The
existence of an objective moral law is the seventh argument for the existence
of God. Some immediately object to this line of reasoning as it is not grounded
in science. But you cannot find out whether there is morality by science in the
ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave.
Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks really
means something like “I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the
sky at 2:20 A.M.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On
January 15th and saw so-and-so,” or, “I put some of this stuff in a
pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.” Do not
think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.
And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me
that this is the job of science – and a very useful and necessary job it is
too. But why anything comes to be there at all and whether there is anything
behind the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is
not a scientific question. If there is “Something Behind,” then either it will
have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some
different way.
The
statement that there is any such thing and the statement that there is no such
things, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real
scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular
novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from
textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense.
Mathematics and logic cannot be proved by science because science presupposes
them. Aesthetic judgments, such as the beautiful and good cannot be
scientifically proven. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew
every single thing in the whole universe. It is plain that the questions: “Why
is there a universe?” “Why does it go on as it does?” “Has it any meaning?”
would remain just as they were. This argument goes like this: 1) every law has
a law giver; 2) there is a Moral Law; therefore, 3) there is a Moral Law Giver.
I.
The Law of Human Nature
Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes
it sounds merely pleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn
something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They
say things like this: “How’d you like if anyone did the same to you?" -
“That’s my seat, I was there first” - “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any
harm” - “come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day,
educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now
what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not
merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He
is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other
man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “to hell with your
standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does
not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special
excuse.
He
pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person
who took the first seat should not keep it, or that something has turned up
which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both
parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or
morality about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they
might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the
human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is
in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and
he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there
would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there
was some agreement about the rules of football. Now Thomas Jefferson called the
Law or Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature” in the Declaration of Independence,
but he really meant that it was the Law of Human Nature. The idea was
that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms
by biological laws, so the creature called man also has his law – within
this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law
of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature
or to disobey it.
That
is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law
which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals
or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew
it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course,
that you might not find an odd individual here who did not know it, just as you
find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the
race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was
obvious to everyone.
Our
herd instinct is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels
like to be prompted by instinct – by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the
instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a
certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to
help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But
feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help
whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in
danger.
You
will probably feel two desires – one a desire to give help (due to your herd
instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for
self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two
impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to
help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between
two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either
of them. You might as well say the sheet of music which tells you, at a given
moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the
notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our
instincts are merely the keys. Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not
simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and
there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the
stronger of the two must win.
But
at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems
to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want
to be safe much more than you want to help him all the same. And surely it
often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is?
I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up
our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam
for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct
when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The thing that says
to you, “Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,” cannot itself be the
herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be
played louder cannot itself be that note. Here is a third way of seeing it. If
the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some
one impulse inside us which was always what we call “good,” always in agreement
with the rule of right behavior. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses
which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it
may not sometimes tell us to encourage.
It
is a mistake to think that some of our impulses – say another love or
patriotism – are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad.
All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desires
need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining
mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of
a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the
fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother’s love for her
own children or a man’s love for his own country has to be suppressed or they
will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries. Strictly
speaking there are no such things as good and bad impulses. For how much would
hatred weigh? Is there an atom for affection? What is the chemical composition
of the murder molecule? These questions are nonsense when categorizing will as
just purposeless matter.
Moral Argument
Think
once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right”
notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at
another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is
something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right
conduct) by directing the instincts. By the way, this point is of great
practical consequence. The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one
impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all
costs. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If
you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking
evidence in trials “for the sake of humanity,” and become in the end a cruel
and treacherous man.
It is taken for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and
teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention or social
convention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication
table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know
it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a
human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might
have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of
Decent Behavior from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn
everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which
might have been different – we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it
might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right – and others of
them, like mathematics, are real truths.
The
question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs. There are two
reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is
that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or
country and those of another, the differences of are not really very great –
not nearly so great as most people imagine – and you can recognize the same law
running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road
or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason
is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one
people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better
or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements?
Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better.
If
no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no
sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian
morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some
moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who
tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call
Reformers or Pioneers – people who understood morality better than their
neighbors did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas
can be better than another you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard,
saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.
But the standard that measures two things is something different from either.
You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that
there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and
that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it
this way. If you moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true,
there must be something – some Real Morality – for them to be true about.
The
reason why your idea of New York can be truer than mine is that New York is a
real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of
us said "New York" each meant merely "The town I am
imagining in my own head," how could one of us have truer ideas than the
other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same
way, if the Rule of Decent Behavior meant simply “whatever each nation happens
to approve,” there would be no sense in saying that any other nation had ever
been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the
world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.
Some
people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is
unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite
different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between
their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of,
say the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans,
what will really strike him will be how very likely they are to each other and
to our own. Besides, imagine what a totally different morality would mean.
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in a battle, or
when a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who have been kindest
to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made
five. Everyone knows that love is superior to hate.
There
is no land where murder is virtue and gratitude vice. Men have differed as
regards what people you ought to be unselfish to – whether it was only your own
family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed
that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.
Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have
always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked. But the most
remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe
in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a
moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to
him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jimmy Cricket.
Further, he wants everyone to value him as a person, even while he denies that
there are values for all persons.
A
nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their
case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one.
But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong
– in other words, if there is no Law of Nature – what is the difference between
a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and
shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like
anyone else? By their reactions, therefore, individuals and nations reveal the
Law of Nature, especially when they are mistreated. It seems, then, we are
forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken
about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a
matter of mere taste and opinion and more than the multiplication table.
None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions
among you, I apologize to them. I am only trying to call attention to a fact;
the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have
failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people.
There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the
children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the
money came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old
So-and-so and have never done – well, you never would have promised if you had
known how frightfully busy you were going to be. I am just the same. That is to
say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment
anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of
excuses as long as your arm.
The
question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they
are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the
Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so
anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we
believe in decency so much – we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so – that
we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we
try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad
behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we
put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to
ourselves. These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human
beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in
a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in
fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two
facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe
we live in.
II.
The Reality of Moral Law
You
may think I am being rather hard on the human race. After all, you may say what
I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong or of Nature, only means that people
are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a
good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame
which is due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave. I am not
concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth. And from that point
of view the very idea of something being imperfect, of its not being what it
ought to be, has certain consequences.If you take a thing like a stone or a
tree, it is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been
otherwise. Of course you may say a stone is “the wrong shape” if you want to
use it for skipping, or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you
as much shade as you expected. But all you mean is that the stone or tree does
not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own.
You
are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that. You really know, that, given
the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any different. What we,
from our point of view, call a “bad” tree is obeying the laws of its nature
just as much as a “good” one. Now have you noticed what follows? It follows
that what we usually call the laws of nature – the way weather works on a tree
for example – may not really be laws in the strict sense, but only in a
manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey the law of
gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means “what
stones always do?” You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it
suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean
that, in fact, it does fall. In other words, you cannot be sure that there is
anything over and above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to
happen, as distinct from what does happen. The laws of nature, as applied to
stones or trees, may only mean “what Nature, in fact, does.”
But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behavior, it is a
different matter. That law certainly does not mean “what human beings, in fact,
do;” for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none
of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you
drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do
and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else
comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do
behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the
rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. But men behave in
a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that
they ought to behave differently.Now this is really so peculiar that one is
tempted to try to explain it away. For instance, we might try to make out that
when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when
you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens
to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the
corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into
it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient.
But
I blame the second man and do not blame the first. I am not angry – except
perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses – with a man who trips me up by
accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not
succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not. Sometimes the
behavior which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all, but the very
opposite. In war, each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful.
But though they use him and pay him they regard him as human vermin. So you
cannot say that what we call decent behavior in others is simply the behavior
that happens to be useful to us. And as for decent behavior in ourselves, I
suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behavior that pays. It
means that things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have
got three pounds, doing school work honestly when it would be easy to cheat,
leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her, staying in
dangerous places when you could go somewhere safer, keeping promises you would
rather not keep, and telling the truth when it makes you look a fool.
Some
people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular
person at a particular moment, still it means what pays the human race as a
whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after
all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness
except in a society where everyone plays fair, and it is because they see this
that they try to behave decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that
safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being
honest and fair and kind to each other. But as an explanation of why we feel as
we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point. If we ask: “Why ought I
to be unselfish?” and you reply “Because it is good for society,” we may then
ask, “Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me
personally?” and then you will have to say, “Because you ought to be
unselfish” – which simply brings us back to where we started. If a man asked
what was the point of playing football, it would not be much good saying “in
order to score goals,” for trying to score goals is the game itself, not the
reason for the game, and you would really only be saying that football was
football – which is true, but not worth saying. In the same way, if a man asks
what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, “in order to
benefit society,” for trying to benefit society, in other words being unselfish
(for “society” after all only means “other people”), is one of the things decent
behavior consists in; all you are really saying is that decent behavior is
decent behavior. You would have said just as much if you had stopped at the
statement, “Men ought to be unselfish.”
And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not
that men are unselfish, or that they like being unselfish, but that they ought
to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human
behavior in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact
about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for
we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about
men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement
about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the
behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we find
inconvenient, and may even be the opposite. The Law of Nature may not even be
the be the standard by which we treat others, but it is nearly always the
standard by which we expect others to treat us. Consequently, this Rule of
Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, must somehow or other be a real thing
– a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet it is not a
fact in the ordinary sense in the same way as our actual behavior is a fact. It
begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of
reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the
ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real – a real law,
which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.
III.
Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver
I
now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever
since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe
really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been
held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that
view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed,
nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just
happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able
to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce
the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life,
and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the
matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances,
the living creatures developed into things like us.
(Current estimates suggest that to replicate our sun, a life-supporting planet,
a Jupiter-sized planet to shield ours from interstellar debris, to originate
life, and life that is able to achieve consciousness would be one in a
million-millionth chance).
The
other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe
is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it
is conscious, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to
another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not
know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself – I
mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one
of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken
its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.
Now
the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only
one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from
external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men,
we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we
are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a
moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try,
and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point.
Anyone
studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing
our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but
merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we
had this moral law. How could he? For his observations would only show what we
did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there
were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the
weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this.
We
want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason
or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power,
if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes
them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in
which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case, and in
that one case we find there is.
Or
put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the
universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the
universe – no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or
staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it
to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to
get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside
ourselves.
Surely
this ought to arouse our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect to
get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases, where
you do not get an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone asked me,
when I see a man in a blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper
packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters? I should reply,
“Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I find it does
contain a letter.” And if he then objected, “But you’ve never seen all those
letters which you think the other people are getting,” I should say, “Of course
not, and I shouldn’t expect to, because they’re not addressed to me. I’m
explaining the packets I’m not allowed to open by the ones I am allowed to
open.” It is the same about this question. The only packet I am allowed to open
is Man.
When
I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find
that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or
something wants me to behave in a certain way. I do not, of course, think that
if I could get inside a stone or tree I should find exactly the same thing,
just as I do not think all the other people in the street get the same letters
as I do. I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the
law of gravity – that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey
the law of my human nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony
nature.
But
I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in
both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide. All I have got to is
a something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law
urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I
do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like
anything else we know – because after all the only other thing we know is
matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.
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For further reading, please consider purchasing and then reading Chapters 1-3
of C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity.” I am personally indebted to this author and
have liberally lifted from his work without the use of footnotes.
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