Here are my thoughts on Ch. 2. Overall, I like what he is trying to do, but I dont think it works. Ch. 3 thoughts to follow.
Chapter 2. Some objections.
1. Summary
Chapter 2 is short. Lewis is mainly dealing with 2 objections to his beliefs that a moral law exists because it best explains the observations he has had in his life with how people talk and act about a moral law.
The 2 objections are what he calls “herd instinct” and “social convention”. I ended my last section by noting that there are other explanations for why people may act and talk as if a moral law exists. These could be 2 other explanations.
Lewis argues that our herd instinct does not explain how we act concerning a moral law very well. First, he says and instinct is a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. But this is different from how we talk about morality. As he says “feeling a desire to help somebody is quite different from feeling that you ought to help someone…” You may feel a desire to help someone in trouble or run away in fear, but according to Lewis this desire is different from the feeling that you ought to help the person instead of running away.
He says that when 2 instincts are in conflict, the stronger one wins but usually when we have a moral conflict, morality tells us to side with the weaker of the 2 impulses. We desire to be safe much more than we desire to risk our life to help somebody, but the moral law tells us we should help even though that's what we want to do less according to our instincts.
He also says that if morality is an instinct, then as an instinct it should always be good. But since we cannot point to any of our instincts that are always good morality must be different from our mere instincts.
Concerning the social convention objection Lewis argues that the moral law is something more akin to mathematics than the rule that you should only drive on the right or left side of the road. 1st, there are many different societies but there are not real differences in moralities. Because there seems to be a morality across all societies, even when these societies are very different, that's a good reason for thinking social conventions don't create morality. 2nd, there must be moral progress, or there must be certain morals that are better than others otherwise we did not talk about whether amorality was civil or savage. We couldn't say there is a difference between Nazi morality or Christian morality. By saying one is better than the other you are already admitting there is some standard the you can use to judge if one is better than the other.
2. Good Points
I appreciate that Lewis is trying to consider objections to his argument. As I read these chapters, these are the first problems I could identify. So I am glad he is at least identifying them and considering them.
3. Questions or Concerns
My concerns are that he doesn’t do a good job of dismissing them. He tries to argue that instinct and the moral law are different, but I don’t think he is successful. He briefly talks about instinct, but he never really defines it. And because he never really distinguishes it, I don’t think he can dismiss it. It’s the same with the social conditioning. He argues that morality exists in a very similar form across all societies. But he doesn’t give us any evidence for this. He just asserts it. Moreover, I am quite confident that varying systems of morality do exist across history and the world, which is a problem if Lewis is trying to argue there is a moral law that exists that we all know about. Basically, I like that he is trying to deal with these objections, I just don’t think he is successful.
Overall, I think there are better explanations for why people act as though there is a moral law that what Lewis is trying to argue for here.
Jon.
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