Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

combined with the benefits of a larger social order, be it a corporation, an institution a state, or a government.

***

To summarise this section on goodness, it could be said that our search for an absolute standard of morality has proven as difficult as our search for truth.

Three basic types of ethics are mentioned — consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. The thing that is most notable in almost all versions of these is that they are individual ethics and not a morality aimed at the common good — let alone a morality aimed at the health of eco-systems or the bio-sphere. Almost all ethical theories start with the question, what should I do? Even in morality — as touched upon, the ethics applied to groups — the question of, what should we do seems hardly to be raised, or it is framed in terms of families, small groups, communities or nations. Even when the whole world is included, it’s the world of humans. What about those other relationships, touched on in Chapter 11? The relationship with nature? The relationship with the whole universe? Morality might serve us better if it started from that wider perspective and not from the individual. But to do this, some further thoughts have to be tied in. We need to see our embodied selves as fully embedded in nature. We need to see how our beliefs about the cosmos might shape our morality. People don’t start out with no feelings or emotions and having to work out their ethics from scratch. It’s not even that we’re all born into a culture. The bigger picture might be that

244