An ethics against fatalism

reflections on freedom, virtue and common utility in Spinoza

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze some aspects of Spinoza's conception of freedom and its link with the notion of virtue, in order to show that Spinoza is not a fatalist and that, on the contrary, from his philosophical project follows a conception of human freedom that implies not only the effective possibility of acting on the real, together with other individuals, but also the possibility of seeing one's own power increase in this work of collective resistance. In order to carry out our purpose, the article will be divided into two main parts: in the first, referring to different passages of his work, we return to Spinoza's critique of the traditional notion of providence. In the second part of this article, concentrating on Spinoza's Ethics, we will study some elements that lead us to affirm the possibility of thinking an ethics of liberation within the framework of the universal determinism that his ontology of immanence postulates.