Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Lists of our odd behaviour could probably be extended for several more pages! But I’m sure the examples given are enough to show that we all live in multiple stories. But we have to make a distinction between what stories we claim to believe and what stories we actually follow!

If ethics are a matter of personal behaviour then we could start by asking — who is the ultimate arbiter in ethical choices? Is it just left to each of us to decide what our personal preferences might be? The answer seems to be no. There is an expectation of some kind of cultural or society-wide determination of ethical matters.

The play-off between reason and ‘passion’ as the basis of moral action was examined in the last chapter. Kant took the opposite view to Hume. For Kant, there needs to be a non-moral reason for us to be moral. Kant took this reason to be obligation — and hence his categorical imperative — which is described below. (Hume, you’ll remember, was very much on the ‘passions’ side.) Kant believed his approach to be an absolute morality, in the sense that moral rules are necessary truths.

Here’s a brief explanation. The word ‘ought’ is used often in a non-moral sense, eg., if you want to be good at music, you ought to practice. Kant called this a hypothetical imperative because the ‘project’, or purpose, of piano-playing is morally neutral. Imperatives in general are commands that dictate a particular course of action. Hypothetical imperatives tell us what to do provided we have the relevant desires. We can escape this kind of imperative

178