Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

bank, waded into the water, and tried to wrestle the duck from out of the swan’s bill. But – I was trying to think quickly here – what if someone were to come along? They would most likely think that – rather than trying to rescue a duck – I was actually trying to force-feed it to the swan. It certainly would not benefit my street cred with the neighbours – neighbours who already refer to me as ‘the damaged one’. Anyway, by this time the swan had kind of decided there wasn’t much it could do with its captive. It dropped the duck, which by this time had gone limp. Happily though, once released, the duck simply shook its feathers and swam away, apparently none the worse. What to make of the swan-duck incident? I suspect most of us would not apportion any blame to the swan. We would rationalise that swans, along with most other creatures, are amoral – they have no sense of moral responsibility – right and wrong. I’m not going to disagree. But it does kind of lead to the question of where morality came from in the first place. Some ‘higher’ animals, such as chimps and monkeys, do seem to have at least a rudimentary sense of right and wrong. So did humans evolve to have a sense of ethics? This is the usual view – that compassion, mutual aid, a sense of fair play and even altruism has some advantage for the survival of our species. But there are other views.

What if, for instance, values and morals are somehow built into the universe itself? What if value is ‘innate’?

This is quite a difficult concept to get one’s head around. For one thing, it seems to suggest a number of different meanings.

We could think of it as a series of ‘rules’ that

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