(6) Quotations such as the above, together with Nietzsche's skeptical writings regarding standard Judeo-Christian ethics, have led to the view among some of his readers that superior, powerful individuals can and should transcend
agapism (i.e., the ethics of compassion and love).
At stake in many of the essays is making a distinction between self-interested eudaimonism and self-sacrificing
agapism to show how the former pales in comparison to the latter, in terms of moral cogency.
Chapter six discusses subjective theories of value, including emotivism and
agapism. A central claim of this chapter is that if value is subjective--either "feeling, pleasure, emotion, liking, or attitudes--then the world is devalued." Chapter seven takes up relational theories.
Peirce coined the term
agapism, alluding to the kind of love the New Testament God has toward his creatures, to capture the sense of design that emerges over the evolution of the universe but is not reducible to chance and/or necessity.
Hall's analysis, by delineating the continuity of personal identity, existential implications, moral implications, moral psychology, and the ethics and individualism of
agapism, unequivocally established "the fundamental kinship between [Jonathan] Edwards and Bellamy" (29).
The ultimate object of Bellamy's agapism, like Edwards's, includes more than humanity for it also embraces nothing less than the largest possible whole to which human beings are a part.
Thus, the difference between them as to how agapism is realized seems to come down to this: It is the difference between the balancing of a lesser and a greater self, such that neither outweighs the other, and the enlarging sufficiently of a single self Either way the promise is the same--a fuller, richer, and happier existence as well as a moral one.