Nietzsche's Misguided Moral Values

Since the early ages of time men called philosophers have argued and tried to put together a kind of framework for morality in humans. There are men like Kant who in the 18th century tried to instill a universal law for everyone and then there are men like Nietzsche who came in the 19th century and tried to impair humankind's thoughts on morality as a whole. In Kant's foundation of work he introduces his categorical imperative as a universal moral law. In nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche later goes on the offensive against Kant's categorical imperative on that Kant, like many others, has been mistaken into advocating for a set of misguided moral values. Duty, the main foundation of the categorical imperative, carries with …show more content…
Nietzsche sets out to find what the Judeo-Christian mentality perceives as moral. Here we are presented with the difference of the noble and the non-noble as the dividing factor in early society. The noble was comprised of the naturally powerful warriors, lords, or as he later calls them “the birds of prey”. The noble people were the first to form moral values, which were simply reinstating their own ideals as a good thing to do, where anything that is not in unison with these ideals was naturally deemed to be bad. Usually when the noble considers strength to be a good quality, being weak is immediately seen as a bad thing. The noble people were forming their morals by themselves and never thought to go further and try to validate why they are the morals to live by. Nietzsche talks about how two sets of morals grew apart in these times: Good/Bad and Good/Evil. The good/bad is the nobel set of morals and the good/evil are the lower class morals. The non noble are placed aside those “birds of prey” as “lambs”. Whenever the predator preys on a lamb they are automatically called evil. This evil comes from the non-noble virtue, the good as an opposition to the evil and only is a reaction to what the noble considers as a virtue. Nietzsche believes and talks about how humans are not promise keeping animals and we tend to be forgetful. One might ask themselves “Why work hard to get something, when I can take it from someone else”. Nietzsche finds the origins to guilt and “bad conscience” as historical events that allowed guilt to become a harmful value. When civilizations first emerged and needed to protect themselves from harm, people had to stop acting like “birds of prey” and act in a “civilized” manner to their neighbors. The sudden loss of “freedom”, for the strongest who was never before was