No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

[think positive]

It’s the weather, this winter is starting to feel like the day after tomorrow. Depressing everyone, even those who hate summer.

[K]

[K]

C.S. Lewis:

"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. ... [T]aking 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 practised? 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 civilisations 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 a 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. ..."

[HAL]

I cannot predict the future.

[David]

For such a respected thinker, Lewis sure came up with some simplistic arguments (see, for instance, his incomprehensibly celebrated, Pascal’s-wager-esque “Jesus was either the son of God or a madman” quote, which I thought was impressive when I was 14). Of course a lot of what was said in WW2 was nonsense; war propaganda is ever thus.

The cross-cultural consistency that Lewis talks about is not evidence of a universal moral law so much as evidence of the common factors required for a functional society. Beyond those requirements (thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, etc.), many societies have historically been quite comfortable treating outgroups (either within or outside its borders) dreadfully. The Nazis just found a particularly efficient and cruel way of enacting that. And even Allied forces, for all their claims of moral superiority, were not opposed to laying waste to a city like Dresden as punishment, snuffing out the lives of civilians as if they were ants on a kitchen bench. It is, indeed, that consistently inconsistent treatment of ingroups and outgroups throughout human history that makes talk of a universal moral law so absurd.

[K]

[K]

C. S. Lewis (II):

"[S]ome people wrote to me saying, "Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?" Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. 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 a 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. ...

Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. 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. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. 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. ...

Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct.

There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. ..."

[K]

Regarding C.S. Lewis, Charles Foster claims

"It might be said that much of what Lewis thought of as his moral philosophizing was actually psychology. It’s not a distinction that should trouble any really serious moral philosophers, for whom moral philosophy is about right living. But perhaps the observation is correct. If it is, Lewis should be given the credit for brokering the marriage between psychology and moral philosophy that has spawned so many shrill and currently entertaining children."

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/11/c-s-lewis-as-a-moral-philosopher/


I'm not entirely sure what Foster means, but Lewis does seem to make certain assumptions about human psychology that are reminiscent of assumptions in traditional economics about human motivation...

[David]

[K]

[David]

^ There's nothing particularly arbitrary about functionality in this sense; common ideas like right to life and right to property crop up near-universally because abandoning them makes a functional society impossible, and of course we internalise such ideas. The idea that these desires spring somehow innately from within us is only true, I think, in the sense that we recognise what we want for ourselves and are capable of feeling empathy for others; but whether these can be disentangled from the social and cultural norms that we are raised with is a more difficult question. These internal "moral" intuitions belong, after all, to the same category of thinking that gives people a disgust for homosexuality or a belief in the righteousness of suicide bombing. I wouldn't be putting such intuitions on a pedestal.

It's true that vastly different kinds of societies (now and historically) might seem to "work" in different contexts, but it depends what we mean by functional: functional for whom? If it's just functional for the ruling class, then how sustainable is such a system in the long run, and how well does such a society actually work (given the inevitable corruption, nepotism and unhappiness of the masses that tends to occur in such systems)?

By maximum functionality or efficiency, I tend to mean here something like "works best for people as a whole". This is also referred to as utility in other philosophies. These concepts deal with ideas like objective benefit, but I'd argue that they're not moral concepts because they don't seek to appeal to any internal or external absolute law. Instead, they likely recognise that we're just apes on a rock in the middle of nowhere in a cold universe, and that our affairs are ultimately no more meaningful than those of other species; but that while we're here, we may as well be doing the best we can to make our societies as amenable to living as possible. Self-interest is, by its nature, a powerful motivator! So if you're going to propose re-introducing slavery and point to certain economic benefits of doing so, I'm going to oppose you because I think that makes us worse off as a society (transforming it into one that is more selfish, undemocratic, violent and unfair) and makes some people's lives considerably worse off – not because I think we're offending some sacred law or something.

But it's also important to keep in mind here that, up until this point, I haven't really been talking about how things should be so much as simply why things are. Most human societies throughout history have been violent, corrupt and unequal; but their rules – and, indeed, the fact that they even had any rules at all – emerged from a shared desire to live in a functional society. That's not a question of right or wrong or good or evil, any more than the hierarchy of a silverback gorilla clan is. What seems to happen is that the more resources are pooled and the more expansive the concept of society becomes, the less conflict-oriented its constituents' lives become and the more that diverse interests are able to be taken into account and codified into law. It doesn't always work that way, but it seems to be a general trajectory.

If moral law were an innate and constant thing, then those imperatives should have remained unaltered throughout the evolution of societies. History seems to indicate otherwise.

[Flanker_33]

Of course most news are bad news, but I have a feeling I can't shake that good news wouldn't sell. Of course, there's the usual report about some kind of wholesome village festival or a crippled kid receiving a cool prothesis 3D printed by university students, but most news are bad because... it somehow looks more credible.

I mean, for example, the news in the USSR and other communist countries reported only about good news in their own countries, lots of steel being produced, a new satellite being launched etc, while reporting only about what's bad in capitalist countries, and people didn't believe it anymore and turned to alternative news sources, like listening to West German radios for citizens of the GDR.

[K]

[David]

Is it better for someone to have cancer or to not have cancer?
Is it better to be dying of starvation, or to have enough food to eat?
Is it better to hide your sexual orientation out of shame or fear of violence and imprisonment, or to be accepted by society?
Is it better to be beaten and made to work for nothing as somebody else’s property, or to live as a free citizen?

Do we need a moral law to understand any of these questions? Aren’t the answers, rather, wholly self-evident without the need for any other supporting edifices? These are, I’d argue, all fairly clear examples of objective benefit (though I would be interested to hear arguments to the contrary about any or all of them).

Let’s try to think of a counterargument: say, that the persecution of LGBT people is a smaller harm that is necessary in order to ensure the rigorous enforcement of traditional relationships, the advancement of which makes society stronger and happier. Many arguments like this were aired during the same-sex marriage debate (and held as de facto positions by many in the years when homosexuality was still pathologised and criminalised). But if you look closely, you’ll notice that almost all of these were consequentalist rather than moral arguments: opponents of same-sex marriage needed to argue that changing the law would make society worse in some objectively measurable way.

A moral argument, by comparison, would have been “same-sex marriage is wrong because homosexuality is inherently immoral”. That, to me, is what morality is all about: claims of fundamental right or wrong that need no further justification, perhaps because they are ordained by God, the universe or “the laws of nature”. To me, that’s a primitive way of thinking. All that really matters are consequences. And what is consequence but mere cause and effect? These are matters of fact, not morality.

Of course we all have different views on what should be, just as different political parties have conflicting ideas on what’s best for the economy, or how to maximise the efficiency of production, or whether invading other countries is necessary in order to prevent greater harm. But I’d argue that these can all be thought of (and, indeed, are generally discussed in terms of) consequence, not morality. If we’re talking about maximising functionality, the question is this: what, exactly, is society’s function?

[K]

Your opening questions aren't well defined without a Moral Law. Saying the answers are "wholly self-evident" is just assuming a Moral Law. To argue against the existence of a Moral Law is to claim that these questions make no sense, that they have no intrinsic meaning.

"All that really matters are consequences," you write, but whether those consequences are "good" or "bad" --- or "better" or "worse" --- constitutes a Moral Law, even if you don't call it that, even if you prefer to call it "objective benefit". The consequence of having no food for sufficiently long is starvation. What is it that makes you claim that starvation is "bad"?

"These are matters of fact, not morality," you write, but morality is not defined to be unfactual. That's precisely the question: is there an objective (i.e. factual) Moral Law? You've assumed a conclusion in your argument for that conclusion. (The Moral Law has been called other things. Perhaps we should use those other terms, because the words "moral" and "immoral" so frequently are used with specific connotations.)


The question is whether this objective Moral Law exists, not whether humanity agrees on it perfectly, knows it perfectly, or follows it perfectly. (Surely, we don't.) It is true that some sort of anthropological universality has been claimed as support for the existence of the Moral Law; whether that's a good claim and good supporting evidence is a separate question.