Maudmarie Clark develops an interpretation of Nietzsche in response to two different groups of scholars.
Some scholars deny that Nietzsche was an immoralist; they think he only rejected a particular flavor of morality, such as, say, Christian morality. Clark thinks he meant to reject morality, period.
Other scholars agree that Nietzsche meant to reject morality, period. But they describe Nietzsche’s understanding of morality in ways that Clark finds inadequate. Philippa Foot, whose essay we read last time, falls into this camp (see Clark 1994, 17–18).
Clark’s essay focuses mostly on the second group. She means to show what Nietzsche thought was essential to morality. She says less about how he went about denying the value of morality, so understood.
It seems to me that there are three elements, corresponding to each of the three parts of the Genealogy of Morality.
First, there is blame, or, more specifically, blame for the kind of person you are. In the first section of the Genealogy, Nietzsche begins with the noble value system, which sorts people into good and bad. Morality emerges out of this when the distinction between good and bad evolves into the distinction between good and evil.
“Evil” is, obviously, replacing “bad.” What’s the difference? Clark says that the “main difference seems to be that the evil are blamed or thought deserving of punishment for being the kind of people they are, whereas the bad are not blamed for being bad, any more than the nobles consider themselves deserving of reward for being good” (Clark 1994, 25).
There is a corresponding change in the meaning of good. The opposite of good is evil and people can be blamed for being evil. So the good must deserve to be rewarded for being good. As Clark puts it, “Only when contrasted with ‘evil’ does goodness become something for which it makes sense to think one deserves a reward” and, at that point, “goodness has become equivalent to moral goodness” (Clark 1994, 25).
So that is one feature of morality, as Nietzsche understood it. Morality involves blaming people for being evil and thinking that the good deserve to be rewarded. The blame and reward are based not on specific deeds but rather for being the kind of person you are.
The second feature of morality is guilt. In the second treatise of the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that the pre-moral system involved the idea of owing a debt and discharging that debt, either by paying it off or by being punished for non-payment. As Clark understands him, he thinks this practice becomes part of morality when people start feeling guilty about their debts.
What does guilt add? Clark thinks Nietzsche believes that guilt, unlike debts, cannot be discharged. “In the case of moral guilt … we remain guilty of whatever wrongs we have done, even if we have suffered an appropriate punishment” (Clark 1994, 29). She adds that the guilty person has a lower self-worth; by contrast, the person who owes a debt in the pre-moral value system does not suffer a loss in self-worth.
The third feature of morality is a bit hard for me to figure out, in part because Clark runs out of space. It is meant to be derived from the third treatise in the Genealogy, the one on the so-called ascetic ideal. This is Clark’s description of it.
Briefly put, rules became moral rules when their violation was thought to incur guilt, and the idea of guilt is a transformation of the idea of debt by means of the ascetic ideal. Furthermore, the noble nonmoral conception of virtue or goodness becomes moral virtue precisely insofar as people are blamed for what they are – that is, considered guilty. (Clark 1994, 31)
I cannot tell how this is different from the other two points. Clark admits that her explanation is incomplete, so I do not feel quite so bad.
I think the obvious thing to talk about is whether this is an accurate description of morality.