How are moral values and norms linked to power?

Matias

The Nietzschean idea I like most is that moral rules and values are noting but tools in a struggle for power and domination.

Morality, even fundamental elements like the notion of "fairness", is never self-evident or obvious - even if it seems to be so. For example "fairness" or "justice", values which are dear to humanists, liberals and socialists, are what Nietzsche called "morality of the slaves". The weak individuals - which are always the majority in a group or population - join forces in order to dominate the stronger individuals. That is what Christopher Boehm called "reverse dominance hierarchy": simple folks unite to dominate (from below, so to speak) those who try to dominate them (from above).
That is the origin of morality: rules and values like "justice" or "care" or "equality" or "fraternity" were invented and took root in our collective minds to rein in all the real and would-be alphas (generally overbearing, aggressive males).

That is the name of the game, from the hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene to Trump who would like to be in the USA what Putin already is in Russia: the Big Guy who can do whatever he wants to increase and consolidate his power - and who can get away with it. The same, of course , applies to the sphere of economy.

Nietzsche's insight was that this quasi-eternal power struggle is inevitable and even necessary (given an evolutionary framework, but unfortunately Nietzsche never really took Darwin seriously), and that all our lofty ideas and ideals depend on, and are subservient to, this power struggle; no one can escape from it, there is no place outside this struggle. You are either one of the weaker members who are always in danger of being at the receiving end of domination or aggression, or you are one of those you can tell others what they have to do.

The only promising strategy of the weak is to unite and use their number to get the upper hand in this struggle. What it does not mean is that the weaklings are the good ones and the powerful are the bad guys, because that is exactly the perspective of the "morality of slaves" (Nietzsche, as we all know, wanted to counterbalance and replace this with a "morality of masters". I suppose he and Ayn Rand would have got along very well...)

Terrapin Station

Morality isn't invented. It comes from the simple fact that there is behavior towards others (including yourself) that you're okay with versus behavior that you're not okay with (the exact behavior for each side can vary per individual). It's behavior that you like and encourage versus behavior that might cause you to start a fight, or feel repulsed by. You can't help but feel that way. Those sorts of feelings ultimately emerged from evolutionary dispositions that help aid survival (even though they're not identical to aiding survival--it's just that the tendency to really like versus really dislike/avoid some behavior evolved because it had evolutionary advantages).

Is morality sometimes exploited for manipulative, power-oriented purposes? Sure.

But that's not what it is. It's just exploited for those ends because it is (that is, because it's human nature to have moral dispositions; that's there to exploit).

Matias

↪Terrapin Station

The way you describe moral behavior it can be applied to all social species (apes, wolves, dolphins...) but nobody - not even Frans de Waal! - in his right mind would say that wolves have morality.
A moral norm or value is not the same as "Well, I like this behavior, let's have more of it." Human beings are born with moralistic preferences and intuitions (even babies like agents who show a fair behavior), but if these hard-wired moral feelings were all there is to morality, all cultures on earth would have the same moral norms.

BC

What it does not mean is that the weaklings are the good ones and the powerful are the bad guys — Matias

See here “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”, Bertrand Russell, 1937"

Also, the Golden Rule:

One of the problems I find in the current discussions about race, discrimination, and equality is this: A good many people start from the position that the oppressed have superior virtues, and that the oppressor can not have superior virtues. People who look like the ur-oppressor (white males) may feel guilty for everything that has been done to the oppressed -- even though they were neither perpetrators nor closer than third- or fourth-level beneficiaries.

A lot of what makes white people guilty about--slavery, Jim Crow, housing segregation, exclusion of various groups from prosperity, etc--in two words, pervasive prejudice, followed as a result of strategic disenfranchisement of groups of people by the ur-oppressor, aka, the ruling class.

Housing policy, managed by large property owners and functionaries of the ruling class--not by working class white people (who are not, by and large, a privileged group) has been one of segregation for well over a century. Segregation has generally not been accidental: it has been calculated and de jure, coast to coast. The poverty and social alienation of the excluded group becomes a threat to those who are just a short distance above them on the social ladder.

How? The real estate, banking, and political industries made sure that black areas of cities became slums, and that slum conditions would threaten stable neighbourhoods. All this is related to the desirability of a substantial population of unemployed people: the unemployed are a constant threat to those who might agitate for better conditions in the work place. "Shut up, or you will join the ranks of the impoverished unemployed."

So, in a nut shell: Yes, moral values and norms are not just "linked" to power. They are pretty much welded together. Judging "moral superiority" has to be separated from estimations of power. I don't approve of Trump's southern border policies, but I don't approve of the Central American dispossessed just marching across our borders en masse, either.

Terrapin Station

A moral norm or value is not the same as "Well, I like this behavior, let's have more of it." Human beings are born with moralistic preferences and intuitions (even babies like agents who show a fair behavior), but if these hard-wired moral feelings were all there is to morality, all cultures on earth would have the same moral norms. — Matias

Why would you believe that we all have the same preferences?

Matias

↪Terrapin Station

That is not what I said. I said that the basic moral preferences we are born with are quite universal, they can be found in all babies and toddlers regardless of their cultural or ethnic origin. And it is up to culture ("enculturation") to built and teach specific moral systems (of norms and values) - -
Have you ever read a book about human developmental psychology or the psychology of morality, or do you talk about morality only on the basis of how "agents" act in philosophical thought experiments?

I like sushi

↪Bitter Crank

Tell that to the people of Benin! Gold indeed :D

Possibility

↪Matias

It always seems to me that people misunderstand what Nietzsche meant by ‘will to power’. This term was a reaction against the pessimism and nihilism of Schopenhauer’s ‘will to life’, and seems to me to refer more to potency, or potential than superiority. Nietzsche’s use of ‘power’ doesn’t come across as a specifically comparative or competitive sense of power, but as achievement, ambition, internally directed self-control and development of cultural excellence, or a tendency towards growth, strength, expansion, etc.

It’s certainly possible to interpret this as a drive to maximise overall achievement, rather than individual power.

Perhaps it’s in the translation...?

Terrapin Station

You said:

if these hard-wired moral feelings were all there is to morality, all cultures on earth would have the same moral norms. — Matias

That would only follow if we all had the same moral preferences.

Since you're pointing out something about babies, by the way, and you used the term "hard-wired" above, it seems like you're thinking that I'm saying something like "We're born with our moral views and they don't change as we go along." Is that right, that you're thinking that I'm saying something like that?

How are moral values and norms linked to power?

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