Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

would lead to good outcomes for ourselves and for human societies. Rationalism is the theory that reliable knowledge of the world can be derived from reason alone. Moral rationalism is the term given to moral theories that emphasise the use of reason or rational procedures in moral decision-making. But note here that there must still be some values — implicit or explicit — that allow us to determine what ‘good for human societies’ might actually mean.

Another similar possibility for the derivation of morality is that they are rationalisations of how we’d like the world to be. In other words, based on the emotions, or ‘passions’, as Hume might have said. This is referred to as ‘emotivist’, or sometimes pejoratively as ‘boo-hooray theory’! (However, we can note that the ‘emotivist theory’ still has a truth-claim underlying it — that it’s right, for instance, to wish the world to confirm to our preferences.) It’s quite staggering how philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes were totally okay to say that what we regard as wrong is just what we find painful, whilst the right is simply related to pleasure.

We should be cautious here, in that people are far more likely to act on their desires than on their supposedly rational deliberations! We should also note here that a subjective morality is not the same as ‘subjectivism’ — where mere approval or disapproval of a particular action is taken as a basis for morality. We could still wish a particular action to be regarded as moral and yet disapprove of it on a personal level. Other than this though, it’s difficult to be clear about any differences between emotivism,

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