Two master and three slave moralities

Nietzscheanism conflates

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. There’s nothing inherent about their being in these two categories other than Nietzschean rhetorical construction.

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.

This morality arises organically because socially powerful groups and individuals can demand obeisance of others, screwing with the intuitions of third parties to make them look valuable. (The legitimating role of this is a part of why they do this in the first place.)

The concept of “honor” fills out much of the pragmatic demands of maintaining a reputation that leads to a dominant bargaining position. You should be fearless, so no one can intimidate you. You should keep your promises to people you expect to interact with a lot, but not to nonpeople that don’t matter. You should revenge slights to your reputation with violence and practice reciprocity. Much of this is of course instrumentally useful for the rest of us to, while other bits are counterproductive or hard to universalize.

Legitimation in modern societies demands more subtlety than this, but some moderns like Nietzsche or Bronze Age Pervert look back to an age of warlords and pirates where this could proceed in a relatively unmediated way. Part of what’s going on here is cope - by loudly rejecting the dominant “slave morality” they get to imagine being a warlord or pirate rather than an office drone - and part of it is admiration for the honesty of an unmediated kind of domination. I don’t think it’s coincidental that there’s clearly a personality type attracted to this type of discourse, and it isn’t an actual warlord or pirate, but someone who feels very acutely dominated by more subtle social signals.

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. You see someone doing something well and then want to see what in their technique to copy or try out. It feels good to be capable and is instrumentally useful for just about everything.

A lot of social conservatives are worried that this will disappear. I think there are often subcultures that deliberately crush these intuitions and that it’s generally bad to be in one, but these have always been mere subcultures (and as subcultures they’ve often performed useful roles, even if you wouldn’t want to stay there long.)¹

S1: Reverse Dominance Coalitions

This is the intuition at the heart of left-wing politics, and at least according to Christopher Boehm (c.f. “Hierarchy in the Forest”) 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. This protects group members from domination by individuals or cliques.

Even the Nietzschean master class can practice - indeed, often needs to practice - S1 internally. The Roman senators who killed Caesar were all slaveowners, as were the elite of the Southern states who feared an overweening king and later federal government, and the attachment of both to abstract concepts of liberty is well known. M1 and S1 agree, after all, that you shouldn’t let some external authority boss you around.

S2: Humility

This says: make yourself small and harmless. Have the goals of a corpse.

The Life Goals of Dead People

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 (sometimes accurately, sometimes not) as a potential master. Especially in the first scenario, S2 can, like M1, derive from cope.

Although both can inspire dislike of the master class, the basic idea behind S1 is “it’s bad to be a slave,” while S2 says “it’s good to be a slave.” S2 is even more contradictory with M2, but contradiction exists in the human soul just fine. In the case of flunkies in power structures, M1 and S2 can be very compatible: deriving joy from being both a faithful servant and loyal instrument to one’s superiors, and from exercising power over everyone else. No armed body of men, I suspect, could function without an unhealthy helping of both.

Moreover: just a little bit of S2 can keep you sane, since the natural default is to think very highly of yourself. A bit of humility helps avoid pointless dick-measuring contests, reminds us we might be wrong and that pobody’s nerfect.

S3: Universal Benevolence

Mozi called this jian ai, Christians agape, Buddhists metta: a lot of beautiful words for this appear across Eurasia shortly after the introduction of writing, which I don’t think is a coincidence: 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” aren’t especially beautiful phrases, and they draw attention to differences in technical specifications², but they also 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.

Nietzscheans don’t like this because they’re partisans of M1, which exalts victory in zero-sum games. Even more offensively, S3 means that the weak have claims on the strong, that in a sense they can impose obligations on them. But there’s no contradiction between M2 and S3 - EA is a scene where both are highly present, for instance, and I think it benefits from it.

in praise of clarity

To lay my cards on the table, 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. These aren’t the only relevant moral intuitions, just those that tend to get labelled “master” or “slave” moralities.

If you do want to use “slave morality” and “master morality,” I beg you to be clear about which of these - or which other things - you’re referring to, rather than slipping in equivocation.

1. If reading Ayn Rand or Nietzsche helps you with this, fine, but don’t make the mistake of taking it too seriously. I’m sure The Secret has been helpful to some individuals too.

2. Which are much overdrawn: Kantianism is the correct metaethics and the substantive ethics it prescribes is preference utilitarianism; debate me if you disagree.