Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

equality and fairness. We use visual metaphors to speak of these, even to this day. And I might suggest here that they are indeed based on vision. (See Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just.) Truthfulness, equality and fairness, we might note, seem to be primary when it comes to morality. They are, if you like, the bridge between animal instinct and the meanings and ideologies that humans devise as the next step towards ethics and morals. The values we get by way of vision are mostly ones we all agree on. But the distinction between these values and the ones that require language is perhaps easy to state, but a lot less easy to achieve! The difference between equality and equity is a good way to recognise the difference. Equality is very much a visual metaphor — something is the same size as something else — for instance. But to achieve equity we need to work out things like how we balance a creature’s size with its strength or its food intake. There’s a lot more going on. Arguably, we need language to understand the more subtle aspects of ethics and to get to meaning, but truth, equality and fairness, based originally on vision, are more fundamental.

Art can often achieve a visual analogy to help us express a deeper truth or clarify a question in morality. Perhaps it achieves this by going back to when we thought only in images. Anything expressed as an image, or through performance, still has a deeper resonance with us than the use of just words. Before humanity even acquired language, it may be that we acted out our thoughts to others in a process that’s come to be known as meta-representation. Chimps and monkeys seem to be able to discern fairness

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