The first essay, “‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’”, focuses on the emergence of the values and conception of agency that compose the idea of the moral person invoked in “morality” through an analysis of the re-evaluation of antique values wrought by the slave revolt in morality. However, it begins with two related methodological criticisms of the “English psychologists, to whom we owe the only attempts so far to develop a history of the genesis of morality” (GM I §1). Nietzsche illustrates this criticism by focusing on an argument from Rée's The Origin of Moral Feeling (1877), which had been endorsed by Nietzsche in The Wanderer and his Shadow (§40), which claimed that originally:

Nietzsche's objections to this hypothesis are twofold. First, it exhibits the “essentially unhistorical manner” of thinking exhibited by such approaches in that it identifies the origin of morality in terms of its current value or function despite the fact that Darwin has alerted us to the point that there need be no relationship between the current function or value of a phenomenon and its original function or value (GM I §2).