Friedrich Nietzsche is known for a view on morality that most of us find rather repugnant. He regarded morality and the notions of good and evil as fictions, and saw himself “beyond” these dogmas for the herd. Furthermore, he actually argued that morality, as conceived today, is actively harmful to society and the individual.

This may be a hard one to swallow, or even entertain for some. On the surface, it seems like a recipe for chaos and cruelty. But Nietzsche is also known for this quote:

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn’t hear the music.

My goal in this video is to help you hear the music of Nietzsche’s campaign against morality, so you’ll understand why I personally share Nietzsche’s view and believe a better world would exist “beyond good and evil.”

“Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity – an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Psychitects – I’m excited to take you into the darkest depths of my personal philosophy. I’m going to share with you the reasons why I oppose moral systems, how many people I’ve murdered, and how you can cultivate robust wisdom in the place of rigid moral rules.

Three thousand years ago, Zoroaster, also known as Zarathushtra, first proposed the good/evil dichotomy. And ever since then, religions have preached of omniscient judges and karmic cycles to lead us to believe we would face supernatural consequences for our actions.

Philosophers like Bentham and Kant tried to convince others, and themselves, that moral demands were imposed by the very structure of logic. And today, otherwise astute thinkers like Sam Harris continue to promote contrived metaethical systems in the hopes of creating a more virtuous world.

Now it’s true: Nietzsche made quite clear that he despised the morality of his day, and often referred to himself as an immoralist. This might suggest that he supports an “anything goes” attitude toward our actions. Be an overman, exert your will to power, and conquer all, even if it means cruelty toward others.

But this is a caricature of his actual view. In his work Daybreak, Nietzsche makes the following statement:

It goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged—but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.

So no, he wasn’t in favor of doing everything your most barbaric impulses urged you to do. But he was a moral anti-realist. For a quick primer:

Moral realism is the metaethical stance which holds that moral properties exist, independently from people’s judgments. A moral realist will likely believe that killing someone has the property of wrongness, and that the claim “murder is wrong” is objectively true, regardless of the individual actor or culture.

The claim that we have a moral obligation to keep our promises, for a moral realist, is not fundamentally different from the claim that water molecules contain one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms – both would be the types of claims that can be definitively true or false.

Moral anti-realism, which Nietzsche subscribed to, holds that there are no moral properties or truths. There are no factual statements about what one ought to do in the strictest sense or is morally obligated to do. For the moral anti-realist, the types of claims moral realists make, like “murder is wrong” are either subjective claims, mistaken objective claims, or not coherent claims at all. Moral anti-realism includes a number of more specific, overlapping stances you may be familiar with:

• Subjectivism: Moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes opinions, conventions, or preferences.
• Relativism: For something to be morally right is for it to be approved of by society, meaning different things are right for people in different societies and different periods in history.
• Non-Cognitivism: Ethical claims do not express coherent propositions, so moral knowledge is impossible. A number of variations aim to explain what moral language actually refers to. Some of these are emotivism (“murder is wrong” = “boo murder!”), prescriptivism (“murder is wrong” = “don’t murder!”), and fuctionalism (“murder is wrong” = a useful fiction).
• Moral Skepticism: Moral knowledge may or may not exist, but no one has access to it regardless.
• Moral Nihilism: There are no moral truths, no objective values, no real good or bad, right or wrong. All ethical claims are false.
• Error Theory: A combination of cognitivism and moral nihilism – moral language expresses facts, but is in error because no moral facts exist (“murder is wrong” = false).

Now like Nietzsche, I fall firmly into the moral anti-realist camp. I’m the realest anti-realist in the game right now, and you can quote me on that. But this doesn’t mean I’m against benevolence or honesty or compassion, and neither was Nietzsche – it’s the reasons, or lack thereof, behind those behaviors that anti-realists object to. Here are some of Nietzsche’s reasons to oppose common morality:

Compassion

You may have heard that Nietzsche was against compassion – and yes, he spoke very critically about a certain, very common type of compassion, which we might also call pity, calling it a “religion of snug coziness.” But contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t critical of the idea of helping others—he actually referred to the “gift-giving virtue” as the highest of all virtues.

So what was his issue with common compassion? Imagine you are talking to someone who hasn’t eaten in days. They are extremely hungry, but they inform you that they are intentionally fasting as an exercise in self-mastery and spiritual growth.

Then another person objects, yelling out “No, you have to eat! You are suffering over this, and that is causing me to suffer. You must eat immediately to resolve my discomfort.”

You probably wouldn’t see this person as particularly kind, wise, or even compassionate. Completely captivated by their compassion impulse, they are selfishly demanding that the other person make them feel better at the expense of the other person’s wishes.

It was precisely this type of compassion that Nietzsche criticized. He spoke out against those with an inability to tolerate another person’s suffering, even when that suffering may serve the greater good and their deeper well-being.

What’s important is that our compassion be directed toward another person’s long-term well-being. We should not foster a reactive impulse to instantly eliminate the suffering of others in order to ease our own. We should develop a deep understanding of well-being and let our kindness overflow in the service of others.

In Nietzsche’s allegorical work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a hunchback approaches the protagonist and asks if he is able to cure his deformed back. Zarathustra refuses and replies “If one takes the hump from the hunchback, one takes his spirit too—thus teach the people.” It may seem cruel to refuse to cure a disability if he was able, but in this case, the decision comes from a place of genuine compassion.

He thought simply removing obstacles from someone’s life was a lazy way of helping them. It did more, he thought, to help the helper feel superior than to actually benefit the person struggling. And it failed to take a unified account of genuine well-being. Nietzsche, like the Stoics, thought that if you truly wanted to help someone, or help yourself, your efforts must aid in the cultivation of character.

The character-cultivating power of hardship is exactly why the Stoics were known to wish bad luck and betrayal on one another. It’s why Nietzsche said “To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities.”

And it’s why Martin Seligman and the research he cites on post-traumatic growth suggest that individuals who have experienced difficult and painful events in their lives end up with stronger character, more intense strengths, and higher well-being than those who haven’t. Our character, like our muscles, can only be strengthened by being exercised.

A loss scarcely remains a loss for an hour: in some way or other a gift from heaven has always fallen into our lap at the same moment—a new form of strength, for example: be it but a new opportunity for the exercise of strength!

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Dogmatism

To get to an even bigger problem with morality, Nietzsche felt that believing we all should do certain things and all shouldn’t do others, simply because we’ve been told they’re moral or immoral, was dogmatic – blindly trusting of the customs set forward before our time.

So does this mean anything goes? Should we really condone the acts of serial killers, sadists, or people who listen to music on their phones out loud in public? No. Remember, he said we should do or avoid certain actions for actual reasons. So what kind of non-moral reasons are there to do “moral” acts or avoid “immoral” ones? Let’s look at an example.

You’ve got a test tomorrow, for school, for a skill certification, for whatever seems most relevant to you. There is a lot of information you don’t know, you really don’t feel like studying, and you’re not even sure if you could master it in time if you did.

It occurs to you that you could cheat on the test fairly easily, perhaps by sneaking in a cheat sheet or looking over your studious neighbor’s shoulder. Should you do it?

Morality generally tells us that cheating is wrong. So if you want to be a “good person,” you’ve got your answer. Don’t cheat.

But what would happen if we completely threw morality out the window and just made the decision based on practical consideration? In other words, wisdom. It might look something like the graph on the right:?