Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

20. Theories of Morality

So far, in our deliberations about the ‘Good’, the main focus has been on what might motivate us as individuals in terms of our behaviour — and therefore, as suggested by our definitions of ethics and morality — this is ethics. There already seem to be inherent values at play here — fairness, love, altruism, friendship, generosity — even beauty. From Chapter 18 we saw that E.F. Schumacher (starting with meaning as the basis of morality) suggested freedom, equality, the pursuit of happiness and love should be the ideals at the root of our morality. For Sartre and Camus, love, freedom, dignity and creativity are the things that we should be living for. In this chapter, morality and justice are our main concerns — how we act in groups, communities and societies and how we come to make decisions about what is right and wrong in the public domain.

Let’s start with the idea of ‘natural justice’. Without a civilisation or government, or even a tribe, individuals are vulnerable to being attacked and possibly killed by others. We would probably all agree with the idea that in this situation the individual has the right to defend themselves and, if needed, kill their attacker. (Moral but not evil.) The idea of a government was proposed by Thomas Hobbes

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