Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

our own pleasures.

Rights and entitlements seem to necessarily involve duties and obligations. Rights and duties suggest that society, by way of justice and the law, owes us something and expects things from us in return. Perhaps this could be taken as the essential interface between our personal behaviour and our public behaviour. We may, of course, quibble over whether society or the state has itself a right to expect anything from us, or whether the state is acting fairly in terms of what it offers us by way of entitlements. This adds a further layer of complexity, an obligation to an authority that seeks to administer moral rules.

So we have the options of goodness innate to the universe, innate to conscious beings, goodness coming from God, or from a system of morality that has been constructed by us. Or there may be a belief that there could be objective moral rules that are the product of human reasoning and are thereby contingent or a system that is based just from what we observe people actually doing. And at every stage we have the nagging question of whether we actually want to follow the dictates of goodness or not, even when we agree that the rules are fair. And add to this the notion that we also have to take into account our rights and responsibilities to others, to nature and to the planet. And we also have to deal with intermediaries, such as the state, who are trying to get us to behave in particular ways, for reasons that we may agree with or not agree with. It’s time now to look at actual systems of ethics and morality, over the next two chapters,

174