On the Genealogy of Morality

Core ideas

Moral values have a history and can be traced to their origins.
'Slave morality' inverts the values of the strong out of resentment.
Guilt and bad conscience arise from internalized aggression.
Values should be evaluated by whether they affirm or deny life.

Summary

Here Nietzsche turns historian and psychologist, asking where our moral concepts actually came from rather than assuming they are eternal. He traces 'good and evil' to a slave revolt in morality, in which the powerless reinterpreted their weakness as virtue and the strength of their masters as wickedness.

He analyzes the origins of guilt and bad conscience in debt and internalized cruelty, and probes the ascetic ideal that gives suffering a meaning. The aim is to expose values as human creations with a history, so that they can be questioned and, where life-denying, revalued.