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

Wait - you're the one who introduced this idea about being slaves to morality, and in an offhand way, only giving it a second or 2 of thought, I said 'yeah, you're probably right'... and now you're insatiably curious as to why I agreed with you?

As for being slaves to our own morality - I think that's probably inescapable, unless you're amoral or immoral.

Yeah, seems right. How does one escape morality without being either immoral or amoral? By definition if you do something that is not moral, it must be either immoral or amoral, right? If you have some other view on it then speak up! What's with all the questioning? I wish you'd take part in the discussion rather than just sitting on the sidelines and throwing these little bombs.

One thing I find when I start to examine the idea of master morality - I'm not quite sure where to draw the line for politicians and other leaders. It's hard to determine what's master morality and what's just immoral. NSA surveillance for instance. Its a huge step toward a police state that they say they're doing entirely for our own protection... but history has shown governments can't be trusted with that kind of power. Is it immoral of leaders to play Big Brother and spy on every citizen, treat them all as terror suspects? Or are leaders allowed to be amoral, above the need for morality? Seems like there would need to be limits on that.

And what about police being allowed to break the laws the rest of us have to live by, like speed limits (I mean when they're not enroute to the scene of an investigation)? People hate it - but an argument can be made that police should have more freedoms than citizens or their ability to protect us is hampered. It's hard to figure where to draw the line - should leaders and enforcers be granted special privileges?

Master morality includes the idea of acting in a noble manner, so it means they need to just be trusted to be acting in the interests of their charges. But it's clear power corrupts.

I know Nietzsche didn't believe in master morality any more than in slave morality, but what was he working toward with these books? Was it the Ubermenschen? That's something I know very little about. I know Hitler used Nietzsche's writings as some twisted justification, but that was supposedly a monstrous misrepresentation of them.*Or was it? Maybe the Third Reich is a demonstration of where his type of thinking will ultimately lead?

At any rate, I'm just grateful that his writings on master and slave morality give us a starting point to begin to diverge from simple naive "be nice to everybody" ideas about morality.