Questioning moral certainty › Who creates values?

The philosophers Nietzsche hopes for are more than interpreters of inherited ideals. In §211 he distinguishes philosophical workers from philosophers who command and legislate. The latter determine a direction and a purpose; their knowing is also a creating. This is an account of authority over values that goes well beyond the familiar permission to choose one's personal preferences.

A created value can reorganize what counts as admirable, what kinds of achievement deserve sacrifice, and what a culture asks of its members. The proposal therefore raises an immediate difficulty. Why should those affected accept the creator's authority? Identifying a commanding personality does not establish that its commands are justified. Nietzsche's language forces that question even when it does not give a reader an acceptable answer.

His criticism of modern European morality belongs here. In §202 he connects democratic tendencies with Christian moral inheritance and describes the dominant morality through the polemical language of the herd. His concern includes the elevation of safety and the reduction of suffering over forms of excellence that may demand danger or hardship. These are Nietzsche's valuations, not established findings about the moral inferiority of compassion.

There is a further distinction between questioning whether a value should govern every person in every circumstance and rejecting the value entirely. A concern for safety could become restrictive without every effort to protect people being objectionable. Nietzsche's polemical compression sometimes makes that distinction difficult to hold. A careful criticism should identify the specific demand being challenged before moving to a judgment about compassion or equality as a whole.

The distinction between master and slave morality in §260 gives the critique another dimension. A noble type begins by affirming itself and calls what it esteems good; the contrasting type develops its evaluations under conditions of dependence and danger. Nietzsche also says that the types can be mixed, even within one person. They should not be used as a simple test assigning every individual permanently to one social category.

In this account the opposing term matters. The noble contrast between good and bad differs from the moral opposition between good and evil. A judgment that someone is contemptible need not have the same structure as a judgment that the person is morally wicked. Nietzsche investigates how different experiences and relationships might produce these different evaluative vocabularies.

His rejection of egalitarian morality cannot be made harmless by calling the whole book psychological. Sections 257 and 259 defend hierarchy and describe exploitation as belonging to life. Nietzsche's language about aristocratic society and slavery is morally serious and disturbing. Although the book supplies no detailed institutional constitution, it makes claims about social order that demand ethical criticism.

A reader can accept the need to investigate moral assumptions while rejecting those conclusions. The fact that equality has a history does not refute its justification. Nor does the existence of exceptional achievement establish that others may rightly be subordinated to it. Nietzsche's challenge is strongest when it makes a suppressed value judgment visible; it still has to defend the judgment he would put in its place.