A Genealogy of Morals...Wait, What? Morality, Part 2: Friedrich Nietzsche

What is morality? Is it based on reason, God, or human nature itself? Or is it possible there’s a history of our moral ideas that we can trace back to historical events? Join us as we delve into one of the most controversial thinkers on morality of all time: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche rejected grand theories that justify morality, like those of Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham. He favored a semi-historical analysis studying where our particular moral beliefs came from. For Nietzsche, different cultures have different moralities, and historical events can influence a whole civilization’s beliefs in right and wrong. In his view, Christianity introduced a new set of moral precepts as a way for a suffering and oppressed class of people to turn the tables on their oppressors: what was good was now evil and what was bad was now virtuous. As an example, pride, instead of being the virtue of the self-confident person, now becomes the worst of the seven deadly sins. What do you think? Is there any validity to his arguments? Love him or hate him, I feel we must answer his insightful critique.

As always, you need not have any previous experience with philosophy to participate. I’m preparing a short google doc with excerpts from Nietzsche’s works if you want to dig in a bit deeper before the meetup. I've extended the time to three hours as it seems our conversations go for quite a while. Hope to see you there!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qv9V7Mt06rii6VxUfNz6lvRzHCXzJNZSLSISzvWu4x8/edit?tab=t.0