Fear and Morality in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche's Theory of Morality

From the beginning of his polemic, Nietzsche establishes that he possessed a superior intellect from a very young age — and is thus, the argument goes, uniquely qualified to judge ethics and morality. He wrote his very first treatise on morality at the "tender" age of thirteen (Nietzsche 1). His views on ethics were shaped by a method of questioning, determining answers, and then building further questions from those answers until, he says, "at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, a secret garden" (Nietzsche 1). Out of this secluded world he constructed the framework for his beliefs concerning ethics.

This is not to say that everything Nietzsche argued was wrong. His basic stance is essentially that "the victor makes the history." He believed there was no true ethic, no genuine morality, and no truly discernible good, because these had all been determined by the ruling and intellectual — the aristocratic — class. Ethics were established by those who ruled; naturally, they would define ethics in ways that justified their own actions rather than in terms of what is truly or universally considered good. His argument can even be found in ancient texts, in which wealth was interpreted as evidence of lesser sin compared to the poor (Nietzsche 5). It is a potentially skewed position, but one that has historically been popular.

From a reading of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, it is apparent that he does not believe that true morality — or what passes for morality among human beings — arises from fear alone. He acknowledges that fear does emerge from centuries of the poor being downtrodden by the rich and powerful (making special, contemptuous mention of the Jews), but in general he lays the tendency to perform "good works" out of fear at the feet of religion (Nietzsche 5). People fear God, and thus they perform what He would consider good deeds in order to avoid some form of metaphysical reprisal. Nietzsche had already stated in his Preface that he "gave that honor to God, as is reasonable, and made him the father of evil" — meaning that even in his adolescent thinking, he believed it could be demonstrated that God was the father of evil and thus a source of fear (Nietzsche 1).

Morality Rooted in Fear and Religion

Because of this fear of a higher being, people who aspired to something greater than their earthly existence began to obey the morals and ethics they found in scripture. Like Hume, Nietzsche believed that people are not inherently good. Goodness, in his view, was something learned — frightened into individuals from childhood. Given Nietzsche's German heritage, it is worth noting that this belief may also have been reinforced by the morally severe fairy tales he heard as a child, which warned against evil deeds with threats of being devoured by witches and similar horrors.

Because of these views, it is apparent that Nietzsche did not believe morality — as people ordinarily understand it — could exist without some element of fear attached to it. People may not recognize that they act out of fear of dire consequences, but according to Nietzsche they actually do. This is visible even on a physical, social level: people who commit crimes go to jail, so the fear of imprisonment itself incentivizes good behavior. This dynamic is consistent with his broader idea that God exercises control through fear and uses it to produce His particular version of goodness.

Conclusion

A study was conducted by psychologists in which three-year-old children in Mauritius were "exposed to two different types of sounds" and their sweat response was measured (Cline). One sound was followed by a blaring horn; the other was not. The children learned to anticipate the horn and produced a sweat response — a known physiological fear reaction — when they recognized it was coming. The original experiment was conducted in the 1970s. Decades later, the research team examined whether any of the original participants had accumulated significant criminal records (Cline). It was found that 138 had, and these were precisely the children who had shown a significantly weaker sweat response during the original experiment. Because the children were only three years old at the time — too young for social conditioning to have fully taken hold — it can reasonably be concluded that this diminished fear response was largely innate rather than learned (Cline). This finding undermines the argument that fear reliably produces moral behavior: lower fear correlated with higher criminality, but the relationship was biological, not moral.

Taking the argument in the opposite direction, morality can also exist in the absence of fear. According to researcher Pillay, there are fear-response moral clauses such as "do not murder" and "do not steal" (Pillay), but there are also principles that people sometimes adhere to — such as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" — that are not grounded in fear at all. These are rooted instead in a genuine desire for a good outcome. The problem, Pillay argues, is not that morality can only arise through a fear response, but rather that it arises through fear far more often than it does through authentic moral motivation (Pillay). Fear is thus a frequent but not a necessary condition for moral behavior.

Nietzsche's contention that morality is inseparable from fear captures something real about how moral norms are enforced — both through religious sanction and through social and legal consequence. Yet the psychological evidence from the Mauritius study and the philosophical distinction between fear-based rules and genuinely altruistic principles together show that the relationship between fear and morality is neither simple nor universal. Fear without morality exists, and morality without fear exists. Nietzsche's framework, however provocative, cannot fully account for either phenomenon.

Cline, Austin. "Fear, Morality and Crime." About Agnosticism/Atheism, 2010. Web.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic Tract." 2009. Web.

Pillay, Srini. "Fear and the Biological Non-Existence of Morality: Why Are We Tortured by Our Brains?" Psychology Today, 2010. Web.