Moral actionsHonesty and deception. Compassion and abandonment. Benevolence and malevolence. All of these represent extremes on the spectrum of morality. From a general social point of view, the former represent attitudes that should be admired, rewarded and emulated, while the latter represent attitudes that should be abhorred, punished and discouraged. Now philosophers, not content to leave things well enough alone, endeavor to discover why this is so. Why do we admire acts of kindness? Why do we hate acts of malice? It is generally believed that the crux of this moral question has to do with the magnitude of selfishness present in the acts and thoughts of individuals. If we can think of selfishness as an empirical property, honesty, compassion, and benevolence are acts and attitudes that imply much less selfishness than their moral opposites. This observation, of course, does not answer the question we are considering, it simply pushes it back one metaphysical level. So the revised question should be this: when is selfishness morally acceptable and when is it not? Nietzsche, in proposing that selfishness is, in some sense, completely free from moral guilt, reaches a conclusion completely opposite to that of the rest of the philosophers we have studied. We will see that Nietzsche is probably on the right track, and that selfishness is an incorrect indicator of the morality of an action, and that morality is simply an illusory concept created by individuals in society to prevent harm to themselves. Before. The African savannah. A cheetah. A herd of gazelles grazing. The cheetah stealthily approaches the herd of grazing gazelles. N... in the middle of the paper... when selfish acts are morally permissible, we first established that all healthy actions are selfish in origin and, therefore, selfishness cannot be used as a measure of morality. Second, the moral standard we use to evaluate the morality of an action is based on our selfish desire for personal power. As established by Nietzsche, actions taken in pursuit of personal power are natural and therefore, from our point of view, these actions are never questionable. It is only when viewed from another's perspective that these actions can be considered despicable because they threaten their personal quest for power. Therefore, actions that others find objectionable are actions performed by us that do not involve stealing personal power from another. In this case, there is no defined set of morals against which to measure one's actions.