Nietzsche on Morality: Master and Slave Morality in the Genealogy of Morals

Last updated: October 20, 2026

In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche argues that our moral values have a history, and an unflattering one. Building on the contrast between “master morality” and “slave morality” he had drawn a year earlier in Beyond Good and Evil (§260), he claims that the morality of the weak, which calls the strong evil and itself good, began with resentment “becoming creative and giving birth to values” (Horace B. Samuel’s translation), and that over two thousand years it won. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Nietzsche’s moral and political philosophy draws on the book throughout.

Two photos and a book cover do the same job. Top left, a man grins: “Watching the lion eat the deer while watching the documentary about lions.” Top right, the same man stares in grim silence: “Watching the lion eat the deer while watching the documentary about deer.” Underneath sits a Penguin Classics copy of On the Genealogy of Morals. Same event, opposite verdict, depending on whose story you are inside. Nietzsche used lambs and birds of prey instead of deer and lions, but the point is his.

“Good” Used to Mean “Noble”

The first essay starts with a word: before “good” meant kind, Nietzsche argues, it meant noble, and its opposite was not “evil” but “bad” in the sense of low, common or plebeian.

Nietzsche’s opening claim is that the first people to call something good were the powerful, describing themselves. Out of what he calls the “pathos of distance”, the felt gap between the high and the low, they arrogated the right to create values. In this scheme, “bad” carries no moral blame. It just means not like us: poor, weak, unlucky. Nietzsche supports the story with etymologies from Greek, Latin, German and other languages, several of which linguists reject (Latin malus from Greek melas, “black”, is a favourite example), and at the end of the essay he himself invites philologists to take up the question. The history is better read as a provocative hypothesis than as a finished result. What matters for him is the direction of the valuation. Master morality starts with a yes to oneself, and the “bad” is an afterthought.

The Lambs Who Called the Birds of Prey Evil

Slave morality reverses that direction. It starts with a no to someone else, and only afterwards defines itself as the opposite of what it hates.

Nietzsche uses the French word ressentiment for the engine of this reversal (Samuel’s translation simply says “resentment”). In section 10 of the first essay, he writes that the slave revolt in morals begins when this resentment turns creative: people denied a real reaction take their compensation in an imaginary revenge. Section 13 gives the picture behind the meme. It is not surprising that lambs dislike the great birds of prey, he writes, and the lambs may reasonably say that birds of prey are evil and that whatever is least like a bird of prey, namely a lamb, is good. The birds look on with a little mockery and reply that they bear the good lambs no grudge at all: “nothing is tastier than a tender lamb”.

The real argument hides in what follows. To blame the bird, the lambs have to imagine a free subject behind the act, who could have chosen not to be a bird of prey. Nietzsche thinks this “doer” behind the deed is something added afterwards, a story invented so that strength can be held responsible for being strong.

Guilt Began as Debt

The second essay, which the meme does not touch, traces guilt and the bad conscience back to something far less spiritual: the relationship between a creditor and a debtor.

Nietzsche plays on the German Schuld, which means both guilt and debt, and asks whether the moral idea of “ought” “originates from the very material idea of ‘owe’”, as the Samuel translation renders the German pair Schuld and Schulden. Punishment, on this account, began as a way of collecting payment in pain when the debtor could not pay in goods. The bad conscience comes later, when people are enclosed in society and their instincts, with no outlet outside, turn inward against the self. In the essay’s final stage the debt is owed to God and, once moralised as guilt, can never be paid off, until Christianity has God pay it himself. This is Nietzsche at his most speculative. Freud’s account of aggression turned inward in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is often compared with it, although Freud said he had long avoided reading Nietzsche.

A Painful Meaning Beats No Meaning

The third and longest essay asks what ascetic ideals mean, the ideals of self-denial found in priests, philosophers and saints, and answers that even self-denial is a form of the will to power.

Nietzsche’s claim is that human beings need a goal so badly that, in his words, “he will sooner will nothingness than not will at all”. The ascetic priest gives suffering a meaning (you suffer because you are guilty), and a meaning, even a cruel one, is easier to bear than senseless pain. Hence the ascetic ideal’s success, and Nietzsche gives it credit for that, while arguing that it turned human energy against life itself. He goes on to suggest, in section 23, that modern science is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but its latest and noblest form. A story told as a simple fight between strong and weak leaves all of this out.

Was Nietzsche on the Lion’s Side?

Not simply. Nietzsche clearly preferred much of what the masters valued, but the Genealogy also credits the priests and their revolt with making humans deep.

In section 6 of the first essay he writes that on the soil of the priestly form of existence “man really becomes for the first time an interesting animal”, acquiring depth and also becoming evil. The revolt is pinned on “priestly” Judaism and then Christianity, and scholars such as Robert Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem (2016), argue that this borrows from the anti-Jewish clichés of his era. Nietzsche at the same time despised the antisemites of his day: in the second essay he names them, with anarchists, as the people among whom dressing revenge up as justice “blooms its prettiest”, and in the third he calls them men of resentment.

He does not set out a programme for going back, although at the end of the first essay he openly wonders whether the old conflict should be rekindled. He also clarifies that his slogan “Beyond Good and Evil” “is not the same as ‘Beyond Good and Bad’”. He wanted to get rid of the moralising opposition of good and evil, not of all ranking. Brian Leiter, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, calls the target “morality in the pejorative sense”: harmful to potentially higher individuals, even if it suits most others.

The Deer Documentary Is Not the View From Nowhere

The meme gets one of Nietzsche’s central claims about right: the same act gets opposite verdicts depending on who is judging, and the judgement of the weak became the official one.

Watching the deer documentary, you are on the deer’s side, and the lion is a villain. Watching the lion documentary, the same kill is a triumph. Nietzsche has no quarrel with the deer’s feelings. His complaint is that we mistook one documentary for the whole of morality. Whether you agree depends on whether you think compassion for the weak can be defended on its own terms or only as a disguised wish for revenge. Critics can cite Nietzsche’s own rule in the second essay (§12), that a thing’s origin and its later purpose can be worlds apart. A genealogy explains where a value came from. Whether that settles what it is worth is a separate question, one Nietzsche raises in his preface as “the value of these values”, and readers still argue about his answer.

For the figure Nietzsche hoped might come after the old morality, read our post on Nietzsche’s Übermensch.