Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

world, and the way this might impact on how we organise our morality. Extending the ‘moral community’ is a way of including animals and plants and sometimes whole eco-systems, rivers, seas and other natural features in our law-making. It is assuming a moral status for nature, and even an intrinsic worth, if not actually a sacredness. It is difficult even to think of us ever being able to treat everything in purely instrumental terms — there’s always some kind of valuing going on and the human tendency to honour and sacrifice for particular things suggests a sense of the sacred will always be with us.

We have to face another, and perhaps unpalatable, idea at this point. All of the values we’ve been discussing in the last few chapters might justifiably be described as emotional, or instinctual gut-feelings. We saw, in the previous chapter, that one of the big divides in ethics and morality is the contrast between ‘the passions’ and a more rational approach. Now, I’d suggest, there’s a need to acknowledge that values are very much on the passion side of things — and this probably holds true whether we think of values as innate to the universe, innate to people, or just things that we’ve thought up ourselves. We could introduce the idea that the values we hold come about as a result of evolution. So, what I’ve been describing as ‘value innate to people’ thus far, may in fact be better described as just our instinctual drives — our animal natures. According to your predilections, this may be a better or a worse explanation. It is only when we come to ideologies, meanings and purposes that we see something else going on.

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