II. MoralityA. Master/Slave Morality
There is a master morality according to Nietzsche, which is exhibited by noble persons who choose for themselves what is valuable, and a slave morality exhibited by the weak persons who inculcate mediocrity in order to protect themselves from superior persons. Thus master morality is based upon choice, whereas slave morality is based upon resentment and fear. Of the noble person, Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil,
“The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: ‘What is injurious to me is injurious in itself;’ he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself. Such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow: The Noble man also helps the unfortunate, but nor, or scarcely, out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. The noble man honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. “Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian Saga; it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking Such type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: ‘He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one.’ The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which see precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinterestessement, the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity and irony towards ‘selflessness,’ belongs as definitely to noble quality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in the presence of sympathy and the ‘warm heart.’” (Beyond Good and Evil, 260) No action is objectively and automatically right or wrong within the master morality. Thus, for example, the characteristic attributes of slave morality, such as pity, selflessness, compassion, humility, and love of neighbor, are not objectively and automatically wrong. A noble person, too, can exhibit these attributes, so long as they originate through self-assertion, not through resentment and fear.
