Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

sense of beauty and aesthetics and on quality. So we can frame our questions about morality ultimately in terms of our understanding of value. Value may come from things held to be necessary truths or from innate principles, or just from what we consider reasonable. Necessary truths of morality might be transcendent, in a similar sense to the way we regard truth, but might also be supernatural, such as coming to us from God or gods. Let’s consider each of these options in turn.

We tend to be comfortable with the idea that there might be ‘a truth’ — indeed, ‘the truth’ — existing independently of human reasoning. But we are less inclined to believe in ‘a morality’. Our narratives with regard to ethics and morality do however demand some kind of justice to be played out. We look for fair play and just deserts in all of our dealings and this probably has a greater hold over the human mind than searching for truth. We have more ‘skin in the game’, as it were, when it comes to human behaviour, than when thinking about abstract ideas around truth.

Plato argued that moral decision-making involves a rational intuition of eternal moral principles. These principles are perceived in the same way as we perceive mathematical truths. So let’s look at our options in relation to a universe that has innate moral principles. This might have its appeal, in that if there were moral rules somehow built into the universe then there would be no ambiguity over what’s right and wrong. But we’d have to ask, what if no-one knew the innate morality, or knew of it but chose to ignore it, or just went along with it

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