Have We Regressed into Nietzsche’s “Moral Nihilism”?
Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage
And all one need do is to note the manner in which “agents” construe the world around them from very different historical, cultural and circumstantial perspectives. If there really was a “universal” morality able to be either discovered or invented don’t you suppose philosophers, ethicists and political scientists would have announced it to the world by now.
Ah, but they have. Over and over and over and over and over again. Given one or another God, political ideology, deontological philosophical contraption, assessment of nature. Human history is bursting at the seams with universal moralities. Even Nietzsche, the moral nihilist, put his reputation on the line by inventing a No God teleology of sorts that revolved around the Übermensch. And isn’t this just another rendition of “right makes might”?
That’s the thing about a world that ever and always combines an ineffably complex intertwining of genes and memes in a “human condition” that never stops evolving amidst an avalanche of contingency, chance and change. As with God, if a universal morality didn’t exist it would have to be invented.
After all, look at all the renditions of it here!!
See how it works? Human interactions cannot be allowed to sink down into the “nasty brutish and short” mentality of might makes right. The fittest will survive but only because they deserve to. The masters are the masters not merely because that have the raw power to impose their will on the weak, but because they are inherently superior to the weak. It’s not for nothing that folks like Ayn Rand brought elements of Nietzsche’s thinking into their own intellectual models.
On paper, Nietzsche can be shaped and molded to fit all manner individual requirements. Again, look at all of the renditions of him here. Some by way of Satyr, others by way of Fixed Jacob and his “intellectual contraption” brood.
Therefore, we can focus in on a particular context and the Übermensch among us can inform us as to what is required of us if we wish to be included among their own own “one of us” clique/claque.