Good versus Evil, this is the ever present conflict in human morality and while nearly one third of the modern world supports this doctrine by supporting Christianity, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche abhors this division of morals. His essay, Genealogy of Morals, remembers that once Good versus Bad was the real conflict of morality and he argues that humanity is worse off because of this reversal of ideas. Dubbing these new Christian morals as slave morals he claims to trace their rise to dominance back to the Roman era and instantly identifies them as the poison of humanity (7th Section.13-18th Line). Specifically the reversal of the two is what immediately interested me; my disbelief that the richest could succumb to the desires of the poorest, even in our society the rich hold the power as they must have back then; but also, how can Nietzsche envision a society where these utilitarian morals are not in place, does he have the answer to this?
[...] Caesar is rebuked for his ambush of the Helvetians, who from a far removed province that would have had little interaction with Christians, by the commander of their forces, saying ita a patribus maioribusque suis didicisse, ut magis virtute contenderent quam dolo aut insidiis niterentur” ( 14.20 which roughly means “That they had so learned from their sires and ancestors, as to rely more on valor than on artifice and stratagem.” This one event proves two things, that a culture with little Jewish interaction still held a rough equivalent Noble Morals and was still supporting honesty and not cunning but also that in Rome by Augustus Caesar's era Slave Morals were already beginning to be enacted. [...]
[...] These priests were an integral part of the rise of Slave Morality by being the ones who largely reversed the values of morals to favor slave class over the nobility. This suddenly dismounts the lifestyle, before lived as though whatever is fun for me or me feels good must be good, and replaces this with the values of aestheticism and utilitarianism, while also changing the term bad to evil. Aestheticism, the first facet of these morals, is the denial of one's own desires. [...]
[...] Utilitarianism creates the other half of slave morality, causing further harm to the nobles and creating more charity for the slave class. In this ethical doctrine action that causes much good for one and none for the whole has negligible positivity compared to the action that causes much good for the whole but only negligible good for one. As before, this reverses the ideas of Noble morality and its benefit is weighed only by which class you belong to, the rich or the poor, and again being only a detriment to the rich who could afford and had the things which Slave Morality slanders. [...]
[...] Sadly, Nietzsche fails to realize that religion has rehabilitated many humans who else wise would be nothing by weights on society, drug abusers, victims of depression and those fatally lost, but now carry their own weight which improves the quality of the culture as a whole. His is missing a replacement for this good caused by religion and his entire argument is infuriatingly flawed because of this. While the true question, of which is the better and what should be is fully indecipherable to me, I will forever lean towards what John Forbes Nash applied to Economics. [...]
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