Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

19. Ethics

If ethics are a matter of personal behaviour then we could start by asking — who is the ultimate arbiter in ethical choices? Is it just left to each of us to decide what our personal preferences might be? The answer seems to be no. There is an expectation of some kind of cultural or society-wide determination of ethical matters.

The play-off between reason and ‘passion’ as the basis of moral action was examined in the last chapter. Kant took the opposite view to Hume. For Kant, there needs to be a non-moral reason for us to be moral. Kant took this reason to be obligation — and hence his categorical imperative — which is described below. (Hume, you’ll remember, was very much on the ‘passions’ side.) Kant’s is a rational form of ethics and his categorical imperative is a rules-based — deontological — approach. (Deontological approaches to ethics are sometimes termed ‘prescriptivism’.) Kant believed his approach to be an absolute morality, in the sense that moral rules are necessary truths.

Here’s a brief explanation. The word ‘ought’ is used often in a non-moral sense, eg., If you want to be good at music, you ought to practice. Kant called this a hypothetical imperative

217