On first consideration, the idea of authoritarian ethics may seem counter-intuitive. After all, isn’t political authoritarianism unethical in the first place? But the branch of philosophy known as ethics prescribes what people should value and how they ought to behave. Can you think of anything that an authoritarian intellectual manipulator would be more interested in than that?
As we noted on the page entitled “How Authoritarian Ideology Works,” authoritarian intellectuals secure their victims’ political submission by altering their conception of political morality. Philosophies of political morality, we learned, define what is moral in our relationships with others in terms of justice and rights. But underlying and helping to provide premises for philosophies of political morality is the branch of philosophy concerned to discover the principles of morality more broadly and generally. That branch of philosophy is ethics.
Ethical philosophy, like political philosophy, is ultimately based on philosophies of metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics, recall, is the science concerned to discover the fundamental nature of reality—which leads logically to discoveries about the fundamental nature of people. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the discipline that seeks to define exactly how we get knowledge of reality, and whether or not it’s possible to get such knowledge in the first place. By considering these two issues together, it’s possible for human beings to develop coherent philosophies of how people ought to behave—ethics, and then, immediately derived of ethics, how they should relate: politics.
But there is a vexing dilemma intrinsic to the development of philosophies of behavior in an authoritarian society. This derives from the fact that there are two distinct classes of people in such a society: the rulers and the ruled. An ethics that is suitable for the portion of an authoritarian society that is ruled is not at all appropriate for the segment of society that rules, so historically, there have evolved two completely different and contradictory traditions of morality for the two different and contradictory classes of people who comprise an authoritarian state. The German philosopher Nietzsche referred to these opposing ethical traditions as the master morality and the slave morality.
The master morality and the slave morality are entirely inconsistent, but both facilitate the establishment and perpetuation of authoritarian states. The study Flowers From the Garden of Evil: Everyone’s Guide to the Elements of Authoritarian Dogma explains the logic of these two moral traditions in detail, and this resource, as it is developed, will explore their manifestations in popular culture. Please drop by occasionally to review the latest additions to this website, and meanwhile, review the section of the above-mentioned survey entitled “Part Three: Authoritarian Ethics.”
Authoritarianism 101 