Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

If we consider morality to be something other than innate then we seem to be in similar circumstances. We could agree with the system in principle but decide not to obey. Or, we could just not agree at all. Or, we could go along with whatever ethics and morality are suggesting we do, but not actually agreeing with them in our hearts, so to speak, or in our conscience. So therefore, even agreeing on a morality, we face these difficulties — we have to want to comply as well as complying!

Belief in God presents another alternative. The traditional view of God includes the notion that God is in some way intrinsically good. God therefore is seen as the source of moral values. But this only pushes the question one stage back. The problem is often exemplified by asking: Does God approve of something because He/She/It is good, or is something good because God approves of it? (This is sometimes known as the ‘Euthyphro’ dilemma, after Plato’s dialogue of the same name.) In either case there is, by implication, an outside standard of goodness by which either the character of God or a particular action is judged. Thus, we are no further forward. Also, it could be argued that a traditional view of God simply treats God as a person and therefore seeing God as the source of morality just means saying that morality is subjective in another way, ie., subjective to God rather than to us. This still does not seem to get us out of the problem that there appears to be a higher standard of morality against which we are judging.

We might instead try to work out rules that

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