Master morality and slave morality
Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality
In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche contrasted "master morality" and "slave morality".
Recently on Substack there's been discussion of the two, for example:
Bentham's Bulldog: Shut Up About Slave Morality
Scott Alexander: Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Richard Hanania: Destiny Interview, Nietzschean Yglesias, and More
But what do we actually mean by "master morality" and "slave morality"? Metaphysiocrat has a good post breaking down different types of "Master Morality" and "Slave Morality":
When Nietzsche gave his “genealogical” account of the master and slave morality, “master morality” was basically given a trivial form: the masters had labelled everything they liked “good” and the rest “bad.” And this is how Nietzscheans have continued to use it: master morality is everything they like and slave morality is everything they don’t - at least in the moral realm.
I think there are two separate things that tend to get referred to as master morality and three that tend to get referred to as slave morality.
So, the 2 elements of master morality are:
M1: Dominance
According to this ethos, it is good to be in charge, dominate others, and be on top of social hierarchies - not just convenient, but morally better, to the extent this frame thinks in moral terms at all.
M2: Excellence
This says it’s good to be strong, smart, and capable. This isn’t always expressed in moral terms, but most of us find this to be admirable. This is the intuition least in need of explanation, in part because I think that on a biological level, this is what a sense of admiration is for.
And the 3 elements of slave morality are:
S1: Reverse Dominance Coalitions
This is the intuition at the heart of left-wing politics, [...] it’s a key group strategy that helped our homo ancestors diverge from alpha male dominance model beloved by Nietzscheans and actually practiced by most other great apes. In human foraging societies, people who get too powerful are gently cut down to size, and if they don’t get the message, killed.
S2: Humility
This says: make yourself small and harmless. Have the goals of a corpse. This arises organically in either hierarchical societies dominated by M1 or egalitarian societies dominated by S1, or just in highly decentralized societies where you don’t know who you might accidentally piss off. M1 can foster S2 by demanding obeisance from others and punishing them for not doing so, while S1 can make people worried about sticking out and being taken as a potential master.
S3: Universal Benevolence
Writing promotes both consideration of others who aren’t immediately next to you and abstract reasoning, which naturally leads to an ethic of considering and advancing everyone’s interests impartially. “Utility” and “categorical imperative” [...] appear in an era of increasing literacy, long-distance communication, and technical sophistication. There’s a long tradition of claiming the novel, as a form, is an agent of this as much or more than abstract philosophy.
Of these, I support M2, S1, and S3, as they all promote human flourishing. Metaphysiocrat feels the same way:
I am a partisan of M2 (excellence), S1 (reverse dominance coalitions), and S3 (universalism). I feel all of them, since they arise organically and shall ever be with us in some form or another.
M1 (dominance) and S2 (humility) are much more problematic. In small doses they are OK, or even beneficial: For M1, think of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk creating a business empire; or for S2 think of a person using epistemic humility to better get at the truth.
But large doses of M1 gives you Stalin or North Korea. And large doses of S2 gives you the woke objection to the Github Meritocracy Rug, or Californian schools banning calculus (because some kids are better at it than others, and we can't have that).
Of the 5 elements, S2 (humility) is clearly the worst, as a society dominated by it will be against M2 (excellence) and therefore against human flourishing. Indeed, a society that holds anti-competence as a virtue will probably be barely able to keep a civilisation together at all. Even M1 isn't as bad, because if a society is truly high-dominance on an international scale it will have to have a decent military, and thus be pro-excellence at least in some fields.
A large part of why I am against wokeness is that wokeness is high on S2-humility and low on M2-excellence.