In his essay "What Is Noble?" Friedrich Nietzsche presents his argument for the master-morality and against the slave-morality. Nietzsche clearly believes that the master-morality is noble, and that the slave-morality is ignoble. Nietzsche supports the idea of a "good and healthy aristocracy" which "should . . . accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments" (46). The noble individual is the individual who makes his own morality, rather than allows others to determine his morality, as does the slave. To Nietzsche, the noble individual is the fearless one who knows and accepts the fact that "life is precisely Will to Power" (46). In other words, the noble individual recognizes that there are two types of people---those who have and use power (the noble), and those who have no power (the ignoble), who see themselves as powerless, and who are exploited by those who do have power. As Nietzsche writes,
The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself: he despises them. . . . The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised. . . . The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values. . . . The noble man . . . helps the unfortunate, but not . . out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the superabundance of power (47).
Nietzsche wants to create a moral system of values which transcends the conventional understanding of what is good and evil. The noble individual determines what is good or evil or moral or immoral. Whatever the noble individual does is moral, according to Nietzsche's moral theory or value system. The noble individual who creates his own morality and his own values owes nothing to the slave class. He owes something only to his own master class:
A mora...