Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

17. Meta-Ethics

’Our goals, our values, our morality, must be visible already in our actions.’

Herbert Marcuse — Play, Creativity and Social

Movements

As I concluded in the last chapter, there seems to be reasonable grounds for saying that we have freedom to choose what we do, and therefore, by implication, there is a basis for moral action. In this chapter, I want to look at where our ideas of morality spring from — a search known as meta-ethics — and still a metaphysical rather than a moral question. So, it could be asked, do justice, morality and ethics somehow exist outwith the universe, perhaps given by God, or residing in some transcendent realm? Alternatively, is morality somehow built into the universe itself? Or a third alternative is simply to suggest that morality is something that we ourselves project onto the world.

In earlier chapters it was noted that our sense of right and wrong comes initially from value. Value was understood to be derived partly from our instinctual drives as creatures evolved from earlier life-forms and partly from our uniquely human characteristics of language and rationality. We noted that a lot of our instinctual drives are based on seeing, on our

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