Nietzsche investigates the origin of moral concepts rather than their justification

Nietzsche's opening move is to reject the standard question moral philosophy typically asks — is this value true, is this action right — in favor of a historical question: where did this value come from, and what conditions produced it. He argues that most philosophers before him had simply assumed conventional morality was self-evidently good and then searched for justifications, rather than questioning whether these values deserved their privileged status in the first place.

He specifically criticizes contemporary English moral psychologists for proposing that selfless behavior became valued through habitual reinforcement — people benefited from others' selflessness, praised it repeatedly, and eventually this habit calcified into assumed truth. Nietzsche doesn't dispute that morality evolved historically rather than existing as an eternal truth, but he offers a sharply different account of the mechanism, rooted in power relations rather than gradual habituation.

This reframing — treating morality as something with a traceable history and specific origin rather than an eternal given — is the foundational move that makes his entire subsequent argument possible. Takeaway: before asking whether a value is right, it's worth asking where it actually came from and why.