Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

of the wider, constitutional, values. Fairness itself, we may note, has its roots in beauty, with notions of balance, harmony, good order and equality.

A moral act and the value that lies behind it are not two separate things. So we need the underlying values, meanings and purposes in order to even make sense of ethics and morality. Values — and our consequent construction of meanings and purposes — are fundamental to our understanding of morality. Ideals, I’d suggest, are more wide-ranging. They may include values, but also include meanings perceived to be playing out in the world (or indeed, innate meanings to the universe). So we may choose to derive morals from ideals, just as much as from values.

We might cite values here to mean things like freedom, equality, the pursuit of happiness and, again, justice. Meanwhile, if someone holds a political ideal, it may include values at its base, but also some more complex ideas about what would be a good life for people and for society. E.F. Schumacher felt it necessary to see meaning in the world (in his case, via his Christian faith) before it was possible to decide what amounts to good or bad actions.

We’ve seen in the last couple of chapters that value could be regarded as innate to us as embodied agents. It’s worth considering this other kind of ‘innateness’ — the idea that goodness may reside within people, rather than being somehow built into the universe at large. But the idea that things and people can somehow have morality built into them is a

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