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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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One of Scott's best recent works is a deep dive on the modern embrace of slave morality and he explains a lot of social and artistic trends that have been bothering him.

Matt Yglesias Considered as the Nietzschean Superman

you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2. But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world.

...

Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package

He doesn't use the word "wokeness" in this post but you can read between the lines.

Warning: it is long, even for a Scott post.

Highly recommended. I literally didn't understand the concept of master vs. slave morality until reading this post, and then huge chunks of modern culture began to slot into place for me.

(from Scott's piece -- thanks for referencing it, it's nice to see he's still sometimes not completely pozzed -- by which I mean fully accepting of one particular form of slave morality)

Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.

I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty.

You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg. Guess which is master morality?

But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?”

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg.

Indeed.

Thanks, Pete—now that I think about it, I do value my suit more than I do the life of some other random dude's kid. What now? A glance at the kid might even tell me if the expected value of his life is negative to mine and that of my descendants, which would make the call even more straightforward. Plus, maybe my suit brings me more happiness than drowning brings the kid sadness.

Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.

I see the point of Scott's article as an appeal to give the status to the first kind and not mistake the second kind as status worthy.

I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?

Because giving 10% to the enemy when you can give 0% to the enemy is stupid. Even where EA doesn't veer off to the left and go full woke, or waste money on a Berkeley Villian Lair, they miss the boat; there they were, buying mosquito nets, when they should have been put a lot more money into malaria vaccines.

Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.

Your language bakes the assumptions of slave morality into it. Building great things is ALREADY good; you don't need to take the money and do "noble" things with it.

and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't think this holds for most of Christian history. Yes, you had to fish the babies out of Roman trash heaps. I don't think Christians, once they had the power, were against using it for their own good.

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

This fits Alfred Nobel, who gave his money to do something to glorify his name after the invention of dynamite. But...this is slave morality too no? He already achieved something great, yet he was so guilty he needed to do something to atone. All great men possess agency, but they're not really free of slave morality either.

Bill Gates already was a great man, giving away his money to strangers merely to improve their lives (some might cynically say as a way of washing off his more unsavory reputation as Microsoft's ruthless head), hell this entire notion of billionaires handing off their money is pretty Christian (it's of dubious acceptability in Islam iirc).

I'm pretty sure Gates gives money away to strangers to control their lives. He says he "fights poverty and disease" but damnit the recipients will do it the Gates Foundation way. Nobel certainly seemed more guilt-ridden. A purer version of what I mean is those whose main business makes people's lives better; this applies to Musk and Bezos and Carnegie -- his steel business rather than his later philanthropy.

I think it depends in how strict we are with our definitions of master morality. If saving children is considered neutral, having possessions is virtuous, and losing possessions means losing virtue then yeah, you are right. But consider another perspective: You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous. They might buy stuff from you and make you richer. You might compete with them and win.

Same goes for the virtuous warlord. From one perspective, the virtue comes from your conquests through slaughter. From another, the virtue is in your ability to best others. In that case, the virtue is there whether you choose to fight or not. If there is no just cause for a war, then you can surely use your abilities in different ways that benefit your people and still shows how virtuous you are in that sense.

You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous.

What master morality has a problem with (and thus the problem that slave morality has with it) is not doing good. It's not that the master never does anything good or nice, or that he doesn't do so on even just pragmatic grounds. Even a pagan aristocrat like Caesar saw reason to be seen as liberal and generous (generosity coming out of overflowing capacity is okay).

It's the leap to "okay, but you can help everyone in your community". It's the totalizing, the flattening. There's no community, this is an idea from slave societies. We're not equals. Some people are better than others and their capacities matter more. In fact, caring about everybody denies them the aristocratic surplus they need to achieve their potential.

To use an example: let's say a Frenchman could sell the Mona Lisa to a billionaire who really wants to burn it and, in exchange a million nondescript, randomly selected people across the globe (no Frenchmen) will be saved from death. The part of him that feels this is either obviously right or not easily argued against is slave morality. The part that recoils sheds light on the impulse behind master morality. There's just something here worth more than some people's lives. And that impulse would almost certainly be called cruel if articulated, if it came down to a choice.

You are proposing a solution that ignores the tradeoffs. I cannot save the children and invest in people to watch the shores and so on, because I have limited resources. If I spend them saving the children I will never get to the point of having enough to hire other people to watch the shores. I could take something like Carnegie's view and let the kids drown until I'm rich enough to do something about it without destroying myself, but slave morality would reject that as "cruel".

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