Choose one topic or concept found in each thinker and write an essay of approximately 750 words (three pages) that interprets and critiques the arguments surrounding the selected topic.

Summary:
In light of your reading from “On the Genealogy of Morals,” assess the following view: a value is not truly a value unless one chooses it for herself or himself. Unreflective conformism is descriptive of a slave or herd morality that simply mimics the values of others. It yields an unfortunate mediocrity and defeats the possibility of excellence found only in the creative genius (the higher man). To be truly excellent, noble people must be free from the expectations of others.
(Suggestion: the yellow highlighted portion serves well as a launch point for the conversation that comprises this essay.)

Now it is plain to me, first of all, that in this theory the source of the concept “good” has been sought and established in the wrong place: the judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance89that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values: what had they to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as remote and inappropriate as it possibly could be in face of such a burning eruption of the highest rank-ordering, rank-defining value judgments: for here feeling has attained the antithesis of that low degree of warmth which any calculating prudence, any calculus of utility, presupposes— and not for once only, not for an exceptional hour, but for good. The pathos of nobility and distance, as aforesaid, the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a “below”—that is the origin of the antithesis “good” and “bad.” (The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say “this is this and this,” they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it.) It follows from this origin that the word “good” was definitely not linked from the first and by necessity to “unegoistic” actions, as the superstition of these genealogists of morality would have it. Rather it was only when aristocratic value judgments declined that the whole antithesis “egoistic” “unegoistic” obtruded itself more and more on the human conscience—it is, to speak in my own language, the herd instinct that through this antithesis at last gets its word (and its words) in. And even then it was a long time before that instinct attained such dominion that moral evaluation was actually stuck and halted at this antithesis (as, for example, is the case in contemporary Europe: the prejudice that takes “moral,” “unegoistic,” “désintéressé” as concepts of equivalent value already rules today with the force of a “fixed idea” and brain-sickness).