Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

universe — as science dreams — we need to come to terms with free will. Determinism, you’ll remember, is the belief that a totally random arrangement of energy at the start of the universe created trees, people, elephants and everything else. The alternative is agency — life and consciousness emerges as a result of living creatures. Biology struggles desperately to tell us that evolution does not involve choice — that it’s random through and through. What are we to believe? Agency is not supernatural and determinism is not really scientific (unless we can come up with a way to prove it’s true by experiment). Agency seems like common-sense, whilst determinism seems nonsensical. But we have been fooled by common sense before.

Morality is now often based only on the way people are observed to behave (hence ‘ought’ from ‘is’ — the naturalistic fallacy). And hence, potentially, meanings and purposes are as a result of the rationalisation of our observations. So we have behaviourism in psychology, and — with no belief in any kind of fundamental moral principles — the only reason to change people’s behaviour, rather than just to observe it, is if it is in some way harmful to a person themselves or to society. Of course, in order to make a judgement about what’s harmful, we’d need to have some moral principles in the first place!

But a couple of things are worth noting here. Our human nature is fairly fixed, but the various narratives with which we interpret the world are more fluid. If we want to change something then, we do not need to change human nature, we only need to change the narratives. And

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