Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

relationships? The relationship with nature? The relationship with the whole universe? Morality might serve us better if it started from that wider perspective and not from the individual. But to do this, some further thoughts have to be tied in. We need to see our embodied selves as fully embedded in nature. We need to see how our beliefs about the cosmos might shape our morality. People don’t start out with no feelings or emotions and having to work out their ethics from scratch. It’s not even that we’re all born into a culture. The bigger picture might be that value is the net result of all the choices of conscious creatures in the universe — and we inherit this simply by being embodied and conscious. This, as a starting point for ethics and morality, would give a very different kind of story.

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