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

Last updated: November 3, 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.

What Did Nietzsche Mean by “Morality”?

Nietzsche called himself “the first immoralist”, and readers have been misunderstanding the label ever since. He did not mean that he approved of cruelty, lying or theft. He meant that he was the first to put morality itself in the dock: to ask not which actions are good, but what the value of our values is, where they came from and whom they serve. In Beyond Good and Evil he put the principle in one line: there are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

By “morality” Nietzsche usually means something narrower than ethics in general. His target is the morality that dominated Europe in his time, Christian in origin but surviving among secular liberals, utilitarians and socialists: a morality that praises pity, selflessness, humility and equality, condemns pride and self-assertion, and claims to apply to everyone in the same way. The philosopher Brian Leiter calls this “morality in the pejorative sense”, to distinguish it from values as such. Nietzsche had plenty of values. What he rejected was the claim of one particular set to be universal, natural and beyond question.

His method was genealogy: tracing how values came to be, on the assumption that something with a disreputable origin may deserve less reverence than it gets. He began this “campaign against morality”, as he later called it, in Daybreak (1881), sharpened it in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and gave it its most systematic form in the Genealogy a year later. In his final works he announced the next step, a revaluation of all values. The rest of this post follows the Genealogy, and then asks what Nietzsche wanted to put in morality’s place.

A careful critic will object at once that this proves nothing. Where a value came from does not settle whether it is valid; to think otherwise is the genetic fallacy. Nietzsche knew the objection and even stated it himself in The Gay Science: a morality could have grown out of an error, and recognising this would not yet touch the problem of its value. His genealogy is therefore not meant as a refutation. It is meant to break a spell. Once we see that values we treat as eternal and self-evident have a history of interests, fears and power struggles behind them, we can no longer take them for granted, and the question of their value becomes open. That, rather than any single verdict, is what he wanted.

His sharpest target was pity, Mitleid, the very feeling his former hero Arthur Schopenhauer had made the foundation of morality. Nietzsche argued that pity multiplies suffering instead of reducing it, humiliates the one pitied, and flatters the one who pities. Behind the morality of compassion he saw a weariness with life, a preference for comfort over greatness. Whether that is fair to Schopenhauer, whose compassion grew out of a metaphysics of shared suffering, is another matter; the contrast is drawn in Buddha vs Schopenhauer.

“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.

Misreadings: The Sister, the Nazis and the Edgelords

No philosopher’s ideas about morality have been abused more thoroughly. After Nietzsche’s collapse in 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his estate. She was married to a prominent antisemite and later welcomed the Nazis; she compiled The Will to Power from his notebooks and shaped the image of her brother as a prophet of German nationalism. Nietzsche himself had written with contempt of antisemites, mocked German nationalism repeatedly and broke with his publisher partly over antisemitic publications. In one of the confused letters written during his final breakdown, he even announced that he was having all antisemites shot.

The most notorious phrase in the Genealogy, the “blond beast”, has suffered the same fate. In the first essay it refers in the first place to the lion as a beast of prey, and Nietzsche applies it to a list of aristocratic peoples that includes Roman, Arabian, Germanic and Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes and Scandinavian Vikings. It is a metaphor for predatory noble types, not a racial category. That does not make the passage comfortable; Nietzsche clearly admired the masters’ unreflective vitality in ways that sit badly with modern ethics. But it is not what the propagandists made of it.

The rescue came after the war. The German-American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) and in his translations, presented Nietzsche as a humane critic of culture rather than a proto-fascist, and the scholarly editions of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari later restored the texts from his own manuscripts. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was perhaps too gentle, and later readers have put back some of the edge. But nobody serious now reads him through his sister’s eyes.

The modern misreading is milder but more widespread: the online “alpha” who takes master morality as permission to despise the weak. Nietzsche would have recognised him at once, and not as a master. A person who needs constant reassurance of his superiority, defines himself against an enemy and nurses grievances about being held back is, on Nietzsche’s own analysis, a textbook case of ressentiment. The point of the Genealogy is not to pick the winning side but to see how both sides came to think as they do. Modern misreadings by tech executives get their own treatment in Misreading Nietzsche.

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.

Nietzsche’s Ethics: What Comes After Morality

If Nietzsche rejected morality, did he have an ethics? Most scholars now think so, though it looks different from a list of rules. Its central idea is a question of rank: some ways of living are higher than others, more creative, more honest, more affirmative of life, and a culture should be judged by whether it produces such lives. His values are health rather than guilt, strength rather than resentment, self-overcoming rather than self-denial and, above all, the capacity to say yes to life as it is.

Several formulas recur. “Become who you are”, borrowed from the Greek poet Pindar, appears in The Gay Science and as the subtitle of Ecce Homo. Amor fati, love of fate, is what he calls his formula for greatness: not merely to bear what is necessary but to love it. The thought of eternal recurrence, the demon who asks whether you could will this exact life again, endlessly, is a test of that love. And the Übermensch, introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the image of a human being who creates values instead of inheriting them; we cover him in Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

What this ethics lacks is equally important. There is no rule that applies to everyone in the same way, no principle of equal respect and no duty to relieve all suffering. Nietzsche thought suffering could be productive, and pity, by multiplying it, harmful to the one who pities. Critics have pointed out that this makes his ethics elitist and, in places, cruel. Defenders answer that his main interest is not politics but the individual’s relation to his own life, and that much of what he says reads best as a challenge to the reader rather than a programme for society. That tension runs through every serious interpretation, and also through the popular misuse discussed in Nietzsche vs Self-Optimization.

The genealogical method outlived Nietzsche’s own conclusions. Michel Foucault took it up explicitly in his 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and in his histories of prisons and sexuality, and the British philosopher Bernard Williams used a genealogical approach in Truth and Truthfulness (2002) to defend, rather than debunk, the value of truthfulness. Both show that asking where a value came from can be a way of understanding it better, not just of tearing it down. Nietzsche would probably have been annoyed at the second use and pleased by the attention.

Nietzsche Quotes on Morality, With Their Sources

Few philosophers are quoted as often or as loosely. These are some of the lines on morality people search for most, with the places where Nietzsche actually wrote them.

Two cautions apply. Nietzsche often writes through characters, the madman, Zarathustra, and his aphorisms are designed to provoke rather than to state doctrine, so a quote without context can mislead as easily as it can enlighten. And translations vary considerably; the wording above follows common English renderings. For the full meaning of the famous announcement in the last row, see Marx vs Nietzsche: Misunderstood Quotes.

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.

So is Nietzsche’s view of morality right? The honest answer is that it is a hypothesis, brilliantly argued and historically shaky. Classicists doubt that early Greek aristocrats used “good” and “bad” exactly as he claims, and historians of religion find his account of Judaism and early Christianity both schematic and, in places, hostile. Yet the core suspicion has proved fertile. Psychologists who study moral judgement, from research on motivated reasoning to work on how outrage spreads online, keep finding that moral language often serves interests the speaker would rather not name. Nietzsche would not have needed a laboratory to predict it. He would only have asked, as he did of every value: who benefits from believing this, and what would it cost to stop?

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