Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

life amount to if we chose this or that particular course of action? That’s the kind of question that virtue ethics is asking us to consider. The narrative approach seeks the good within the context of a whole life story.

It seems that our life stories are always being updated, and our awareness of our own strengths and weaknesses continually evolves. Most importantly, life stories and virtue ethics are always set within the context of a community. Communities, of course, also change and are informed by other communities, as cultures and nations change.

Virtue ethics (and indeed ethics in general) can be divided into two broad categories — those that consider virtue to be an end in itself and those that consider virtue as a means to an end. In the latter case, the end in mind is usually happiness. Virtue ethics is often contrasted with both moral rules and utilitarianism as an alternative approach to morality.

There’s a further approach to ethics that is worth mentioning here. It can be described simply as deriving ethics from our encounters with other people. It is in conversation with other people that we arrive at our ideas of right and wrong, and not necessarily from the rules laid down by society. As individuals we have a tendency to rationalise what we do and see it as right, just because it fits with our actual behaviour. Confronted by others, however, we must together sit down and decide: How should we live? All of the systems we have examined concerning ethics and morals in this and the previous chapter have the tendency to make

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