Friedrich Nietzsche: on the Genealogy of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
Nietzsche complains that most philosophers have thought about moral concepts ahistorically, as eternal and unchanging ideas to be analyzed and understood. In contrast to this approach, Nietzsche looks at morality through the lens of genealogy, providing a speculative history of the origins of many of our moral concepts. By showing how these concepts have changed over time, Nietzsche hopes to undermine some of the current ideals that he sees as destructive of the full development of human potential.
He begins with an account of the origins of the concepts of "good" and "bad." These concepts were first created, Nietzsche contends, by the strong and powerful, who thought of themselves as good and the weak and powerless as bad. According to this master morality, "goodness" was an affirmation of one's own qualities, and "badness" was merely the negation of this. Eventually, however, the weak and downtrodden came to resent those of higher status, and engaged in a transvaluation of values, by labeling the powerful "evil" and themselves "good." The resulting slave morality was fundamentally based not on an ideal of what human beings should be like, but on the idea of what was despised in others.
Nietzsche goes on to give accounts of the origins of bad conscience and the ideal of asceticism. Nietzsche argues against the prevailing view that bad conscience is somehow the outgrowth of punishment of the guilty, on the grounds that the meaning of punishment has changed over time too much for this view to be defensible. Instead, Nietzsche claims that bad conscience is the result of humans settling into civilization, which required them to live more consciously and to turn their animal instincts inward. Asceticism, Nietzsche claims, results from the attempt to master these animal instincts by denying them. By providing accounts of the historical origins of slave morality, bad conscience, and asceticism - all of which he sees as destructive of human life - Nietzsche hopes to show that they are not necessary features of our lives.
-According to Nietzsche, the values of "good" and "bad" were first created by:

A) the strong and powerful.
B) the weak and powerless.
C) the reflective and compassionate.
D) religious leaders.