In Mark St. Germain's play "Freud's Last Session," but not in the movie, there is one scene where Freud and Lewis disagree about the source of morality (14):
LEWIS. We have to begin by accepting that there's a moral law at work ---
FREUD. I don't accept it. There is no moral law, only our feeble attempts to control chaos.
LEWIS. Moral codes have existed throughout time. Tell me one civilization that admired theft or cowardice. Mankind has never rewarded selfishness.
FREUD. Selfishness rewards itself.
LEWIS. Then the Nazis are right in their actions?
FREUD. Of course not.
LEWIS. So there is a morality you're comparing them with. A man can't call a line crooked unless he knows what a straight line is.
FREUD. Ah! Geometric morality.
LEWIS. Moral conscience is something we're born with. It grows as we do. When I was younger, I thought about right and wrong as much as a baboon thinks about Beethoven.
FREUD. And this "conscience" is God-created?
LEWIS. Yes.
FREUD. Ha. I am laughing. You might argue God did an adequate job with the sunset, but as far as "conscience," he failed completely. What you call "conscience" are behaviors indoctrinated into children by their parents. These become the crippling inhibitions they struggle with all their lives.
Here Lewis is alluding to his moral argument for the existence of God, or what he calls in Mere Christianity "right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe" (17-39). All human beings--or all normal human beings--have a sense of right and wrong, of what they and others ought to do or ought not to do. Even though human beings often disobey this moral law, they show their knowledge of this moral law by feeling guilt and shame when they disobey. And while there is a lot of variation across cultures in their moral standards, there is remarkable agreement: for example, all agree that lying, stealing, murder, and betrayal of one's friends are wrong. "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 taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table" (20). And so, "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" (30). This intimates "the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us" (36). At some point, you realize "that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power" (39). There 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" (34). Here we see what Lewis identifies in The Problem of Pain as the third stage of religious development--when human beings believed that the Divine Power before whom they felt dread and awe was the source and the enforcer of the Moral Law.
But Lewis never provides a compelling argument for why the reality of the moral law of right and wrong proves the reality of a Divine Power behind that law. After all, we could follow the lead of the ethical naturalists--from David Hume to Charles Darwin to Edward Westermarck--in explaining this universal moral law as rooted in a universal human nature shaped by natural evolution. We could explain the common moral rules as arising from the natural needs and desires common to all human beings. The natural desires for self-preservation and for respect for life, persons, and property shape the moral rules in all societies.
Even Lewis seems to agree with this when he identifies this Moral Law as "the Law of Human Nature." One can see this in his book The Abolition of Man, where he speaks of the Moral Law as the Tao or Way that is universal to all human societies. I have written about this in some previous posts.
Although natural moral law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:
"Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with" (61).
It seems, then, that there is no necessity for grounding the Moral Law in "a Something which is directing the universe."
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