Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

18. Meta-Ethics

’Our goals, our values, our morality, must be visible already in our actions.’

Herbert Marcuse — Play, Creativity and Social

Movements

Before we commence properly with this chapter — just a note about the words morality and ethics. Many authors use these two terms interchangeably. There is some scope for seeing morality as the more basic term and then ethics as being ‘morality applied’, as it were. But in this work I’ve decided to adopt the principle that morality refers to behaviour in a social context such as communities, nations and even the whole planet. Meanwhile, ethics refers to individuals. So, ethics refers to private, individual behaviour (what should I do?) whilst morality refers to public behaviour (what should we do?) and to justice and the law. This contrast is of particular importance, because, as we will see, what is often seen as an individual concern should, more properly, be applied to whole societies, cultures and the bio-sphere. The widest context is always worth exploring in any system of morality or ethics — look at the common good — the whole of human society. The big picture.

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