Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

subjectivism and moral subjectivism.

However, David Hume argued, ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ So, reason alone is not sufficient to motivate action. The notions of rationality and irrationality are not directly applicable to the passions.

For Hume, the role of reason is to establish facts — to determine truth and falsehood. However, recognising facts is not sufficient to motivate us. There must be fear or desire present in order to make us act. But emotion by itself is not sufficient to motivate us either. Reason provides the ability to work out how to reach a desired end. So there is a balance between reason and desire when we try to make ethical decisions — we don’t just reach ethical decisions based on personal preferences.

To believe that something is wrong means that we have some motive for not doing it and vice versa. Acting morally therefore cannot be motivated by reason alone. This is moral subjectivism. Whilst Hume stressed the importance of the passions in making moral choices, he was not advocating pure subjectivism. Simple subjectivism, as previously discussed, states approval or disapproval but does not make a value judgement. On this basis it might be said that there’s something of a sliding scale between moral rationalism on the one hand and the emotivist position on the other.

So a further alternative is that morality is simply

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