 To highlight just one example, Nietzsche attacks the value of compassion (another central element in Schopenhauer’s moral theory). Nietzsche tried out many different arguments against pity and compassion beginning already in Human, All-too-human (1878) and continuing to the end of his productive life—for discussion, see Reginster (2000), Janaway (2017a, 2017b), and Nussbaum (1994). At times, he emphasized the ad hominem suggestion that compassion is less altruistic than it seems, either based on the La Rochefoucauld-inspired reasoning that apparently altruistic compassion is in reality just cloaked egoism (D 133), or based on the psychologically subtle point that the satisfactions of pity essentially involve a feeling of “small superiority” over others (GM III, 18)—(note that Rousseau relies on a similar observation as part of his defense of pity’s role in moral development; Rousseau [1762] 1979: 221). But Nietzsche’s deeper complaints begin from the observation that a morality of compassion centers attention on the problem of suffering, presupposing that suffering is bad as such. Nietzsche resists the hedonistic doctrine that pleasure and pain lie at the basis of all value claims, which would be the most natural way to defend such a presupposition. If he is right that there are other values, independent of consequences for pleasures and pains, that fact raises the possibility that the ultimate value of any particular incidence of suffering could depend on the role it plays in the sufferer’s life overall and how it might contribute to those other values; in that case, its badness would not follow immediately from the bare fact that it is suffering. Nietzsche builds this idea into an argument against the morality of compassion, suggesting that suffering may sometimes promote a person’s growth, or progress toward excellence (GS 338; see also Janaway 2017a). From that point of view, the morality of compassion looks both presumptuous and misguided. It is presumptuous because it concludes from the outside that a person’s suffering must be bad, thereby flattening out “what is most personal” (GS 338) in the person’s life and interfering with her deciding for herself on the value of her suffering. It is misguided both because it runs the risk of robbing individuals of their opportunity to make something positive (individually meaningful) out of their suffering, and because the global devaluation of suffering as such dismisses in advance the potentially valuable aspects of our general condition as vulnerable and finite creatures (GS 338; compare Williams 1973: 82–100).