Question

Please come prepared to address the following questions in depth.

1. Explain the distinction Nietzsche draws between Master Morality and Slave Morality. In addition, discuss his understanding of how Slave morality came to be the dominant understanding of morality. What is your assessment of Nietzsche’s position?

2. Discuss de Beauvoir’s understanding of “The Ethics of Ambiguity.” Include in your discussion what she means by the distinction between absurdity and ambiguity, the problem she identifies with the “serious” person, and her outline of a method for doing ethics. What is your assessment of de Beauvoir’s position?

3. Explain Camus’ understanding of the absurdity of life and what resources we have in facing this absurdity. Explore how this relates to his use of the story of Sisyphus. What is your assessment of Camus?

4. Discuss W.E.B. Du Bois’ understanding of “double consciousness,” the connection that Dr. Lewis Gordon draws between racism and bad faith, and the themes that are typical of the approach of Black Existentialism overall. What is your assessment of this material?

5. Explain what Russell Miars identifies as the prejudices that keep counsellors from incorporating the insights of existentialism in their practice, how he counters these concerns, and what he believes existentialism has to offer to counseling psychology. What is your assessment of Miars’ position?

Answer 1

• 1.Nietzsche argued that there were two fundamental types of morality: 'Master morality' and 'Slave morality'.Slave morality values things like kindness, humility, and sympathy, while master morality values pride, strength, and nobility.
• The Master morality involves those with strengths of both mind and body seeing themselves as good. It values things like wealth, glory, ambition, excellence, and self-actualization. It affirms life and everything in it.
• Since the master morality is favored by the powerful or those with some strength, its followers are few. However, those few are unconcerned with the disapproval of the many. This also means the masters are creative, as they have no desire to follow a prescribed life plan and are willing to experiment with new life choices that suit them despite widespread disapproval.
• Someone who believes in master morality will look at the consequences of one's actions, not necessarily if those actions are the right thing to do or not. If a master moralist can get away with something that is considered to be bad for many slave moralists, they will do so if it benefits their power.
• On the other hand, the slave morality condemns the strength that the hated masters possess and praises the weakness that they have.  Humility was held to be a virtue because they had nothing to be proud of. Endless generosity was praised because they needed help themselves. The slave morality is sour grapes made into a values system.
• If societies in Europe began with a noble morality, at some point, slave morality became dominant.Nietzsche says the slave’s ‘manifold hidden suffering rages against that noble sensibility which seems to deny suffering’. The Roman rulers seemed, and valued being, free-spirited (reinterpret: wicked), self-confident (decadent), care-free (lazy), tolerant (unruly). They viewed slaves with contempt, pity, and disdain, causing hatred that could not be expressed directly. And so it turned into what Nietzsche calls it a kind of resentment.
• In someone with a slave mentality, the feeling grows as no action is taken. Instead of a political revolt, revenge took the form of a moral revolt. The pent-up feelings of resentment were expressed through blame, an idea that has little place in a noble morality.
• A slave morality therefore centers on the question of blame, and not just for actions, but also for being who and how one is. This requires the idea that one could act or be different, and makes guilt (for not being or doing ‘better’) the heart of morality. Guilt causes suffering, but the slave has known only suffering, tyranny, being commanded – so morality becomes unconditional commands, e.g. of a God.
• Basically, Nietzsche describes slave morality as the kind of morality that an oppressed people, a weakened and complacent people, needs to adopt for its survival.
• Thus we get “turn the other cheek,” and “do unto others as you have them do unto you,” and “in the afterlife they will suffer the torments of Hell, because in this life I am good and they are bad.”
• So, the Romans were healthy and happy and strong and beautiful. They appreciated robustness, humor, valor, and were a culture of honor.
• So the Jewish folk, in order to continue their existence and not be wiped out or assimilated into the Roman Empire, had to form a code of ethics that was not only diametrically opposed to the Romans, but posited pagan values as evil. This is Nietzsche saying this of course.
• Nietzsche does not mean to identify just the past origins of morality. Both master and slave moralities continue, evolved and mixed up, in us today. The motives present at the origin of slave morality continue to motivate morality today.
• As you look out at the political spectrum, we can see that many progressive Democrats tend to focus on social justice issues from the vantage point of slave morality whereas many conservative Republicans think in terms of individual responsibility, merit and the achievement of power free of governmental constraints. Nietzsche's formulation suggests that we do well to keep the dialectical tension between these two moral perspectives in mind.
• Basically, anywhere the dispossessed and disempowered exist, there will be a moral code that, oddly enough, claims the highest attainable virtue is behaving according to precisely those characteristics that are necessary for a weak, oppressed people to exist.
• Due to time limit,remaining quesions can be asked as another question,they will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation