[AnimalMuppet]

But if everybody's defining their own values, then a bunch of people are going to define their values very selfishly. That's (unfortunately) human nature. One could argue that Ashley Madison (to use a current example) with their slogan "Life is short, have an affair" is living this just as much as Martin Luther King. Once you remove morality, then you have nothing to give any positive direction to your values, because you have no basis for defining what "positive" means, other than your own feelings and thoughts.

> He felt rationality leads to values which benefit humanity as a whole.

Other philosophers would disagree. de Sade, for example. (Yes, he was a philosopher, and his writings and actions were an expression of his philosophy.) And even human history seems to show that Nietzsche was overly optimistic on human nature on this point.

In "The Abolition of Man", C. S. Lewis argues that rationality, by itself, can never give real values. That can only come from "practical reason", not mere reason, because it has to tie reason to values and emotions. (I'm not stating it well - go read Lewis. It's really short, only a hundred pages or so, and very readable, though it does take some thought.)

[dragonwriter]

> But if everybody's defining their own values, then a bunch of people are going to define their values very selfishly.

Everyone is -- unalterably -- defining their own values, and quite often those doing so consciously are doing so quite selfishly, sure. Those doing it unconsciously are often just defining their own values by uncritically internalizing some (possibly distorted and misunderstood) set of values that someone else defined (either selfishly or not.)

> Once you remove morality, then you have nothing to give any positive direction to your values, because you have no basis for defining what "positive" means, other than your own feelings and thoughts.

Arguably, "morality" is just a label for your own feelings and thoughts about what is positive and negative, and recognizing that is the first step in thinking about morality on something beyond a cargo cult level.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Arguably, "morality" is just a label for your own feelings and thoughts about what is positive and negative, and recognizing that is the first step in thinking about morality on something beyond a cargo cult level.

No, that's not morality, at least not the feelings part - more like the opposite, in fact. Morality is what I believe is right or wrong, especially when it goes against my feelings.

[jkyle]

> But if everybody's defining their own values, then a bunch of people are going to define their values very selfishly.

There are only two options: define morality for yourself, and own it completely, or allow someone else to define it for you.

Morality is a construct that stems solely from man. What Nietzsche condemns is accepting the morality of others like sheep instead of critically. You cannot own a moral construct until you have fully evaluated that construct and accepted its consequences yourself.

Further, he claimed that a morality based on what happens after you die is bereft of any real meaning. He advocated a morality rooted in the human condition and defined by its relation to humanity, not its relation to dead gods as defined by moral potentates.