Origins of Morality

The moral philosophy that we know and recognize today in the Western world is slave morality, a morality which puts forward ideals of fairness, equality, and democracy. However, many centuries ago during the medieval times, master morality was the norm; a morality that favors those superior in strength, beauty, intelligence, and status. Master morality preceded slave morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philologist, who used his knowledge of words to trace the origins of morality from their ancient definitions. He said that morality was something that man had created, specifically the nobles, for they were in a position that enabled them to declare what is to be considered good or bad. The concept of “good” was created when the aristocrats examined themselves and saw that they were rich, beautiful, healthy, strong and powerful. Then, they observed the slaves beneath and saw how they were poor, common, ugly, dirty and weak; which led them to a conclusion that the slaves must be “bad” because they were they opposite of the nobles who were “good”. The pathos of nobility and distance, as aforesaid, the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a “below” – that is the origin of the antithesis of “good” and “bad” (Genealogy of Morals, pg. 26). Their superiority that had begun in a social sense underwent a conceptual transformation into a moral sense that gave a definition of having a “soul of a high order”, “with a privileged soul”.

The slaves became angry and furious as they were labeled “bad”, so they made up a plan to change their miserable situation into something advantageous. Since, they were not strong and powerful enough to defeat their maste...

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...ol and all these lead him to achieve reason and conscience. Human understanding owes much itself to the passions. It is by the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself. The passions owe their origin to our needs and their development to our knowledge, for one can desire or fear a thing only if one has an idea of it in the mind (Discourse on Inequality, pg. 89). Reason is what teaches us to know “good” and “evil”.

The search for origin of morality had long genealogy from Jean Jacques Rousseau search in the evolution of man with his needs, passions, desires and Friedrich Nietzsche tracing the etymology of “good and evil” uncovering their original meanings. Individualism and inequality direct humans into starting comparison from which morality is built on. The different perspectives on morality are underlain by psychological and biological natures.