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Morals play a large part in everyone's lives. They are what decides what is good and bad to us. It is what drives us to make decisions and to judge others. But I don't need to tell you how important morals are to all of us. So I shall now move on to discuss the first set of ethics in the moral group I plan to discuss. This first set is called master morality and slave morality. For the sake of space I entitled this section just master morality. Master morality was devised by Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who lived from 1844 to 1900. Some consider him the founder of existentialism; Jean-Paul Sartre, founder of modern existentialism, is said to have copied Nietzsche's ideas for his own use. Nietzsche originally studied philosophy, but when he began to read the works of Schopenhauer he turned away from modern religion. This all ties into master morality, which I shall now discuss. This ethical system all revolves around the idea of the master and slave tendency of man. If you view human history at any point in history you will discover that there have always been masters and slaves, whether literally through slavery, or through the rulings of an aristocracy. What Nietzsche said was that the master moralist creates his own morals for himself, and no one else. He does not conform to nature, he makes nature conform to him. He tends to be powerful and wealthy. All good deeds that he does are not out of pity or the want of thanks, but out of the excesses of power; might as well do good deeds if you have all of that power and wealth that you don't need. This is also what keeps a master moralist from becoming a killer; he is only going to do what is good for him, and killing a man will not get him anywhere, so this all acts as a natural check system for everyone. So this leads to a pseudo-elitist group of moralists. What drives someone to seek out this power is the will to power. Nietzsche said that our will to power, which is the most basic human drive, makes us seek out power in any way possible. This is where our reason comes in. It makes the decision of what act gives us the most power in the end. So reason is complementary, not supplimentary, to the will to power. Nietzsche said this because he believed the reason was too convoluted and messed up to actually drive us to do anything, and that is why we have the will to power. Before we cover slave moralists, you must first understand other doctrines of Nietzsche. He believed that no longer functions in this world, essentially making him dead to this world, whether he truly exists or not. This meant that the world was meaningless since God is not here to give us meaning, such as striving to reach heaven. So this means that we make our own meaning of existence. He also believed in reincarnation and that when we returned we brought with us the lessons that we learned from our previous life. This leads to a spiralling effect of recurrence, with our knowledge ever increasing, with the ultimate goal of becoming supermen, basically gods in our own right. Nietzsche also said that the universe is finite, but temporally infinite. This leads to the doctrine of Recurrence which says that the universe is fixed in size, so everything will eventually repeat. This all ties into slave morality. the definition of a slave moralist is essentially the opposite of a master moralist; someone who gets their ethics from another, not from themselves. These people are considered "little", since they must get their morals from others. This often happens because they can not come to terms of their not being a god. This leaves many people in distress since that means that we are all alone in this world with no true purpose for being here. Most people can't handle this idea that we are all alone, so they turn to a god and religion for comfort since they just can not handle these truths. Religion is a great example of master and slave morality. The heads of the religion, like the priests in Christianity, decide what is ethically right and wrong. The followers of Christianity, the slave moralists, then adopt those ethics. I am not going to put any arguments against master morality for one reason. That reason is that there are no specific arguments against it. The only major one is whether or not God exists, but that is the hinge of almost all ethical systems, and I don't want to have to type that out every time, so just wait until I do my group on God. There are some that have specific flaws, which I will point out, but master morality is an ethical system that does not have any. So to refute this system, read the next section on ethics... |