On Villains and Villainy

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” – Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game

When I first heard the Joker movie with Jaoquin Phoenix was being made, I admit I was disturbed in the slightest. Critics of pop culture have long criticized what has seemed like a gradual and unnecessary decent into what seems like an anything-goes mentality for entertainment’s sake. The inundation of sex, drugs, and violence in pop culture appears to be on one hand merely for the sake of titillation yet on the other hand a reflection of the Western world’s dark underbelly it seems the average citizen doesn’t want to concede exists nor accept their explicit or implicit role in.* It is, however, the glorification of the villain that has troubled me the most when it comes to pop culture. I can name countless movies, not to mention countless musical artists, whose villains and villainy outshine their protagonists.

[Perhaps the same can be said for the world at large.]

To be clear, I prefer my villains to be complicated, for their motivations to be more than evil simply because that’s who the villain cannot help being. Certainly, the new Joker movie is a reflective character analysis in this regard. Even the long string of Marvel movies were part of a story arc that centered around stopping a ‘mad’ Titan, Thanos, from wiping out half the life in the universe. His murderous methods aside – which we assume are wrong – it’s difficult to say what’s wrong with Thanos’ motivations for those of you who are aware of them. I think it’s fair to want interesting villains – the world is not black-and-white after all – but we’ve reached the point where in America’s culture at least, we’re literally rooting for the bad guy.

Case in point; at last night’s WWE’s Hell In A Cell Pay-per-View (I apologize for still keeping tabs on professional wrestling at my age), a character called The Fiend did not win the championship match and fans in the audience were audibly upset. This Fiend character is very popular among the internet wrestling community to the point that fans would rather see him crowned champion than have a face (good guy) retain the gold. I agree that the character is interesting and that the heel (bad guy) needs to win on occasion to maintain the delicate and eternal dance between good and evil alive for the sake of storytelling, but for a crowd to nearly riot when the heel doesn’t win indicates something is possibly wrong with either the Western psyche, the current rules of society, or perhaps a matter of definitions. (It is possibly all of these.) I can point to actual current events to make my case.

The election of Donald Trump to President of the United States in 2016 couldn’t make my point clearer, being of the opinion that Donald Trump is clearly a villain. Why; what has he done that is so wrong? I could name a number of things and not be nearly exhaustive: Asking foreign powers to interfere in U.S. elections, accepting the word of despots over his own intelligence community, cavorting with said same despots, backing out of treaties with traditional allies and treating them with contempt, rolling back environmental and civil protections, coddling white supremists and stoking xenophobia, ignoring the U.S. Constitution (this is perhaps because he’s clearly never read it), embezzling from his charities, doing nothing about gun violence, and generally acting like a third-grade schoolyard bully. While I understand the frustration of many modern American voters with the federal government, I was aghast to find out a large swath of the U.S. thought Donald Trump was the answer. In my opinion, I can’t say Donald Trump has never done any good as U.S. president – even a broken clock is right twice a day by accident – but does the good outweigh the bad? No, because all things considered, the person in question wouldn’t be a villain. Inevitably, then, we’re forced to think about what exactly makes someone a villain.

What is a villain? The definition of ‘villain’ is broad throughout various dictionaries, meaning anything from the antithesis of the protagonist in fiction to generally someone doing harm to others in reality. In either case, a villain is typically breaking the law. They are considered dangerous or have behaved heinously towards any given person or group of people. A villain is often considered immoral, and therein lies a problem.

To some people, Donald Trump is a hero, a freedom fighter even. He is a protagonist to all those who feel they’ve been ignored, stepped on, or otherwise aggrieved by the federal government. The current president of the U.S. doesn’t play by the established laws, traditions, or unwritten social contract. This makes him a terrorist to some (in that word’s broadest sense) and a hero to others who feel that the current laws, traditions, and unwritten social contract need to be revised or reset to reflect some unspecified glory somewhere in America’s history. (Possible interpretation: When they felt more entitled.) So if a villain can also be a hero, there must either be something wrong with our definition or perhaps there is no such thing as a villain, objectively speaking.

It’s easy to contend there is something wrong with the definition. Scores of English words are too broad in their definition to be of much use or are outright confusing; ask anyone studying the English language. I contend that in modern U.S. culture, the definition of ‘villain’ is so ambiguous as to be vague to the point that many people would not know when they are behaving as a villain. (I’m not sure which is worse, a villain who knows they’re a villain or one who doesn’t know they’re a villain.) It also seems wrong to label anyone who offends us or that we simply don’t like as a villain, but that does seem to be the manner in which many Americans now operate.

Do villains exist, objectively speaking? Not if all cultures are relative, something we have to assume if not all cultures can agree that murder is wrong. (There’s always a caveat.) Villains can exist within a given culture, certainly, as there is no doubt that people have existed that have flouted the laws of a society they are seemingly a part of. Again, though, this allows a villain to be a hero to society’s downtrodden or any one outside of a society that would like to see that society fail. So it’s hard to say villains actually exist anymore than we can now say heroes exist. Now we can see that heroes merely prop up the rules of society, and this would make them villains in someone’s eyes somewhere.

My original feelings towards the Joker movie have to be misgiven. After all, what does his nemesis Batman do but prop up the rules in Gotham City? Imagine Batman having grown up in 1930’s Germany; what would he have been but a Nazi superhero come WWII? Thank goodness he’s not, but Batman must be seen as a villain by some law enforcement agencies; there are procedures for catching and detaining criminals and subsequently putting them on trial. When this sense of fairness is broken can we agree this is something villainous? In the Joker movie, the central figure that is Arthur Fleck is driven insane by a thousand unfair psychological cuts, so can we blame him for the anarchy that ensues?  Can we blame a mass shooter who goes on a rampage because they think they’ve been treated unfairly?

Hopefully you are saying ‘yes’ because you agree that murdering innocent people, people who have not directly affected the shooter, are being murdered and we have to agree this is wrong no matter what society we belong to. Breaking two fairness rules – making two wrongs – does not result in a right, correct? Unfortunately, any given mass shooter or lawbreaker will have sympathizers. (To say nothing of laws that should be broken either because they are apparently unethical or quite ridiculous.) It would make more sense for a mass shooter to only kill the people that have affected them assuming the punishment fits the crime against them and we’ve never seen that.

If we invoke this rule of fairness which we, Western culture, seem to have forgotten as of late it might be easier to gauge who the villains are when the doctrine of fairness is broken. Given the current impeachment inquiry regarding Donald Trump, his proponents can argue for an investigation into the Bidens ad nauseum, and I’d be okay with that, but so should there just as well be an investigation into Trump as well. The fact that Donald trump obstructs justice in a manner that most of us cannot violates the fairness doctrine. I think it therefore reasonable to construe him as a villain. Then again, his proponents see this ‘unfair’ characterization as exactly what’s wrong with current American culture (despite these same people not wanting to do anything about solving the problem of mass shootings, which I view as villainous). I can’t imagine asking a Donald Trump supporter what they think made Obama such a villain because it seems like their definition is going to wind up being arbitrary. In fairness, though, I am willing to hear them out. Villains on the other hand hear no one out and simply assume they are entirely in the right.

Thoughts on Being Vegetarian

Vegetarianism has been on the rise for some time now, finally taking root in my own household. I am participating, so to speak, but it’s not that I find arguments for this eating lifestyle particularly compelling; I don’t. No, I participate mostly for the sake of supporting those who are enamored by the idea and because I don’t want to make my own dinner all the time. But why aren’t I completely compelled by the arguments for vegetarianism alone? Let’s examine the typical vegetarian’s arguments for abandoning meat in their diet.

To begin with, it’s fair to say that your garden-variety vegetarian finds the idea of farming animals for food repugnant. I can certainly understand this as I am generally against cruelty to any animal that isn’t human. Packing animals in close corners, feeding them something we wouldn’t eat ourselves, pumping them full of hormones, snatching calves from their mothers, wood-chipping chicks if they’re the wrong sex; well, it’s enough to leave a bad taste in any humane person’s mouth. While those of us who occasionally fall off the vegetarian food wagon hope against hope our chicken piccata roamed around happily clueless before being snatched from its bliss like a child in Indonesia, we really know better, and to know better – to know what’s really going on and be okay with it – kinda makes a person an asshole. And we’ve got enough assholes, truth be told.

Fortunately, I don’t find meat all that tasty, or at least not so tasty I couldn’t live without it. After my own father died of a massive heart attack given his meat-saturated diet (though there was the smoking and some drinking, too), I’ve never thought of meat as something I just had to have. And knowing an animal suffered for my culinary enjoyment kind of makes me nauseous when I think about it. Others disagree and their argument is often something like, “Then they (animals) shouldn’t be so damn tasty.” Yes, but if we suddenly discovered how tasty people were, would that suddenly make it okay to eat them? Sometimes this leads to the follow-up argument that God gave human beings dominion over animals (which somehow got translated into “Be shitty to animals”) so it’s all good; the Boss said so. I’m not convinced. It seems like people treat animals the way they’d like to treat other human beings ‘cept that those pesky societal norms stave off their more primitive desires. I’d say thank goodness if treating each other with some dignity weren’t becoming abnormal.

But I digress; I offer my own counter argument to vegetarians here: That eating a plant is equally or even potentially worse than eating an animal. Vegetarians seem content to take life so long as it does not possess a nervous system like most animals do. The reasoning is that if some lifeform is sufficiently close enough to being human, it is cruel to kill and eat that thing. But this is a completely arbitrary distinction. If you’ll notice, many vegetarians are content to include fish in their diet, citing that fish are sufficiently unlike human beings to warrant eating them. Having seen many a fish hooked and pulled out of the water, I’m reasonably sure they feel as much pain as any land animal. So the argument becomes, “I think X is like me (or worse, X is cute), therefore I will not eat it. Y however…” There is no solid delineation for what is sufficiently like a human being to warrant sparing its life and not eating that thing. Who gets to be the authority on such a matter? Arbitrary reasoning is not objective, so the ‘moral’ choice a person makes to become a vegetarian and how far they take it is based solely on subjective reasoning.

It is likewise subjective to assume that plants do not feel pain or suffer from what we do to them. We know that all lifeforms react to the environment around them and what we can pain are sensations the nervous system sends to our brain to tell us harm is taking place. It is therefore reasonable to assume that tearing or uprooting a plant adversely affects a plant and that they don’t somehow sense this. Granted, plants do not have a nervous system like mammals and other animals do, but certainly plants possess a mechanism to react to harm in much the same way they obviously react to positive conditions like sunlight. For all we know, uprooting a plant may make it feel something entirely worse than pain. We don’t know. In not knowing, we should err on the side of caution, not continue on our merry way and say, “Whoops, sorry, we were wrong about you” if we find out plants do feel pain. Then again, that is the tract the United States took in regards to its era of slavery so I guess there is precedent for behaving/eating the way we do.

Ideally then, we really shouldn’t eat anything that may potentially feel pain in our efforts to eat it, if we’re on a quest to claim some moral high ground. Fruits and nuts appear okay to eat then seeing how they are the attempt of plants to procreate and not ‘alive’ in and of themselves or cannot grow unless they’re given the proper circumstances or conditions. In the end, the so-called moral argument given by vegetarians is utterly lost on me; it rings as hollow as a gourd.

This aside, I do believe there are some good arguments to be made in favor of a vegetarian diet. First and foremost is the environmental argument. While a majority of human beings seem to care very little about how poisonous they make their own immediate environment…well, that’s just it. Look, the Romans didn’t know they were poisoning themselves with lead and this was a contributing factor to the fall of their empire. We don’t have that excuse anymore. We know what we’re doing to the environment and the vast majority of us still don’t care. We don’t care that the environment sometimes – maybe often – contributes to cancer yet people ‘race for a cure’ instead of doing the obvious, cleaning up a toxic environment. (I might also mention that people who constantly consume meat have higher rates of cancer than vegetarians.) I know full well that cancer is a horrible, devastating disease but there are steps we can take to minimize our risk to succumbing to it, and taking care of the environment should be chief among those steps. And this is to say nothing of the methane – a particularly nasty greenhouse gas – that is released into the atmosphere due to cattle farming. Shoot, sorry; I forgot rising temperatures aren’t mankind’s fault. (You know mankind can’t take the blame for anything it does to itself.)

As alluded to a few moments ago, there is also much evidence that a vegetarian or meat-restricted diet is healthier and this is a good reason to choose this dietary avenue. This is not to say that being a vegetarian doesn’t take planning, it does. Much of the protein (and to a much lesser degree vitamins, minerals and fats) we get easily from animal products are not readily found in plants, meaning a vegetarian must eat a broader range of plants to meet their essential nutrient needs. Given the downside of consuming so much meat, both for the environment and our health, taking the time to do a little planning couldn’t hurt. Facebook and Twitter will still be there after the ten minutes you’re gone doing some research.

There is sufficiently proper reasons to be a vegetarian but let’s not pretend that the ‘moral’ argument is one of them. Getting into an ‘conversation’ with a carnivore and bringing that argument up is only going to make said carnivore run out to the store and buy a cow’s worth of ground meat. Of course, hard core carnivores don’t care about being healthy either, so perhaps the point is moo-t. Vegetarians; do what’s right for yourself and let time win the battle for you. While you console the meat-eater in your family as they lay dying of cancer, you can say, “I told ya so.”

A Modern Day Trolley Problem

The Trolley Problem (aka the Trolley Dilemma) is sometimes used thought experiment used by psychologists and philosophers to gauge a person’s moral compass. The though experiment goes something like this:

Suppose there is a runaway train car (a trolley) that is rolling down the tracks towards five people tied to the tracks, or are lying on the tracks and are otherwise unable to move. You are off in the distance observing this and happen to see a lever next to you that if pulled will switch the runaway train car from its current course onto another set of tracks. However, on the diverted track there is single person tied to the tracks and will be killed if you pull the lever. Question is: Do you pull the lever to save five people and kill one or take no action and let five people die?

Keep in mind this is the Trolley Problem in its simplest iteration. There are several variations of this thought experiment which involve intentionally pushing a fat man onto the tracks to save five people (the Fat Man version) or intentionally pushing the man (a “fat villain”) who tied up the potential victims onto the tracks to avert the deaths of the innocent. Let’s not concern ourselves with these versions or ask questions about the characters of all the potential victims. For the sake of realism, however, we are going to alter the details of the thought experiment to a more likely scenario than initially presented. We’re going to do this because the Trolley Problem such as it is described above doesn’t present a realistic situation one would find themselves in and be forced to make a moral judgement. What I’d like to do is introduce a modern equivalent to the Trolley Problem, changing the problem to something more akin to what philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson had in mind with her “brilliant surgeon” version of the Trolley Problem.

Here’s my version: Suppose you are a politician and if you don’t vote on a particular bill, five random people will lose their health care coverage and die from pre-existing conditions. If you do vote for this particular bill, the five people will keep their health care coverage but another single random person will lose their coverage and die from their pre-existing condition. In summary, if you don’t vote – if you take no action regarding the bill – five people will die. If you do vote for the bill – take action on the bill – one person will die and five will be saved. Do you vote for the bill or not?

Philosophically, what you as the politician is likely to do is based upon whether you are a utilitarian or a deontologist. That is, if you seek to do the greatest good, as a utilitarian you’re going to vote for the bill. If, on the other hand you think that committing certain actions like intentional harming someone are wrong, then you’re not going to vote for the bill. Of course, the obvious flaw with the deontologist’s position is that not voting for the bill – an inaction – is just as bad as intentional harm if it is your intention to abstain from the vote. In other words, an inaction is just as bad as an action if one intends towards the inaction. (The major flaw in Deontology is that intentions matter.) There is a choice to be made – vote or don’t vote – and once it is made, there is intention behind the given choice; this fact cannot be escaped. The deontologist likes to think that by not intending to ‘intentionally’ cause harm, they are absolved from whatever harm does happen. Obviously, this is madness as not voting for the bill – intentionally – causes harm and makes the deontologist’s actions morally impermissible.

This deconstruction of the deontologist’s position philosophically compels you to vote for the bill, thus taking the utilitarian route (if there’s no false dilemma here, which there may well be). Without knowledge of any of the random people involved, without knowing whether saving the five will result in a better or worse world, you should vote for the bill on the assumption that the death of five people is likely to wreak more sorrow and havoc than the death of one person. All things being equal among the random people, you are compelled to vote for the bill on purely philosophical grounds if you want to be considered a morally just person (such as morality is construed in the Western Industrialized world). However, what people are likely to do is much different in reality. 

In reality, most people take the deontologist’s route and think they are avoiding taking an action that intentionally harms a single person. This outcome was confirmed by a 2007 online experiment conducted by psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and biologist Marc Hauser. They concluded that by taking a positive action (doing something) that resulted in a positively negative consequence evoked emotions that clouded ‘better’ judgement. But why should this be the case? Why would ‘taking action’ result in feelings that assume the outcome will be worse than taking no action at all? Why does an apparently personal investment in an outcome change what a person will decide to do?

We may want an evolutionary psychologist to weigh in here or we may hypothesize that people generally ‘don’t want to get their hands dirty’ for fear of negative consequences, meaning, precisely, being responsible for one’s actions. As those of us familiar with the workings of Western culture know, we tend to forgive inaction that leads to harm as we work from the assumption that such consequences weren’t malicious in nature. Only, if one knows the consequences – that five people will die through the inaction of not voting – it is difficult to reason why this outcome isn’t just as malicious as voting. Again, the deontologist works from the premise that an action can be wrong and an inaction not wrong, but I’ve already argued this is demonstrably false as inaction is in fact an action because the decision itself is based on intention. The deontologist intends not to intentionally kill someone not realizing the initial intention intentionally kills five people. No matter what angle you view such moral dilemmas from, given only two choices, the deontological reasoning falters.

None of this takes into account other reason why you might vote or not vote. Perhaps you view situations like this and feel the need to do something, and therefore decide to vote. Or perhaps you’re a misanthrope and are indifferent to the people dying. There may also be the way such dilemmas are presented (for example, in the way they are written or are viewed in a virtual world) that may influence decision-making. Regardless of the one of the two choices made – if that’s all that are given – it still tells us something about the moral compass of the person making the choice. In my example, a deontologist has no firm philosophical ground to stand on. They are, in other words, irrational.

And this is why the Trolley Problem, formulated in 1967, is still relevant today. It would be wise to know when a populous is too irrational, if for no other reason than to prompt a re-evaluation of, say, educational programs. Of course, there is the other side of the coin in which people in powerful positions rely on an irrational populous, so such moral tests would be wise for them to administer as well so they might be aware of when citizenry might be becoming too smart for them to fool. Thought experiments, long considered the realm of lowly philosophers, are beneficial to everyone. And when they’re not, they still make for good conversations when you’re high.

Bugged

As is habit, I was going to take my evening ‘sabbatical’ last night when events took a surreal turn. I turned on the light and saw a small beetle on the floor. Without thinking, I tore off a piece of tissue paper and scooped the little guy up and threw him into the toilet. However, I did take the time to think that I’d throw the toilet paper so that the bug could not swim out from underneath it when it hit the water. Basically, between the time I scooped the beetle up and the time I was sending him into the toilet, I had consciously set out to drown him. I didn’t even bother to immediately flush the toilet and put the bug out of his misery much less out of my mind so that I didn’t have time to reconsider what I’d just done. Surely, most people don’t second guess themselves on such things.

But I’m not most people. As the beetle struggled mightily, I thought to myself Why am I watching him drown? Why am I killing him when I could have easily taken him outside? After all, the bug had done nothing to harm me; I just didn’t want it in the house. And so I took extreme measures against a life. I thought about this for a moment. It was certainly within my power not to kill the beetle. I could take it outside and it could go on doing whatever it does, no harm no foul. I reconsidered my actions, got a glass and scooped the bug out of the water and set him on the front porch. Too late; he was dead. This made me feel terrible.

I usually take bugs out of the house with the exceptions being roaches and ants, which I kill for (presumably) very good reasons. (Actually, I don’t always kill roaches, but I probably should.) But in almost all other cases, I relocate insect outside of the house. Why? For one thing, it is awfully arrogant for me to assume some kind of special status based upon my particular form of life. What makes a human being any more special than a beetle? Because we can think and have emotions and reflect upon these mental events? Because we are not bugs or some other species of animal we have run roughshod over, humans automatically ascend to arrogance in thinking that another form of life doesn’t have an inner world, much less an inner world worthy of respect. (Note that this kind of thinking has long been the excuse for genocide or otherwise treating differing ethnicities poorly.) We don’t know what it is like to be any other life form, so I do not ascend to the arrogance the rest of my brood display. Unfortunately, I happen to be of a species that needs to kill and eat other living things to survive. (Yes, Virginia, even plants are living things.) That makes me sad when I think about it.

Another reason I take bugs back outside the house is because it is so much easier to kill something we tower over than it is to respect its life. But consider the hypothetical situation in which giant hostile aliens with advanced technology descend upon the Earth and begin to lay waste to humanity. Why wouldn’t any such aliens laugh at us while we scurry for cover or plead for mercy? I am not trying to say it would be some kind of cosmic retribution, rather I am saying that’s just how the animal kingdom works, based on how we humans react to it. If we have no mercy for bugs or other life forms, we cannot plead for mercy (at least not without being pitiful) when the Hangman comes for us. That is, unless we really are the special animals we keep telling ourselves we are.

So I try to respect life, not because it will allow me to reason with or plead for mercy with the hostile aliens, but because it is the road less travelled and because I have the power to refrain from killing. Isn’t that supposed to be one of humanity’s nobler traits? I’m not going to say I am the most noble human being ever to live, but surely any bug would rather deal with me late in the evening than deal with most of the rest of you lot.

Nietzsche on Morality

[Although I’ve never been a fan of Nietzsche (read my blog The Nietzsche Blues), he did have some interesting thoughts about morality. Through the course of his writings, he makes a case for extreme moral relativism and you’ll see what I mean in this examination…]

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche touches upon morality, offering reasons why we (or some of us) ought not to engage in moral judgement. His reasons begin to appear early in the

Nietzsche & his silly mustache.

second book when he takes to task the Realist interpretation of reality as being nothing more concrete than any person’s particular explanation of reality. Nietzsche remarks that the Realist is just as full  of  “prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear” (57) as anyone else and  as  such,  this prevents any true interpretation of the world. Later, in Section 116, Nietzsche writes that morality is, “the expression of the needs of a community or herd,” and we can take from this to mean that as an agent in one of these communities, the agent is not an impartial evaluator of morals. Nietzsche also sees that individuals within these communities tend to regard themselves as valuable only insofar as they serve a function within the herd, a view of one’s self that is antithetical to Nietzsche’s free-spirit or overman.

Nietzsche’s view of morality begins to become clearer in Section 301, where he points out that, “Nature is always worthless,” in the sense that morality is not born of or inherent in the natural world but that it is man who creates morality. The failure of men to recognize this creates errors in valuation. In sensing that there is something defective about current concepts of morality, Nietzsche chides historians of morality for not coming to a similar conclusion and as such historians are guilty of not critically evaluating morality. [Their lack of insight perhaps due to acquiescing to tradition or plain and common prejudices.] Nietzsche calls these historians childish, for when they think they are evaluating morality they are actually evaluating people. Thus, it should not be the job of historians to evaluate morality.

Scientists are likewise not to be arbiters of meaning in the world. It is the scientists’ view of the world that would be worst of all in Nietzsche’s opinion, for the scientific view would be the view most devoid of actual meaning. “An essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world,” he writes, adding how worthlessness a scientific evaluation of music would be (373). To Nietzsche, only a philosopher could possibly investigate such a human construct as morality.

A more precise formulation of morality is exactly what Nietzsche presents in On the Genealogy of Morals. In Genealogy, Nietzsche explains there are two types of morality. [This is not to say there are only two types, but the two types obvious within Western civilization.] There is Master morality—morality in which actions are either good or bad—and Slave morality, which evaluates actions as being either good or evil.

Master morality is characterized by a self-affirmation that they, the Master, are good. This, the self, is where (a) morality begins. If Masters begin by viewing themselves as good, what they value is likewise good: Nobility, courage, open-mindedness, truthfulness—these characteristics are helpful to Masters, insofar as they help Masters maintain their status, and that creates the value of such characteristics. We see then that Master morality is consequence-based; that which does not promote or advance their positions as Masters is deemed bad. [There is at least one notable exception to this rule: Enemies. Enemies are not held in contempt by Masters because Masters see themselves in the enemy. The enemy is trying to do the same as any Master—be a Master—and this, to any Master, should be viewed as honourable.]

Born in response to Master morality is Slave morality, a morality that holds intentions to be either good or evil. The Slave morality comes from weakness, out of being oppressed by Masters and as such does not seek what is good for (strong) individuals, rather it seeks what is good for the entirety of its community. The Slave morality holds that the characteristics Slaves do not possess (those characteristics common to Masters, for example) to be evil since such characteristic can give rise to injustices such as slavery.  Amongst the Slaves then, something such as  humility,  which would be bad as far as Masters are concerned, would be called a virtue by Slaves when in fact Slaves are humble not by choice, but precisely because they do not have a choice, being at the mercy of Masters. Slave morality is a form of resentment aimed at those who they cannot be like or whose goals they cannot assent to. Ironically, Slaves need Masters to define themselves; Masters do not require Slaves in this way.

To Nietzsche however, these formulations of morality are simply the inventions of a given society or culture to advance its own cause. What is good, for example, is merely the expression of whoever wills that conception. There is no metaphysically true morality. We can be fooled into thinking there are moral truths though, perhaps through conditioning or familiarization with the traditional meanings of morality such as they exist in Western civilization. Nietzsche believes that Slave morality has become triumphant in Western civilization, first through Christianity and then through democracy, and this is cause for worry.

Having conceptualized the overman prior to On the Genealogy of Morals, it is not difficult to sense why Nietzsche would be opposed to the triumph of Slave morality. If Slave morality seeks to cast all persons in the same context with the same values, individuals cannot assert any will to power. The Slave’s system of morality favours the interests of the largest numbers of persons, not the few who wish to flourish. An individual cannot create their own values if conditioned to believe tradition-based interpretations of morality. That said, we should make note that Master morality is not without fault either. It is as traditionalist as Slave morality and thus, can be opposed to change and opposed to (other) free-spirits.

Nietzsche thinks there can be morality, but it must come from within us as individuals; morality is never divorced from individual will. Only individual will, the fundamental drive within us, can assign value to anything. Our will to power is the origin of morality. However, if we accept beforehand that morality has fixed meaning(s), we can never aspire to independence and thus, we are surrendering ourselves to other wills. How would we ascend to the overman then? It will not be possible for as long as Slave morality remains embedded to reign over the free-spirit. To Nietzsche, Master mentality is clearly moral and Slave mentality is not because Nietzsche believes in the importance of individuals over any collective mentality. We cannot take Nietzsche to task for this view since he is the origin of morality as much as anyone else.