What is the highest ethical ideal according to Nietzsche? That human beings free themselves from the spirit of revenge. Freedom begins where the will to revenge and punishment turns into the will to responsibility, i.e. to freedom. To want to revenge oneself means to want to be unfree and irresponsible. With the will to responsibility, the subject has emancipated itself from the violent logic of the counter-blow, from the logic of equivalents, of enforced symmetry, of reciprocal retribution.