Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

position. But again, it seems to come back to what people think is a good idea in terms of benefiting society.

But the difficulty with all theories of meta-ethics is that ethics and morality sometimes ask us to do things we don’t really want to do! This might seem in conflict with the idea that value is innate. If value is innate, it might be argued, then any meanings, purposes and morals derived from our values must be things that we would naturally want to do. So we see an ancient dichotomy emerging, which has really stayed with us ever since. There are moralities based on what we‘d like to do and there are moralities based on what we think we ought to do. We’ll be seeing the outworkings of this below and in the next two chapters.

The contrast between what we’d like to do and what we think we ought to do is really about our responsibilities to others — and a hierarchy of wishes. We may want a good society over and above catering to our own personal wishes. Where these two come into conflict then we may give primacy to the needs of society. On the other hand, we may be a ‘free-rider’, taking the benefits of society for granted and just indulging our own pleasures.

Kant used the term ‘practical reason’ for what is generally called ethics (and ‘judgement’ for aesthetics). He recognised ‘perfect duty’ as acts that must be performed. ‘Imperfect duty’ is where circumstances dictate whether an act is needed or not. In other systems, perfect duty is that which must be done because of the rights of others. Kant’s is just a way of consistently

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