Thread: What is morality? It's not about being inoffensive to everybody.

It's a lot for me to think about too, and I realize I made a basic mistake - I conflated unethical politicians with master morality. Like pretty much everybody in the modern free world, I'm so deeply entrenched in the slave morality worldview that it's hard to really think outside of it. This isn't really something I'm very familiar with (the master/slave morality idea), it's really something I had read about somewhere long ago and it didn't register much until more recently when I was thinking about differences between liberals and conservatives - at that time I equated conservatives with master morality, because their creed seems to be 'everybody should take care of their own - why should we support minorities and people who aren't trying to find jobs?' whereas liberals obviously support welfare and government imposed entitlements and incentives specifically for minorities and the unemployed. Reading over what Nietzsche wrote it's clear he does consider Democracy a slave morality program, but then so is Christianity, which is a strong foundation for Republicans.

It's clear I don't yet have a very good understanding of this. But I do believe that morality sometimes means standing firmly against things that violate your principles, not just being as nice as possible to everybody all the time. Negotiating from weakness is not a good strategy, it makes you a walking victim.

And not fully understanding Nietzsche's ideas, of course I'm not advocating his views - I'm simply saying that when I think about morality in the terms he laid out it's a lot easier to form a framework that does allow me to understand morality, even of a type that I don't personally endorse. So I'm promoting his breakdown as a good way to start thinking about morality in a broad across-the-board way for people like me who have never really gone much deeper than "we should all be nice to each other". < This is only a very shallow and interpersonal viewpoint, and fails to address many situations, so is a very incomplete idea of morality, more a catch-phrase for a children's cartoon than something with any nuance or rigor to it. And it does seem in these times (when we live in a society that has essentially taken all the real dangers and hardships out of life) most people do live by a series of empty catchphrases that they never really examine in any depth.

I guess I should actually say they do this until it becomes necessary to go beyond that, and often that's only after some terrible tragedy. I think it's important for us to read the ideas of some of the world's great thinkers on subjects of great importance (and I readily admit I need to get going on that myself!)