Regards,
Peter Grice
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MERE CHRISTIANITY C.S.Lewis
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BOOK ONE - Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
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CHAPTER ONE - The Law of Human Nature
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"Every one has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we
can learn something 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 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 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 this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of
Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean
things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when
the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature,'
they really meant 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 had this law - with 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 Human
Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to
several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is
free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot
disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice
about falling than the stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to
various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than the animal
can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other
things; but the law which is peculiar to 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 every one
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 and there who did
not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no
ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the
human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe
they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the
war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the
wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well
as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion of what
we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we
could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour
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 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 like they are to each
other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in
the appendix of another book called 'The Abolition of Man'; but for our
present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally
different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were
admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of
double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just
as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. 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 every one. 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 Jack Robinson. 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?
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 any more
than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to
my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of
Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They
had much better go read some other book, for nothing I am going to say
concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not
preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else.
I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or
this month, ore more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise
ourselves the kind of behaviour 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
- the one you have almost forgotten - 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. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister
(or brother)... if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder
at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? 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 behaviour, 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 or 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 behaviour 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, the, 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 and they break it.
These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves
and the universe we live in."
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