Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Another way to look at this is to say that justice (morality in the public sphere) is instrumental — it serves the needs of society in trying to avoid unfairness and harm and to promote well-being (or whatever is collectively agreed to be the primary motivation of realising a good life). Friendship, by contrast, has intrinsic value — it is personal ethics and should not be instrumental. It seems right for justice to be pragmatic and instrumental in this way, and equally, it seems right that we regard friendship as something that should not be instrumental. This contrast is useful in highlighting the difference between morality and ethics that I am trying to pick out in this and the following chapters.

As I concluded in the last chapter, there seems to be reasonable grounds for saying that we have freedom to choose what we do, and therefore, by implication, there is a basis for moral action. In this chapter, I want to look at where our ideas of morality spring from — a search known as meta-ethics — and still a metaphysical rather than a moral question. So, it could be asked, do justice, morality and ethics somehow exist outwith the universe, perhaps given by God, or residing in some transcendent realm? Alternatively, is morality somehow built into the universe itself? Or a third alternative is simply to suggest that morality is something that we ourselves project onto the world. This would be the physicalist position and indeed the position of various forms of post-modern thought.

We tend to be comfortable with the idea that there might be ‘a truth’ — indeed, ‘the truth’ —

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