Excerpts from Richard Schacht's chapter on Nietzsche in Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy Ed. Cavalier, Gouinlock and Sterba (MacMillan/St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Nietzsche's point of departure is the observation that throughout human history, what he calls 'moral prejudices' of one sort or another have prevailed, finding expression in 'sentiments', 'valuations', 'attitudes', 'beliefs', 'convictions' and the disposition to pass 'judgements' concerning various qualities, tendencies, actions and intentions. He has a special interest in what he often refers to as 'our morality' (and 'our moral prejudices'); but he holds that one cannot even begin to achieve an adequate understanding and fair assessment of it unless one broadens one's view to include others, both independent of and ancestral to it. The moral philosopher's first order of business, therefore, is the task of description, both cross-cultural and historical; for, as has been seen, he holds that it is 'only when we compare many moralities' that 'the real problems of morality emerge' (Beyond Good and Evil 186). It is a further task to determine the sorts of social functions various moralities perform and social requirements or needs to which they answer. It is yet another, moreover, to uncover the psychological factors at work in the motivation of individuals to embrace or reject different forms of morality. In short:

Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of individual passions have to be thought through and pursued through different ages, peoples, and great and small individuals; all their reason and all their evaluations and perspectives on things have to be brought into the light.... It would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the differences between moral climates. (Gay Science 7)

The fundamental step which must be taken if one is ever to arrive at a sound understanding of morality, for Nietzsche, involves viewing moralities from without (GS 380)óand more specifically, recognising them to be devices whereby modifications of the attitudes and actions of human beings living together are brought about. These modifications may be of diverse kinds; but he contends that they generally are related to the establishment or maintenance of advantages of some sort (accruing either to certain segments of the populations of various societies or to these societies themselves as ongoing enterprises), and have the basic character of direction, which in most cases reduces to that of control.

'Advantages' must not be taken too narrowly here; it is to be understood as embracing a broad range of respects in which the position of such groups in relation to others and to other forms of life may be secured and enhanced. In the first instance they pertain to the preservation of the group. Thus Nietzsche contends that an analysis of various moralities reveals that 'their erection was the erection of the conditionsóoften erroneousóof existence of a limited groupó for its preservation' (Will to Power 260). They generally perform the function of strengthening the hand of the groups which develop them in their dealings with others, or at least of heightening their sense of their superiority in relation to others.

The notion of 'direction' similarly is to be understood rather broadly in this connection. What moralities fundamentally convey, on Nietzsche's view, are norms of human life. They distinguish among purported human possibilities, identifying certain ways one might be or act as better or worse than others, and endowing these discriminations with normative force. They thus perform a directive role, encouraging or discouraging ways of living, thinking and choosing to which those concerned may or may not have any prior inclination. In the latter case they may at least initially bear the aspect of constraint, while in the former they serve more to refine and intensify; but in both they educate and transform the consciousness and conduct of those who come under their influence.

Moralities generally thus are taken by Nietzsche to be fundamentally (although by no means purely) social phenomena. In making this observation he means more than merely that they pertain chiefly to interpersonal relationships. His larger point is that moralities as a rule are primarily the moralities of certain societies, peoples or groups, and are only secondarily the moralities of individuals. So, for example, he remarks that we should not be misled by the 'refined' character of our modern 'sense of morality'. We must recognise that, fundamentally considered, morality (Sittlichkeit) 'is nothing other (and thus in particular nothing more) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind these may be; customs, however, are but the traditional ways of acting and esteeming' (Daybreak 9). In short, it is 'society', on Nietzsche's view, which is the source of 'all morality and all celebration of moral action' (The Wanderer and his Shadow 40). This early insight is reflected in one of his best-known (but frequently misunderstood) observations: 'Wandering through the many subtler and coarser

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moralities which have so far been prevalent on earth', he writes, 'I finally discovered two basic types and one basic difference'. The two types are 'master mornlity and .slave morality'óand, he continues, 'I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities' (BGE 260).

All such moralities for Nietzsche are to be regarded as social formations, and referred to the character of the social groups, structures and processes of which they are the issue. The moral sensibilities of individuals (the moral views of philosophers most definitelv included) are not to be thought of as somehow originating and developing within each of them independently of these social formations, any more than their religious beliefs may be supposed to take shape through" their autonomous employment of their own intellectual and spiritual resources. Rather, they are primarily the effects of the internalisation of initially external social norms, together with the operation of a variety of psychological factors rooted in the individual's particular constitution and history. Both of the two basic types of moralities Nietzsche discerns ('master' or 'noble' moralities and 'slave' or 'herd' moralities), along with their various historical admixtures, are in this respect fundamentally akin to the very ancient phenomenon he calls the 'morality of mores' (D 9).

Nietzsche places considerable emphasis on the point, however, that such moralities may be and have been of sign)ficantly different sorts and origins. In particular, they can have the character of an aristocratic code, embodying 'aristocratic value judgements' reflecting the self-affirming self-consciousness of 'the noble', powerful, highstationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebian'. On the other hand, they may have the character of the expression of the 'herd instinct' of the latter, which 'at last gets its word (and its words) in', proscribing what the 'herd' finds threatening and prescribing what seems advantageous to it (On the Genealogy of Morals I:2). Or, somewhat differently, they can take shape in more direct and insidious reaction to the former, 'when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values' and to opposing conceptions of 'good' end 'evil' (GM I:10).