Logos & Muse

Note:  Because in this series I am build­ing an argu­ment and reach­ing a con­clu­sion in stages, it is meant to be read con­sec­u­tively.  Part One, “A Primer on Rights,” may be found here.

SHALL BEGIN where I began in Part 1, with the open­ing sen­tence of Book II of Aristotle’s Physics:  “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, and some from other causes.”  With the help of Aquinas, we may amend that to read, “Of things that exist, some owe their exis­tence to God, and some to other causes.”   That is the begin­ning of all cor­rect rea­son.  And if it applies to the ques­tion of Rights, as I sug­gested ear­lier, it applies no less to the ques­tion of the moral law.  No one, I sus­pect, would argue that Aristotle’s words apply only to tan­gi­ble things.  Rights, though intan­gi­ble, exist; for that is how peo­ple talk about them.  Peo­ple talk as though intel­lect, and love, and rea­son, and logic, and free­dom actu­ally exist, and as though they mat­ter, in a much more pro­found way than a world of tan­gi­ble things.  So that is how we should speak of the moral law, too, and whence it derives.

With that in mind, let us turn to how C.S. Lewis estab­lishes the real­ity of the moral law, in the open­ing para­graphs of Mere Chris­tian­ity:

Every one has heard peo­ple quar­relling.  Some­times it sounds funny and some­times it sounds merely unpleas­ant; but how­ever it sounds, I believe we can learn some­thing very impor­tant from lis­ten­ing to the kind of things they say.  They say things like this:  ‘How’d you like it 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’–‘Why should you shove in first?’–‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’–‘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 behav­iour does not hap­pen to please him.  He is appeal­ing to some kind of stan­dard of behav­iour 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 that there is some spe­cial rea­son in this par­tic­u­lar case why the per­son who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite dif­fer­ent when he was given the bit of orange, 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 behav­iour or moral­ity or what­ever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. … 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. Read more »