Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

— the universe has value as its primary means of expression, even although if does not somehow contain a set of specific rules.

Another way to look at things, as discussed above, is to think of people (and possibly some other animals) as having ‘virtues’. This suggests (by way of a third understanding of ‘innate’) that morality is gained by collecting good attributes. But virtue ethics falls foul of similar difficulties to the ideas discussed above. There is not some collection of virtues out there that we collect as if they are possessions. We are either virtuous or we are not. So perhaps virtue is never anything other than embodied — perhaps virtue is innate to us (thus a fourth meaning for innate). Everyone has a life journey and the life journey is a catalogue of virtues expressed or denied.

But, well, somehow this answer doesn’t quite satisfy. So we try yet another tack. What about some kind of pragmatic approach to morality? Something that serves best for human endeavours, quite apart from whether it is described as literally good or bad? But this falls foul of yet another problem. How do we decide what is good for human endeavour? All we’ve done is push the search for value back a step. We have to assume some values in order to come to some agreement on what makes a ‘good life’ for a human. Usually this is taken to be ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’. That might seem plain and sensible, but in fact it’s fraught with difficulties.

It would be better if it were expressed as, ‘the least harm for the greatest number of people’.

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