In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche's focus is squarely on morality. He seeks the “value of our values” and asks a question about morality that he believes has been avoided – has morality been good for us, has it contributed to our flourishing or not? In contrast, in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Heidegger discusses morality only incidentally during his investigation of the ordinary way humans orient themselves in the world. He undertakes this investigation to shed light on the larger question of being (das Sein): of what it is to be at all. Hence Heidegger's chief concern here is not morality itself; any moral or ethical implications are indirect.

Heidegger famously avoids any systematic engagement with morality or ethics, which both worries and frustrates many of his readers. He believes that a concern with morality or ethics perpetuates a misguided focus on beings (das Seiende), in particular the concerns and needs of humans, rather than on being (das Sein). It is not that humans and their concerns are to be disregarded. Rather, the problem is that by making humans the beginning and the end of our inquiries, and by failing to ask the earlier question of what it is to be at all, our investigations into this or that being remain impoverished.

There is good reason to highlight Heidegger's refusal to treat directly the questions of morality and ethics. Indeed, one of my chief aims in this chapter is to show the benefits of Heidegger's indirectness. It allows us to stay longer with the question of what morality conceals without diverting the inquiry to the question of what would enhance morality. In contrast, as we shall see, Plato in the Republic (on a certain reading of that text) and Kant in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals seek to rectify our ordinary relation to responsibility by revealing what grounds morality. Their concern for grounds leaves their accounts of responsibility vulnerable to appropriations consistent with a calculative, moralized approach to politics.