Nietzsche and the Judge in Blood Meridian
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy inserts a Nietzschean line into the discourse of the Judge: “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.” (p. 261, 25th Anniversary Edition, Vintage Books)
Here’s one objection to this claim. If morality is such a contrivance, it’s a successful one. By its application, the weak have become the strong while the strong have been rendered weak. In other words, the powerful are not powerful but quite vulnerable to attack from the impotent; and the powerless are not powerless but quite potent in their attack against the mighty. The Nietzschean/Judgean assertion thus contains a significant tension, if not an outright contradiction.
Here’s how the Judge might answer this objection, given his commentary on p. 261:
Ultimately, it is not the rule of law or ethics that wins, but rather the rule of strength. The formers are useless in the overwhelming face of the latter, subsumed under its rubric of raw power.
This debate goes back at least to Book I of Plato’s Republic. There, we find Thrasymachus claiming that justice is nothing but the interest of those in power. Socrates dismantles this claim with his elenchus, but in Book II, faces another challenge — this time from Glaucon’s story about the Ring of Gyges.