Against the Genealogy of Morality

Alfred Tang

            Humans are different from animals in many ways.  One of the differences is morality.  The phenomenon of morality among humans is one of the challenges of atheistic naturalism because (1) there is no clear evolutionary advantage in moral actions (e.g. self-sacrificial acts) and (2) no animal exhibits any evidence of knowing moral right and wrong.  Atheists have been trying to invent a natural explanation of morality to weaken the claim of the existence of God.  Atheologian (atheistic theologian) Friedrich Nietzsche made such an attempt in his book On the Genealogy of Morality.  The book is basically a collection of discrete thoughts summarized as three treatises:

• Treatise 1:  The concept of goodness is a revenge of the base and lowly people against the noble and superior by the way of renaming weakness as virtue.  Nietzsche called this psychological reaction “resentiment.”  This way religion is a conspiracy of the weak to usurp power from the strong.
• Treatise 2:  Guilt is a primitive subliminal invention to guarantee kept promises in the society.  This resentiment is later transferred to a deity.  The claim is that a stronger human has a freer conscience and that atheism will ultimately free mankind from any guilty feeling.
• Treaties 3:  Sexual attraction is the most primal and basic instinct.  It is unnatural for any animal to want to avoid it.  Ascetic ideal refers to the self-denial of sensual pleasure.  This trait is unique in human beings.  Sensuality is a distraction to philosophers.  The claim is that ascetics manipulate themselves by numbing their senses through self-denial into believing truth without going through the mental agony of proving through scientific thinking.

My quick responses are the following:

• Against treatise 1:  Christianity teaches that God alone is good.  Humility and servitude (not power and control) are held as Christian ideals.  If goodness is an excuse of the weak for usurping power from the strong in the name of religion, then it is a surprise that the cause (usurping power) and the effect (abstaining from power) are opposite in nature.
• It is commonly believed that positive reinforcement is much more effective than punishment.  Evolution by definition picks out the most effective mechanism for survival.  In other words, the celebration of virtue should be naturally selected over the torment of guilt as a means to guarantee kept promises in the society.  This observation is opposite to Nietzsche’s speculation.  Since guilt is only a weak deterrence to crime, it cannot be nature’s pick for a mechanism to maximize stability.
• Ascetics and philosophers are unusual groups of people in the society and represent only a small percentage of the population.  A natural explanation of morality ought to apply to the whole population at large and not just a selected group of special interests.  Furthermore minorities are constrained by a set of much more stringent environmental variables so that they are evolutionarily disadvantageous.  In other words, ascetics and philosophers ought to be systematically de-selected by nature.  On the contrary their existence is an evolutionary miracle.  Notwithstanding the irony, it is generally the case that suffering clarifies thinking.  It is especially true among spiritual and thoughtful people.  It means that asceticism tends to heighten one’s awareness of truth rather than dulling his reasoning faculty like Nietzsche has claimed.

At the end, Nietzsche fails to construct a natural explanation of morality consistent with atheism and evolution.  If morality cannot be explained naturally, then the simplest and the most logical explanation is still the one that is supernatural in nature.