Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

then it is likely to be acted upon by impulse. It could not be described as either good or bad at this stage — this evaluation only comes later — but what matters is that we act! Whether this is a better approach, or really just our unavoidable approach, I’m not sure it’s possible to say. What could be said here though is that this approach is probably less prone to committing the naturalistic fallacy that we encountered earlier — Hume’s ‘ought from is’. Rationalisation of our behaviour comes after the event in the sequence I’ve described. There is perhaps more time to reflect on what kind of morality we need to construct. Granted, there is the possibility that we might say that whatever we did on impulse was the right thing! But this seems too crude an assessment to be taken seriously. It is too obviously a lazy deception — unlike the subtle ways that the naturalistic fallacy is buried within the idea that morals can be derived just by observing what people actually do.

So we have the options of goodness innate to the universe, innate to conscious beings, goodness coming from God, or from a system of morality that has been constructed by us. Or there may be a belief that there could be objective moral rules that are the product of human reasoning and are thereby contingent or a system that is based just from what we observe people actually doing. And at every stage we have the nagging question of whether we actually want to follow the dictates of goodness or not, even when we agree that the rules are fair. And add to this the notion that we also have to take into account our rights and responsibilities to others, to nature and to the

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