethics, which defend justice and altruism (Kantianism and Utilitarianism, for
example). It has caused the accomplishment of democracy and the overcoming of the
master-slave social dichotomy in the First World. Nietzsche considers that democracy,
communism, religion, and other philosophies, are all heirs of slave thinking (Nietzsche 1886,
section 203). Slave morality, in conclusion, still prevails, but in various forms.
The first of Nietzsches main arguments in favour of master morality and against slave
morality stresses that the masters focus is on themselves, while the focus of the slaves is on
the masters, and their morality is a reaction to the master morality. The masters hardly
spend time thinking of anything that is not themselves. Of course, they consider that what
they do is good, and therefore what the slaves do is bad. However, this is almost an
afterthought. They are so full of purpose and life that they do not bother to compare
themselves to others. On the other hand, slaves constantly look up at their masters with
jealousy. They spend their lives wishing they were masters, but constraining those wishes,
so they invert moral values to console themselves. It is a reactive morality. Nietzsches point
here is that a reactive behaviour cannot bring happiness, only bitterness. Modern
psychology, (as well as common sense) seems to confirm this point: persons who spend a
lot of time brooding about others are likely to be unhappy. However, as Foot points out, what
is called into question is whether a non-selfish morality (the one he calls slave morality) is
as reactive and negative as he claims (Foot 1978). I will present this counter-argument later.
The second of Nietzsches main arguments is a metaphysical argument against the slave
concept of good. Nietzsche claims the doer and the deed are the same thing, and that
language is misleading in this sense, with its subject-predicate distinction. For example:
birds of prey hunt. We cannot imagine a bird of prey not hunting; if it does not hunt, then it is
not a bird of prey. Hence, they cannot be blamed for it. A bird of prey is its will to hunt; to say
that it has a free will is to commit the doer-deed distinction error. In the same sense,
masters live a self-affirming life and slaves live a sacrificed life. They are their actions and
life choices. This implies two things. First, that the masters cannot be blamed for acting like
they do, and they cannot be judged as evil. Secondly, and even more importantly, that
slaves can take no merit for acting like they do, for they are too weak-willed and coward to
act like masters anyway. They cannot label themselves as good, because they are not
making that decision freely. This argument moves into the debate of free will/determinism,
which is itself a major issue in philosophy. Being an open question, I will have to leave it
open and move on to consider some counter-arguments.
In 1978, Philippa Foot pointed out the scarcity of philosophical refutations to Nietzsche since
he wrote his books (Foot 1978). While nowadays Nietzsche has been more thoroughly
analysed, her question is understandable: why a theory as debunking and revolutionary as
Nietzsches was neither accepted nor systematically refuted by the philosophical community
for so long? The problem in criticising Nietzsche lies in that he disdains reason. Not only his
theory is not a rational sequence of arguments, but rather a tale, written in poetic tone; he
also scorns reason itself as an invention of slave thinking (Welsh 1998). Hence, whatever
rational critique made against him can be despised by him as being a product of slave
thinking. This makes him, in a way, untouchable. On the other hand, his rejection of reason
rests credibility to his theory.

However, it is clear that there is an important problem in Nietzsches theory: he takes for
granted some behavioural assumptions about human beings. For example, he affirms that
compassion and pity stem exclusively from the resentment of the weak, totally ruling out any
other possible motive for being compassionate. Do we have to assume that being altruist is
always caused by resentment? Similarly, his picture of the master (and his positive valuation
of it) stems from the conviction that the overriding driving force of human behaviour is the will
to power. The problem is not that these assumptions are wrong; it is that they are still under
debate, and he gives no arguments to adopt them. The validity of his theory is subject to us
accepting those assumptions as true.
In conclusion, Nietzsche has some very interesting points. His critique of our moral values is
exceptionally harsh and debunking. For that reason, it raises many controversies, which is a
merit in itself. Studying Nietzsche necessarily takes all of us to re-consider our values. In
addition, if we consider his genealogy from a descriptive point of view, it shows itself like a
perfectly possible account of the evolution of our moral values. While his theory is hard to
defend because of its irrationality and extreme consequences, and he takes many things for
granted, it is an important check for our morality.

Bibliography
Foot, Philippa. Virtues And Vices And Other Essays In Moral Philosophy. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978. Accessible at:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/virtues-and-vices-9780199252862?cc=gb&lang=en&
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On The Genealogy Of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good And Evil.
Welsh, Wolfgang. Nietzsche on reason. University of Jena Press,1998. Accessible at:
http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Welsch_Nietzsche_on_Reason.html