Views of Morality
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethical thought has tended to justify ethics and morality in terms other than religious and to find a different rationale for morality, seeing ethical questions as involving the relationship between the individual and society, whether that society have a religious or secular orientation. For Marx, morality was related to political and social ideology and to Marx's view of the engine powering the social order--economics. For Nietzsche, the traditional morality of his time was itself immoral and would lead to the decline of western civilization, and he proposed a countermovement based on true values which he proposed,,though he also believed that only the select and superior few would be the free spirits who would be able to accept this doctrine and make use of it. Jean-Paul Sartre is an existentialist, part of a movement that finds that the attempt to understand humanity through rational categories will fail and who instead consider human beings as radically free, seen as a condition of human existence. Human beings face a range of possibilities at any given moment, and human beings are also fully responsible for their own actions. Marx denied the possibility of meaningful morality in his earlier writings, but he changed over time so that he came to support a form of moral relativism so that value judgments may differ form one society to the next because morality serves the interests of a particular social class at a particular
. . .
ng to have an opposite against which to strain and develop. The strong natures of the nobility cannot take enemies, accidents, or misdeeds seriously for long. Nietzsche makes a distinction between the noble man and the member of the herd. The slave who learns to resent always considers that there is always an "other" against which to fight, an enemy to be slain. The ultimate enemy is an evil enemy which becomes the basic concept from which the human being at this level can then evolve a concept of the "good one," meaning himself. This is the contrary of what the noble man does. He rather conceives the basic concept of good in advance and does so out of himself spontaneously, creating the idea of "bad," meaning that which is not good (282-283).
Nietzsche comes to condemn certain values because they ar herd values, derived from resentment of all that is noble. Nietzsche condemns the ideals of peace and universal equality because they are life-denying, going against the reality of the conflict that characterizes life and all living things. Nietzsche was thus attacks Christianity as a morality for the weak. Nietzsche argued for the "natural aristocracy" of the superman who, driven by the "will to power," celebrates life on
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, God Ethical, Communists Fascists, , Sartre God, Kierkegaard Nietzsche, Kierkegaard Sartre, Existentialism Sartre, Indeed Sartre, human nature, ruling class, social class, responsible own actions, concept alienation, society society, rejected doctrine, private property, class class, responsible own, sartre rejected doctrine, means production,
Approximate Word count = 2182
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Views of Morality
|