Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

moral rules into abstractions — in fact meta-ethics explicitly sets out to do this. The problem is that we then treat morals as some kind of truths to which we might aim or aspire. But ethics as encounter — as a conversation — keeps it from this abstraction and arguably makes it more real. Moral precepts are then no longer ‘things’, which we can either acquire or reject, according to our predilections. Morality becomes part of who we are — part of our way of being in the world.

With these thoughts in mind, it’s time to tackle systems that at least attempt to treat moral issues at the wider scales of communities, nations and the like.

So did humans evolve to have a sense of ethics? This is the usual view — that compassion, mutual aid, a sense of fair play and even altruism has some advantage for the survival of our species. But there are other views. As we looked at in earlier chapters, we could ask, what if values and morals are somehow built into the universe? What if value is ‘innate’? We could think of this as a series of ‘rules’ that somehow exist out there somewhere, somewhat along the lines that Kant seemed to be suggesting. The more intelligence that has evolved, the more awareness of the rules has developed.

We might of course just make up rules rather than seeking them out in the universe. But the strange result of trying to make up rules is that we seem forced to assume that there are already values out there somewhere, to which our rules are either agreeing or not. This is another meaning for these matters to be innate

182