Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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express what people should want if they were not mistaken? Or should morality just accept people’s mistaken wants and desires as a given? (Again this is, arguably, the stance of laissez-faire economics.)

It might be easier to say that what we actually believe to be right is embodied by our behaviour. But clearly, we do not always feel justified in our actions. We feel there ought to be rules about behaviour that are different from the way people actually behave.

If we consider morality to be something other than innate then we seem to be in similar circumstances. We could agree with the system in principle but decide not to obey. Or, we could just not agree at all. Or, we could go along with whatever ethics and morality are suggesting we do, but not actually agreeing with them in our hearts, so to speak, or in our conscience. So therefore, even agreeing on a morality, we face these difficulties — we have to want to comply as well as complying! And we could still wish a particular action to be regarded as moral and yet disapprove of it on a personal level.

We might instead try to work out rules that would lead to good outcomes for ourselves and for human societies. But note here that there must still be some values — implicit or explicit — that allow us to determine what ‘good for human societies’ might actually mean.

Another issue with trying to figure out moral rules is that different societies may come up with different sets of rules (and surely they do!). This makes morality ‘consensual’, in the sense

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