Well, Fred said a lot of atrocious stuff ("When you go to woman, bring your whip!"). That said, what I like about Genealogy of Morals is the focus on moral systems as a social product. As N puts it in the Prologue, section 6:
Let’s proclaim this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, we must first question the very value of these values —and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew, under which they have developed and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie [hypocrisy], as illness, as misunderstanding, but also morality as cause, as means of healing, as stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge of the sort which has not been there up this point, something which has not even been wished for. We have taken the worth of these “values” as something given, as self-evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have also not had the slightest doubts about or wavered in setting up “the good man” as more valuable than “the evil man,” of higher worth in the sense of the improvement, usefulness, and prosperity with respect to mankind in general (along with the future of humanity). What about this? What if the truth were the other way around? Well? What if in the “good” there even lay a symptom of regression, something like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, something which makes the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps something more comfortable, less dangerous, but also on a smaller scale, something more demeaning? . . . So that this very morality would be guilty if the inherently possible highest power and magnificence of the human type were never attained? So that this very morality might be the danger of all dangers?
[end quote]
Instead of treating the moral values that we hold as natural and irrefutable, Nietzsche insists that we examine the history of how our current moral values were made to appear natural and irrefutable. Put broadly, he treats the dominant moral system in 19th Europe as the triumph of Christian "slave morality" over the "noble morality" of earlier non-Christian civilizations. For N, one of the crucial components of Christian slave morality is the notion that autonomous subjects are the "wellspring" of action:
A quantum of force is simply such a quantum of drive, will, action—rather, it is nothing but this very driving, willing, acting itself—and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a “Subject.” For, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong person there were an indifferent substrate, which is free to express strength or not. But there is no such substrate; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming. “The doer” is merely made up and added into the action. [GM, Essay 1, section 13.]
Note the scope of N's argument here: he's not just saying "morals differ
across societies"; rather, he is arguing that our concept of personhood is historically bound up in our system of morality and continually reinforced by language use. We take it for granted that "the doer causes the action", but that common-sense belief is itself a product of historical struggles related to the ascendancy of what N calls "slave morality".
One more point. Although N. considers our modern morality a triumph of Christian morality over "noble morality" (Judea v. Rome), that origin does not determine its current purpose or use:
For all forms of history there is no more important principle than that one which we reach with such difficulty but which we also really should reach—namely that what causes a particular thing to arise and the final utility of that thing, its actual use and arrangement in a system of purposes, are separate toto coelo [by all the heavens, i.e., absolutely] from each other, that something existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be interpreted by the higher power over it from a new perspective, appropriated in a new way, reorganized for and redirected to new uses, that all events in the organic world involve overpowering, acquiring mastery and that, in turn, all overpowering and acquiring mastery involve a new interpretation, a readjustment, in which the “sense” and “purpose” up to then must necessarily be obscured or entirely erased. [GM, essay 2, section 12]
And thus we see this slave morality integrated into capitalist social relations that have nothing to do with the Christian origins of the moral system. To put it simply, it's a small jump from "the sinner should be held responsible for her sins" to "you can become rich if you work hard enough". Indeed, through this process of appropriation, it's
possible that this slave morality and the notions of the subject linked to it will far outlast Christianity as a world religion.
I recognize that this is a somewhat lengthy post, but it explains why I think N is still worth reading.
Miles