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When you come to a fork in the road....Take it!
~ Yogi Berra
In a previous post, I ventured into an exegesis of Nietzsche. Well, not quite. But I did offer a few pointers on Nietzsche's views on happiness that I found in Julian Young's excellent biography. I promised to follow up with a post on morality. So here goes, very brief and probably oversimplified.
Nietzsche was disenchanted with Christianity and became ever more radical in his rejection of it. He believed that conventional moral sentiments are derived from Christian norms, and that, although Christianity was beginning to lose its hold over millions of Europeans at the time, its morality lingered like a bad hang-over. Nietzsche sought the origins of Christian morality in the revolt of the oppressed during late antiquity. Once it had succeeded, the revolt replaced an aristocratic moral code with a slave code. The basis of the slave code is ressentiment. Nietzsche chose this French term because it captures the idea of remembering an injury and desiring to take revenge (according to Larousse). In short, what occurred was a revaluation of values (Nietzsche's phrase).
According to Nietzsche, the archaic and the classic Greeks were the paragons of the aristocratic code. The Hellenistic Greeks were already en route to décadence. The early Greeks prized combat and competition (agon). To win a foot race or a poetic contest at Olympia was noble, virtuous, and morally good. Such victories were quintessentially self-oriented; they took the self to a higher place. Hence happiness. Yet, these victories also ennobled the community. Hence, be wary of simple zero-sum schemes pitting the individual against society. To these Greeks, weakness, meekness, and cowardice were despicable.
In contrast, Christianity-says Nietzsche-glorifies self-effacing values. Turn the other cheek, love your neighbor, repent, etc. Nietzsche thought this was a bad idea, and he offered two reasons: [1] The moral code makes demands no one can meet. Who hasn't lusted in his/her heart? [2] Yet, the same code insists that we have free will to do the right thing. It follows that if we don't do the right thing it is because we choose not to. As a result, Christian morality creates the conditions for a viciously bad conscience (psychopaths excepting).
Nietzsche was a staunch determinist. Like Schopenhauer, he held that we can do what we want, but we cannot want what we want. If we did, there would be a problem of infinite regress. Can we want what we want what we want? And so forth. Now, given determinism, there is no place for a bad conscience, which is one of the hallmarks of conventional morality. If your actions are fully determined, what is the point of beating yourself up over any one of them? I would like to add that if we did have free will-as many of you believe we do-there is no point of having a bad conscience either. A bad conscience says you should have acted otherwise, but having had free will at the time of choice, you selected the best course of action, the course that you "willed." Why would your will be different in retrospect? Thus, the bad conscience is a paradox beyond the free-will-vs.-determinism debate. It does not make good sense under either position. Either way, it is a cruel and pointless punishment. Nietzsche concluded that a slave morality makes you sick, whereas aristocratic morality can potentially make you happy.
From a conventional perspective, it might be scary to contemplate the removal of conscience. The intuition that it is a necessary and ultimately beneficent force is very strong. The same intuition says that without a conscience we would be exploitative, Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths. I am not suggesting that there can be no good argument for having a conscience, but I think that this particular fear is unfounded for three reasons. First, many highly evolved nonhuman species seem to get along just fine without a conscience as it is ordinarily understood. Why not us? Second, I think it would be wrong to confuse the lack of a conscience with a lack of sympathy, compassion, regard for others, and so forth. Again, some animal species show signs of these capacities. Third, there are ambitious theories of social behavior that have no concept of conscience built into them. For example, rational-actor models only assume that individuals consider what various available outcomes are worth to them (and perhaps to others they care about) and how probable these outcomes are to be attained. Perfect rationality does not require a conscience and it is perfectly compatible with ethical conduct.
Granted, the notion of conscience has snuck back into some versions of the general rational actor model under the label of regret (see here for a future post on regret). According to regret theories, we choose one action over another because we try to minimize the anticipation of regret. Let's say you choose to tell the truth because you anticipate that if you lied you might regret it later. In other words, it is the expected possibility of a bad conscience that promotes ethical behavior. But again, regret theory is just a modification of the rational actor model. You anticipate a negative consequence for one of the actions, and therefore choose not to do it. What would need to be shown is that the repeated experience of a bad conscience actually leads to improvements in ethical behavior that are greater than the improvements obtained with other means. And to Nietzsche, being socialized to be weak, meek, and self-effacing is not the kind of improvement a self-respecting human would want.
At the present time, the ghost of Nietzsche is not out to haunt psychology, but perhaps it should be. Let me point out two examples.
First, moral psychology has become a productive area of research over the past decade. The guiding mission of this research program is to figure out how ordinary people apportion praise, blame, and responsibility. Theories differ in how they envision the sequence of emotional and cognitive processes that shape moral judgments. But they all put a lot of stock in perceptions of intentionality, which is code for free will. Someone who "chose" to break the code is expected to feel more remorse and deserves a harsher punishment than someone who can say "The situation made me do it." Like most theories in social psychology, these theories of moral judgment are conditionally determinist. These theories do not appear to question the moral code itself and the psychological assumptions that it makes.
Second, a currently popular framework of social perception distinguishes between two major dimensions of judgment. The most common label of the first dimension is "warmth." This dimension expresses conventional morality. A person with a high score is agreeable, sincere, altruistic, and concerned about others. In a more technical term suggested by Belgian psychologist Guido Peeters, such a person engages in other-profitable actions. The most common label of the second dimension is "competence." This dimension is orthogonal to conventional morality. A person with a high score is powerful, skillful, rational, and self-interested. In Peeters's terms, such person engages in self-profitable actions.
Orthogonality means geometrical independence. Being high (or low) on one dimension does not keep one from being high (or low) on the other. It is here that I think we can put Nietzsche into perspective. The sage of Sils-Maria called for a second revaluation of values. Many of his writings suggest that he saw conventional slave morality and classical aristocratic morality as polar opposites. To overcome the sickness of conscience, the Übermensch would have to become narcissistic, uncaring, and Machiavellian. My impression after reading Young's biography is that this would be the wrong interpretation. As I said earlier, it seems that the mature Nietzsche's view was that an aristocratic morality is compatible with community spirit and compassion. Nietzsche himself had it both ways. Legend has it that on the day of his final collapse, he tried to save a horse from a crazed coachman's whip.
For a defense of the view that guilt is good, see
Cohen, T. R., Panter, A. T., & Turan, N. (2012). Guilt proneness and moral character. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 355-359.
