Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

others will allow for compassion and that goodness — and good morals — will follow. As individuals we have a tendency (from our sensation, perception, impulse way of seeing the world) to rationalise what we do and see it as right, just because it fits with our actual behaviour. Confronted by others, however, we must together sit down and decide: How should we live? All of the systems we have examined concerning ethics and morals in this and the previous chapter have the tendency to make moral rules into abstractions — in fact meta-ethics explicitly sets out to do this. The problem is that we then treat morals as some kind of truths to which we might aim or aspire. But ethics as encounter — as a conversation — keeps it from this abstraction and arguably makes it more real. Moral precepts are then no longer ‘things’, which we can either acquire or reject, according to our predilections. Morality becomes part of who we are — part of our way of being in the world.

With these thoughts in mind, it’s time to tackle systems that at least attempt to treat moral issues at the wider scales of communities, nations and the like.

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