The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
926.
_Against John Stuart Mill._--I abhor the man's vulgarity when he says: "What is right for one man is right for another"; "Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you. Such principles would fain establish the whole of human traffic _upon mutual services,_ so that every action would appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine; the most personal value Of an action is simply cancelled in this manner (that part of an action which has no equivalent and which cannot be remunerated). "Reciprocity" is a piece of egregious vulgarity; the mere fact that what I do _cannot_ and _may_ not be done by another, that there is _no such thing as equivalence_ (except in those _very select circles_ where one actually has one's equal, _inter pares_), that in a really profound sense a man never requites because he is something _unique_ in himself and can only do _unique_ things,--this fundamental conviction contains the cause of _aristocratic aloofness from the mob_, because the latter believes in equality, and _consequently_ in the feasibility of equivalence and "reciprocity." The suburban Philistinism of moral valuations and of its concepts "useful" and "harmful" is well founded; it is the necessary point of view of a community which is only able to see and survey _immediate and proximate_ consequences. The _State_ and the _political man_ are already in need of a more _super-moral_ attitude of mind: because they have to calculate concerning a much more complicated tissue of consequences. An economic policy for the whole world should be possible which could look at things in such broad perspective that all its isolated demands would seem for the moment not only unjust, but arbitrary.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.