Nietzsche’s second treatise, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and Related Matters” gives a genealogy of right and wrong, the part of morality that concerns what we are permitted to do, forbidden from doing, and required to do.
This is roughly the territory that Hume covered with the artificial virtues and that Kant puts in the center of his moral theory.
I am going to split it in two parts. The first fifteen sections argue that the fundamental moral concepts are debt and punishment. Sections 16-23 concern guilt, which Nietzsche calls “bad conscience,” and how feelings of guilt are related to a belief in God. The last two sections gesture, very loosely, at an alternative to guilt; the material here is quite thin and I will not have much to say about it.
For Hume, duty comes from conventions, cooperative practices that benefit everyone concerned. The dutiful person either complies with the rules without thinking about them or does so as a result of thinking about how non-compliance would be seen by disinterested observers. For Kant, duty is self-imposed by people who imagine themselves to be universal lawgivers. Here, dutiful people act autonomously, or at least consistently, in complying with the rules that they imagine they have given to themselves.
For Nietzsche, by contrast, duty comes from exchanges. You do something for me and I owe a debt to you. Until that debt is paid, I have a duty to you. And if I fail to pay my debts, you will rebalance the scales by punishing me.
This is one of Nietzsche’s more insightful moments. He asks how punishment could reestablish balance between us. Suppose I cheated you. I promised you $10 tomorrow in exchange for your umbrella today but, while I took the umbrella, I never paid up.
It is fairly clear how $20 would make you whole again: you would be paid for your umbrella and the inconvenience of having been stood up by me.
But most of us demand more than that. We want the person who wronged us to be punished or, in other words, to suffer. What kind of balance does that restore?
Nietzsche thinks the answer reveals the true motive behind moral thought.
For a discussion question, I think it would be worth exploring how Hume might address punishment. It is completely absent from his theory. But Nietzsche is surely correct to say that it is an important part of morality. Could Hume make room for it?
Part of Nietzsche’s argument rests on a claim that punishment does not really serve the goal we say we want it to serve. The function of punishment is supposed to be to get the criminal to feel remorse or guilt. But, Nietzsche says, it fails to accomplish that goal and we know it fails. So our real interest in punishment must lie in something other than what we tell ourselves it is (see §14). Is that really so? Does punishment play no role in getting people to see that their behavior was wrong?
Nietzsche thinks his analysis of punishment shows that we have aggressive motivations. In the second half this treatise, he uses that result as part of his analysis of guilt. Guilt, in a nutshell, involves turning aggressive impulses inwards. Instead of trying to hurt others, we try to hurt ourselves.
Why would we do this? Nietzsche thinks it comes with the state. People can live in societies larger than a village only if they regulate themselves. Otherwise, it is too easy to get away with anti-social behavior and if enough people do engage in anti-social behavior, you won’t have a society. How do they regulate themselves? With guilt or “bad conscience.”
Nietzsche suggests that states were created by force, the “blond beasts” forced people into them. While the blond beasts are unburdened by conscience themselves, they inadvertently led to its creation in others since the social units they created depend on it. He is at least correct about the origin of the state as the first states were built on slavery. Whether that led to a sense of guilt is another question.
Nietzsche combines his earlier remarks about debts with his claims about guilt to chart a path to belief in God. In a nutshell, we think of ourselves as owing duties to our ancestors. This morphs into thinking of ourselves as owing duties to God. We eventually project our conscience onto God, thinking that he judges us.
The suggestion, I take it, is that the self-restraint we need for social life has been achieved in ways that make us feel miserable. We blame ourselves in order to make sense of our unhappiness; it is something that we deserve, say, and so it is understandable why we are unhappy. If we are perpetually unhappy, we need a perpetual explanation: never ending guilt.
While I believe that is the main idea, I do not know how to make sense of the fact that Nietzsche seems to think that some societies are better off than others. The ancient Greeks, for example, seem to have what Nietzsche regards as a healthy way of thinking about their Gods (see §23). They see them as just larger versions of human beings, with many of the same flaws and foibles. So there seems to be something about the kind of religion a society has, and not just the pressures of social life, that explains how the cycle of misery and guilt gets started.
I am going to post an essay by Jared Diamond detailing his observations of the pursuit of vengeance in Papua New Guinea (Diamond 2008). It seems to me that Diamond does a good job of fleshing out some of Nietzsche’s more speculative claims about the desire for punishment.