ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche's genealogy of morals led him to conclusions diametrically opposed to Kant's. Nietzsche concluded that, far from morality's being inescapable for any rational agent, moral conceptions arose in specific historical circumstances through nonrational causes. In particular, Nietzsche maintained that the idea of morality is a self-serving projection that enables those who are naturally weak or inferior to rationalize their repressed unconscious hatred for the strong. Nietzsche's historicism is characteristic of nineteenth-century thought generally, especially when it is viewed in relation to that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nietzsche's remark that the birds view the "good little lambs" as tasty morsels may mislead us to think that he believed nonmoral evaluation to be self-centered or hedonistic. The challenge for those who would defend morality, of course, is to find a nonideological, philosophical account of the warrant for the moral ideal of equal dignity.
