Stumble it!C.S. Lewis, Instinct, and the Moral Law
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |In Book I, Chapter I, of Mere Christianity, Lewis presents an argument for the existence of God, which rests on the idea that people worldwide hold to very similar standards of morality. This, according to Lewis, points to the presence of a God. Nothing else, according to him, can explain the cross-cultural similarities. I suggest that there is another explaination, and that Lewis merely “stated the improbable and called it a day”.
Several people have reacted to this critique by claiming that Lewis dealt with my objections in Chapter 2 of that same book, and there is some truth to this claim. Lewis does discuss the possibility that instinct could account for the similarities in cross-cultural moral sentiment he notes– which in the chapter he’s taken to calling the ‘Moral Law’–, and gives a series of reasons why this idea should be dismissed. He then continues to address the idea that his ‘Moral Law’ could be the result of social convention. This latter is the more interesting of his arguments, and it more directly anticipates my criticism, but I’ll take things in his order and begin with instincts.
In many ways, a critique of Lewis’ arguments about instinct is a pointless exercise on my part, because I agree with him that the ‘moral law’ is nothing like anything that could be called an instinct, which he defines loosely as “a strong want or desire to act in a certain way” and I add that, presumably, he means this strong desire to have some biological basis. He is responding to the question, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ It is important to note specifically that what he is addressing is the idea that the Moral Law, as he calls it, is an instinct, or an instinctual reaction, along the lines of the ‘fight or flight’ impulse or an infant’s suckling reaction. Lewis himself refers to the ‘herd’ instinct. He acknowledges that people do experience certain instinctual emotions, or compulsions, and writes:
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 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.
Lewis does something rather interesting in this passage, and speaks of the “moral law” almost as if it were some kind of sentient agency. The “thing that judges between”, the third thing, is in his calculation the moral law, and it seems to work as a brain lording over the instincts. This is a new twist to the story, as he doesn’t seem to have previously given it such power to actively decide between behaviors, and I am not entirely sure that it is consistent with his other uses of the term. Of course, it is possible that Lewis anthropomorphized the idea unintentionally, and what he means is that the “Moral Law” is the gauge we use when making decisions. Either way, his conclusion that the “Moral Law” must be responsible is unwarranted. In the first case, he substitutes an abstraction for a known, physical, decision making organ– the brain. Substituting some “third thing” for a thing known to perform the same function is indefensible, at best. In the second case, he assumes that we need some external, even metaphysical standard, in order to decide between two things.
Lewis’ case is compelling in the light he presents it, but consider that we make hundreds of decisions a day and never invoke any “third thing” as a guide. We decide to eat and what to eat, usually, several times a day. We may consider our weight, our vanity, and what “just sounds good”; but few, if any of us, invoke a “third thing”. The decision to speed or not to speed is, in my experience, typically made on the basis of time vs. the cost of the ticket and not upon the basis of any “third thing”. A decision to hit, or not to hit, during a game of Blackjack is made with no invocation of external entities. Likewise, to swing or to not swing at a baseball is a decision made without quizzing the heavens. In these cases, we take it for granted that our brains are capable of deciding between our various options without referring to some metaphysical slide-rule to do so. Why then can we not also make the decisions Lewis discusses without referring to such a rule?
In effect, Lewis ignores the obvious actions of the brain and treats humans as machines driven by instinct and instinct alone. That is the only circumstance wherein his argument makes sense, yet it is a horrible oversimplification. This error is perhaps partially forgivable given the question he set out to answer, but what is not forgivable is that he answered the question with such a gross absurdity when other responses were available to him. He seems to be unaware that, or perhaps he denies that, people can and do weigh desires and circumstances and come to decisions without having to read the answer from some cosmic rule book. His second and third reasons as to why the “Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts” both depend upon the same mistake. Concerning his second reason he writes:
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. … You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you 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.
Mere Christianity, Book 1, Chapter 2
Granted, people do act and think just as Lewis describes, but here again, to neglects important elements of the story. We are not machines driven only by instinct. In fact, in humans and in all other primates, instinct plays a very subordinate role in behavior. Most behavior is learned. We do have some instincts, but learned behavior and thought often overrides them. Lewis blithely ignores these factors, choosing again to treat humans like a collection of cogs, sprockets, gears, wheels, belts and the like. This is ridiculous. We never experience just a collision of desires as Lewis presents. We calculate consequences based upon circumstances– legal issues, religious affiliations, relationships with the drowning person, other desires such as the desire to be a hero or the hope for a reward. No “third thing” need be invoked to break the deadlock. Our brains turn the trick quite nicely, and this also answers Lewis’ third take on the “third thing”. Our rational capabilities provide the ‘tune’ to which Lewis refers. Thought directs the instincts. There is no need for a “third thing”. Postulating it is like postulating a metaphysical ruler to which I can appeal for decisions about my next move in a game of cards.
I feel I need to make it clear that while I find much wrong with Lewis’ reasoning on the subject of the instincts and the “Moral Law”, I do not disagree with his conclusion that this “law” is no instinct. I argue that this “Moral Law”– really, the appearance of cross-cultural similarities in moral sentiment– is something far more complicated than instinct, though still explainable without an appeal to the divine.
Lewis’ next step is to address the question, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?” This is the most interesting part for me since it sounds in many ways like my own opinions. He writes:
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 made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? … 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 questions is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.
To determine “to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs”, Lewis provides two arguments– the first of which is the same argument he provides in Chapter 1. He somewhat inexplicably responds to an objection by repeating the same argument which provoked the objection, and this means that his first response is no response at all. His second 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? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. 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.
He appears to be appealing to the idea that there are differences between human moral systems, and that we can determine which system is better and which is worse by comparing these systems to the archetypal system, the “Moral Law”. Oddly though, he states just a few sentences previously– as well as in Chapter 1 of the book–, that “though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great — not nearly so great as most people imagine — and you can recognize the same lay running through them all…” In other words, his one argument appeals to the idea that there are no significant differences between human moral systems, while his other argument appeals to the idea that there are such differences. These statements cannot both be true, and this means that Lewis has not really addressed the objection at all. He has either repeated his original argument– which does not count as addressing objections made to that original argument– or he has negated that original argument, which rather obviously does not count as a defense of it.
But lets assume that moralities are different for a moment, because he makes yet another error. He writes:
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 thing, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
It is true that when claiming that one morality is better than another, one is appealing to a standard, but Lewis merely assumes that that appeal is to some platonic “Real Morality”. Surely, a Nazi, to use Lewis’ own example, would consider Nazi morality an improvement over ‘lesser’ moralities? How does this demonstrate that we appeal to a “Real Morality”? The standard of comparison need not be anything like a universal moral standard. It can be, and experience tells me often is, whatever morality happens to be accepted by the person doing the comparison. The leap Lewis makes here defies common sense. A Muslim will consider Islamic moral codes to be superior, while a Hindu will consider Hindu morality to be superior. The one’s leveling a judgement against the other in no way implies that either is nearer the “Real Right”. In fact, it is rather easy to show that Lewis’ formulation leads to a contradiction.
If, as Lewis claims, moral truth is measured by an appeal to some “Real” standard, then either the Hindu or the Muslim could level a judgement against the other, but they could not condemn each other mutually– a glance at the “Real” moral standard should prevent that, and demonstrate conclusively that the one is right and the other wrong. It takes no imagination to see that this is not the case, and mutual condemnation is very possible. Consequently, though, that condemnation cannot be based in the kind of appeal Lewis suggests.
Finally, I want to talk about math. Lewis introduces the topic of mathematics– multiplication tables in particular–, suggests that the moral law is like mathematics, then drops the subject, essentially. Rather than investigate the idea thoroughly, he introduces it then backs away. I think he would have been better served by asking how the multiplication tables were generated, and then comparing that to the “Moral Law”. He writes:
The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. 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 made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?
What Lewis does here is confuse ‘convention’ with ‘invention’. His choice of words makes that very clear. It is true that some things are human inventions and are also conventions. These things could have been different. We can decide to drive on the left side of the road, or on the right. Rules such as that are merely convention, but not all human invention is purely convention. Some inventions cannot have been otherwise, at least not significantly. Take, for example, an alternator. Alternators are human inventions, yet they are all very similar. Why? The invention– in this, of a machine that generates electricity– is constrained by the properties of electro-magnetism. An alternator cannot be made that does not conform to and exploit these properties. Boats worldwide are all fundamentally very similar. They are similar because they must all contend with the same circumstances– with the physics of floating on water, being propelled through water, and being controllable on the water. These are human inventions, but they could not have been significantly other than they are.
Likewise with mathematics, and likewise with the general social rules to which human civilizations abide. The multiplication tables are certainly a human invention. There are no tables floating in the ether. We created them, but we created them to conform to the world around us. That world is the constraint. We didn’t merely make them up. We created them to serve as a kind of short-hand addition, essentially. The rules of addition, in turn, were worked out to conform to the way that observable countable quantities change as items get moved around. If I count two cows in one field, two cows in another field, then recount them after the two pairs mingle in the same field I get a count of four. I always get a count of four. If I count five apples in my basket, then pick two more, I always get a count of seven. There is the birth of mathematics, and that is why math– and the multiplication tables– cannot have been different. At least, if math were different, it wouldn’t conform to the world we observe.
Human ethics are much the same, though there is more room for variation than in mathematics. A society where killing 19 out of twenty infants is the norm simply wouldn’t survive very long. The population would crash and either the baby-killer convention would change or everybody would die off. A society where cold-blooded random murder is lauded would also quickly self destruct. We are constrained by such things as reproduction, the need for shelter, food supplies, supplies of fresh water, and protection from predators and from other groups of humans. Solving these problems necessarily produces similar social structures, just as the physics of water necessarily produces similar ships worldwide, and just as the physics of electricity necessarily produces similar batteries and generators. A ship, or a battery, that strays too far from its physical constraints simply fails to function. The same is true of human culture. A culture that strays too far from good solutions to human survival problems, fails and ceases to exist.
Human culture and moral sentiment is not, therefore, merely convention, nor is does it point to some Platonic “Moral Law”. The “Moral Law” reflects what humans have collectively learned about surviving in a group. It is an abstraction of our successes and failures as social animals. Nor, note, is it instinct, which would imply a genetic basis to moral sentiment. While our moral codes are intended to address biological constraints and provide solutions to certain very physical problems, the codes themselves are learned behavior and not embedded in our genes but passed along by tradition.
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