I Shan't Shut Up About Slave Morality
I Shan't Shut Up About Slave Morality
It's good to be strong! Boo to Analytic Philosophy! I hate utils!
The above image is one of the most iconic in American history. It features an ornery protestor—either a woman of African descent or a circus clown fleeing a mineshaft explosion—railing against the launch of some NASA space mission.
Despite this picture having been taken during the era of Great Society welfare programs, its subject is furious that the government has chosen to allocate more resources to advancing the cause of technology / innovation than to producing sandwiches with which she might further enlarge her already formidable body.
Dear reader, I don’t have much of a disgust impulse. But to the extent I do, this picture is one of the few things that triggers it in a really visceral way. I despise this woman.
To me she is utterly reprehensible and perfectly emblematic of almost every force in society that I consider my enemy. And that is because she is a fantastic incarnation of what Nietzsche called slave morality.
The inimitable Bentham’s Bulldog just put out an article defending slave morality:
There’s a lot of discussion among many people, especially fans of Nietzsche and those on the right, of master and slave morality. Master morality is supposed to be the type of morality that reveres strength and dominance, toughness and power, while slave morality is that which champions the weak and appeals to the masses….
There are a lot of people—especially online—who treat slave morality with a sort of disdain. They treat it as some sort of modern aberration, as though its proponents are in some way cucked…
But the phrase slave morality is even more annoying. Because the thing it makes taboo is being in favor of good things. People who talk derisively about slave morality seem uniformly to have no idea what morality is, and act as if caring about it is something debased or cucked.
He concludes as follows:
The essence of morality is slave morality. It’s caring about those who are downtrodden who cannot stand up for themselves. It is good that slavery was abolished, and those who were abolitionists were heroic, even though they were standing up for those who couldn’t repay them in return. Similarly, it is good that lots of people are trying to end the abuses on factory farms, even though they don’t get any reward from it. Caring about others involves caring about them even when they don’t benefit you materially.
BB’s rhetorical style is a picture-perfect distillation of how analytic philosophy professors talk; I’m sure he has an excellent GPA, and will obtain a tenure track position more easily than at least 85% of his peers.
Unfortunately, this style of rhetoric is also incredibly unconvincing to normal people, which is why continental philosophers like Nietzsche and Camus are so much more culturally influential than analytic philosophers like Saul Kripke or even Dan Dennett.
But analytic philosophers retain their position of unchallenged dominance over the academy in the English-speaking world, and this has led to their communicative style becoming a popular nerd dialect with its own highly visible and very annoying features, such as the proclivity to make smug and vapid statements like this:
You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter.
Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?
These things which “obviously don’t matter” to you obviously do matter quite a bit to the Hutu and the Tutsi, or to the perpetrators of farm murders in South Africa, or to Knockout Game enthusiasts. Race is an enormously impactful fact of life even in most American cities, let alone the broader world.
These things likewise matter to the numerous scholars of human biodiversity, who catalog politically or socially salient physiological and psychological differences between human subgroups, despite the considerable risk of professional censure (observe the case of Nathan Cofnas) or severe social ostracism this brings.
But you do not even bother making an argument for your position here—you are churlishly relying on the low social prestige of “racism” to simply position it as some exaggerated and unthinkable counterexample to your overall point.
And this is precisely why I don’t take Analytic Philosophy seriously anymore. Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.
Sure, these guys would permit you to make an argument against abortion or something banal like that, but they would always shit their pants whenever I advanced arguments in class against things like multiculturalism or feminism. And then on topics like more overt white identity they’d refuse to even engage.
To me that is straightforwardly anti-philosophical.
One can observe something resembling this tendency in BB’s otherwise superb article The Rabbithole Goes Both Ways, where he justifies talking to me (!) despite my somewhat edgy views and continued interaction with fellers like Richard Spencer:
Richard Hanania seems to associate with some pretty far-right individuals. He approvingly quotes Ron Unz, for instance. He also interacts with Walt Bismarck, who interacts with other further-right people including Richard Spencer (I also interact with Bismarck). Lots of people would be concerned: maybe those who like me will start liking Bismarck and then start liking Spencer.
But I’m not concerned about this. I think I have better ideas than Richard Spencer. I don’t think my—average SAT score 1481 readers—will start jumping ship to begin loving white ethnostates!
Shall we really play this childish game, BB? Because my own readers have an average IQ of 125 and a mean openness at the 90th percentile relative to the general public, and I would predict that Spencer’s audience is similarly erudite.
I am no longer a white nationalist, but in my youth I became a white nationalist as someone with a near perfect SAT who started full-time university studies at fourteen. There is absolutely no compelling reason to think that white nationalists are inherently stupid, and if you listen to major figures in the DR and adjacent scenes, like myself, Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Ryan Faulk, J.F. Gariepy, and Nick Fuentes, it’s just patently obvious from speech patterns that all of these guys are 130+ IQ.
Plenty of brilliant men love white ethnostates and always will. They are usually strange and disagreeable dudes, but their minds are objectively very impressive.
Anyway, onward to an even crazier claim that BB makes…
Singer’s argument shows that those who don’t care about obviously stupid things like how far away people are should care about faraway children dying of disease.
Obviously stupid things like how far away people are?
This is utterly laughable. I’m sorry BB, but proximity not being a salient moral factor is by no means obvious—I’d say quite the contrary is true, and 99% of people on the planet would find Singer’s rejection of moral proximity retarded and contemptible.
My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.
If you abandon these basic conclusions you are throwing civilization into an unworkable anomie, because people practically extend moral personhood in gradations across concentric circles of intimacy.
As I argued in my last essay directed at you, people don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones, because out of sight is out of mind.
And I know what you’re going to say to this, BB, because you say it in pretty much every article or verbal argument about your ethical worldview:
When justifying not caring about the weak and downtrodden, people will often make these claims like “the strong dominate the weak.” Yes, this often does happen, but inferring from the fact that X happens that X ought to happen is bad reasoning, that derives normative claims from descriptive claims.
Please understand this nuance: precisely nobody is advocating we straightforwardly derive an ought from an is (except for you when you incorrectly define moral standards as objectively binding yet “coming from nowhere,” which is patently absurd compared to my more robust and flexible meta-ethical intersubjectivism… but I digress).
My own stance is predicated instead on the descriptive heuristic that any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient. It is my emotional / aesthetic preference to dismiss such a paradigm as impotent and gay. And it seems Utilitarianism is very obviously such a paradigm in a million trivial ways.
For instance, you would obviously sacrifice two strangers to save your mother’s life.1
I haven’t read Nietzsche in years, so I’m not certain how properly “Nietzschean” my rejection of slave morality is. But here are the main precepts of my Moral Waltism:
Politics is transactional and coalitional, but “morality” is basically an ideological Esperanto we created to more painlessly scale human behavior through larger and more abstract agglomerations in the neolithic / agricultural / industrial eras. It isn’t “real”, but we treat it as though it were real, same as the fundamental laws of thought or axioms of mathematics (meta-ethical / epistemic intersubjectivism).
The use of “morality” naturally reaches a hard limit when you get big temperamental divides in openness and conscientiousness that vary by occupation and region and subculture, at which point you must enter the fully transactional realm of politics and broad coalitions.
Specific moral codes are very useful as a means to an end: creating a robust incentive structure that rewards people for being more agentic / productive and punishes indolence / self-destruction. The idea should be to assume that individual selfishness guides behavior and promote the general welfare around that (i.e. Smith’s “Invisible Hand”). This as a happy medium between universalist philosophies like Utilitarianism (which fatally ignore personal incentive structures) and something like Objectivism which is clearly autistic and unworkable.
When I say “general welfare” this isn’t the same as Utilitarianism because I DGAF about utils / hedonic calculus. I think it’s too easy for your hedonic treadmill to get spun into overdrive by Skinner Boxes if your life is easy / comfortable.
As a rightist I support relentless conflict and competition with others as a vitalizing force to regularly kick you in the ass. This is what creates something that feels like “free will” in practice.
I also don’t want people to be “happy” per se, because when people are happy (or at least when men are happy—happy women are prob okay) they become fat lethargic pussies who want to sit around cumming all day. I much prefer being angry or scared because it creates infinitely greater fulfillment in the long term.
The two most prominent aspects of my moral code are as follows:
Reciprocity - Do nice things for people who help you and viciously hurt people who do you harm. Keep your word to people you see as basically inside the friend-enemy distinction. Note that the goal isn’t reward / revenge, but to create a virtuous incentive structure to guide future behavior.
Proximity - I owe more to people who are relationally closer to me, and their lives are consequently more valuable. I am currently unmarried and childless, but my basic heuristic if I am in a Runaway Trolley Situation is as follows: biological children > wife > parents / adopted children / siblings / close girlfriends > close male bros / pets > casual girlfriends / extended family > Walt Right Paychads > Americans of my approximate ethnic / (non)religious / ideological background > Walt Right Freefriends > Americans generally plus foreigners of my approximate ethnic / (non)religious / ideological background > foreigners who are very different from me
I’ll never let someone who doesn’t have my best interests at heart shame me into not taking my own side. Everyone has the basic right to take his own side—this is the most fundamental dignity of sentient life and I would extend this right to even my most hated enemy. Contra Peter Singer, you are allowed to go on vacation even if Senegalese orphans are being torn to shreds by mosquitos. It’s fine.
BB ends by quoting a character named “Philosophy Bear", who maintains that “evil people exist” and describes this evil as a simplistic caricature of right wing vitalism:
As someone who has traveled in edgy right wing internet circles for years, literally nobody says “we should exalt in the cruelty of the strong against the weak.” That sounds like Sid from Toy Story, not Richard Spencer or BAP. This fake and gay strawman is very obviously the product of a hysterical and effeminate academic.
Philosophy Bear should become more aware.
You know who is actually evil? The obese welfare scrounger who kills the space program agitating for food stamps. The middle aged woman who leeches off disability benefits claiming Long Covid or Fibromyalgia and gradually makes everyone in her life a little lazier and less agentic. The pedantic schoolmarm who resents her brightest students and kills their intellectual passion with pointless busywork.
Also, the biggest threat to the future of our species isn’t Nuclear Armageddon or a dystopic totalitarian government. It’s not 1984 or Animal Farm or Brave New World.
It’s fucking Wall-E.
Utilitarianism is the real evil facing our society, not right wing tribalism or vitalism.
Util maximization will invariably result in Wall-E, because whenever you don’t have a painful crisis emerge to reset everyone’s hedonic treadmills and shake things up, the desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology and basically ensures the arc of history bends towards Honey Boo Boo. Our hyper-optimized Skinner Boxes are just getting too strong.
The longer you go without pain (and more importantly the demand for action) the less capable you become at proactively solving your problems with gusto. You don’t just become a relentless epicurean—you become horribly lazy and anxiety-ridden about any interpersonal conflict, whether it’s driving on a busy road, saying no to sex, or simply ordering a pizza. And that’s why Zoomers are the way they are.
BB is a smart and capable guy and I like him a lot.
This is such an asshole Boomer thing to say, but he reminds me a ton of myself at that age. I’m confident he has a tremendous future ahead of him as a public intellectual.
That said, I hope he abandons some of his intellectual snobbery towards ideologies that code as low prestige in academia. A lot of the views he casually disdains are literally just mainstream opinion in the GOP coalition at this point, so his dismissiveness comes off as incredibly out of touch.
I also hope his time on Substack gets him a bit more sympathetic to ways people think and talk about things outside of the conventions of analytic philosophy. He should probably retain some kind of single-mindedness and fanaticism until he’s at least 25, as that is a huge force multiplier and essential source of energy for a very young guy. But as he becomes a crusty middle aged man like me it would make him a more interesting thinker if he could switch more nimbly between different paradigms.
At which point he can jump on the Substack of 2035 and give some iPad kid the same obnoxious lecture I’m giving him now!
I mean, I guess maybe you wouldn’t do this, but if so you are weird.
As a fellow philosophy major, I see the appeal of utilitarianism and other rational articulations of OCD, but it's worth noting how much of an aberration they are from the ethics found throughout most of the history of philosophy. Epicurus and Lucretius didn't write about the immorality of anything whose opportunity cost is not reallocating resources to those most in need. It's only post-Enlightenment thinkers who've embraced this abstract, OCD-induced ethics designed for everyone and useful for no one. Confucians conceived of moral obligations in terms of concentric circles and five relationships, each of which had a governing principle, because they realized that we only exist as persons in relation to each other. Hence, In Japanese and Korean first- and second-person pronouns change according to the relationship the speaker has with the interlocutor. The moral dimension of human nature is our ability to relate to each other as agents with the appearance of free will and, consequently, to recognize obligation and take responsibility. None of this makes sense when it's detached from the reality we inhabit, which comes with involuntary associations whose demands can't be weighed on a universal scale given that we exist in relation to each other.
Throughout most of college I wanted to become a philosophy professor, but I eventually realized the futility of most of the field (with some exceptions; philosophy of mind seems to encounter new issues that require new theories). You could dedicate a lifetime to scrutinizing one premise within one argument for one position, and it'll remain unresolved. I concluded you have to just know your priors and empirics, then go out and act on your knowledge. This is, of course, a philosophic position, but I'm not going to spend the remainder of my life scrutinizing its merits at the cost of participating in society and its institutions as they exist. Philosophy has value, of course, but nobody has infinite time to know every argument about even a single philosophic issue-- let alone the time to read multiple books on every issue-- so you have to find a philosophy that articulates your instincts and priors and that can actually affect you. It's unsurprising, therefore, that so many people read the ancients and so few indulge in the writings of GE Moore or AJ Ayer.
I remember once reading a short essay in a Peter Singer book answering the question of whether moral progress is real, and his answer was basically "yes, b/c the world's less racist and sexist." Of all the advancements since the Scientific Revolution, the one this great philosopher cited as the most pertinent to the discussion is whether people are judged prejudicially. Nonetheless, his wacky conclusions serve a useful purpose by making us question our priors.
//You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter.
Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?//
Well, I know you're not a moral realist, but I am and have spent quite a long time arguing for it. In short, then, the question doesn't have an answer. Things can matter without mattering to any particular person. Even if everyone approved of torturing babies, for instance, it would still be wrong. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true
Most people have a preference for nonarbitrariness. They want the things they care about to make some degree of sense. They also care about morality in some sense beyond social convention. Most people want to be the types of people to oppose slavery even if society tolerates it. Even if one isn't a moral realist, that can be tapped into.
//Shall we really play this childish game, BB? Because my own readers have an average IQ of 125 and a mean openness at the 90th percentile relative to the general public, and I would predict that Spencer’s audience is similarly erudite.//
I win! Mine have a higher SAT score if converted to IQ--coming in at 143 with a SD of 15. I don't deny that a lot of Spencer fans are decently smart, but I think they are poor at thinking. This was also my impression of Spencer when I interacted with him. I suspect I'd think something similar about much of your audience, full disclosure, though I think most people are bad at thinking, so this isn't unique to you (analytic philosophers, I think, tend to be way less confused than average, though I agree they're annoyingly intolerant to various ideas, as are most people).
//My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.//
But that's caring about things other than distance. If the thing you care about is nationality, well, we can make the drowning child case involve a foreign immigrant child and you still are obviously obligated to care about them. Note I wasn't saying it's obvious that there aren't special obligations, though I do hold that view and have argued for it at length https://benthams.substack.com/p/believers-in-special-obligations?utm_source=publication-search
//any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient//
I don't really care about what other people will adopt. I care about what is actually true morally. Even if I wasn't a moral realist, I'd value some sort of nonarbitrariness.
//You know who is actually evil? The obese welfare scrounger who kills the space program agitating for food stamps. The middle aged woman who leeches off disability benefits claiming Long Covid or Fibromyalgia and gradually makes everyone in her life a little lazier and less agentic. The pedantic schoolmarm who resents her brightest students and kills their intellectual passion with pointless busywork.//
Can you elaborate on this claim? What do you mean when you say it's evil? Earlier you seemed to suggest that values can't be wrong or mistaken but just diverge from yours. Do you think a person who does that is genuinely going wrong?
//Utilitarianism is the real evil facing our society, not right wing tribalism or vitalism.
Util maximization will invariably result in Wall-E, because whenever you don’t have a painful crisis emerge to reset everyone’s hedonic treadmills and shake things up, the desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology and basically ensures the arc of history bends towards Honey Boo Boo. Our hyper-optimized Skinner Boxes are just getting too strong.//
LOL, there are like 5 utilitarians and they're all tech nerds and philosophy professors. Utilitarians have reason to oppose things that leave people miserable and unfulfilled because they don't make people happy in the long run--not to mention not being conducive to other things of value like relationships.