Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

But even so, it can lead to all sorts of abuse for some individuals in order to serve the interests of some majority — and so on. And also, very often, such matters are judged on the basis of individuals. If the ‘least harm’ principle were applied to whole societies, whole nations, and indeed, the whole planet, then we might be onto something.

When it comes to justice and laws, we are forced to adopt a pragmatic approach — something along the line of the modified ‘least harm’ principle discussed above. But again, it’s best to be mindful that value lies at the back of this. There’s no reason that innate value has to mean static value. The derivation of morality, justice and law from values can be an ongoing conversation — in fact, this seems unavoidable. We’ll be taking up this question in more detail in the next two chapters.

But — going back to the idea of value being somehow innate — one way to think about this is to recognise that the world is a world of choices rather than a world of facts. Our agency as creatures is not just some add-on that evolution has conjured up for ‘survival’ purposes. Our agency is what defines us as conscious, moral individuals.

The thing we miss, very often, is to get a clear divide between values that come to us as a result of our evolutionary inheritance and values that come from the much later — and purely human — ability for rationalism. The former often stems from seeing — we can see what’s a fair share, for instance. The latter stems from language. To get a handle on this, think of the

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