MereChristianity: "The Reality of the Law "

3. The Reality of the Law

    

     I now  go  back to  what I  said at the end  of the first chapter, that

there  were two odd things  about  the human  race. First,  that  they  were

haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought  to practise, what you

might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second,

that they did not in fact do so.  Now  some of you  may  wonder why I called

this  odd. It  may  seem  to you  the most  natural  thing  in the world. In

particular, you may have thought I was rather  hard on the human race. After

all, you  may  say, what  I call breaking the Law  of Right  and Wrong or of

Nature, only means that people are  not perfect.  And why  on earth should I

expect them to be? That would be a good answer if what  I was  trying to  do

was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving  as

we  expect  others to behave.  But  that  is not  my  job at  all. I am  not

concerned at present  with  blame; I am trying  to find out  truth. And from

that point  of view the very  idea  of something being imperfect, of its not

being what it ought to be, has certain consequences.

     If you take a thing  like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there

seems no sense in saying it ought to have  been otherwise. Of course you may

say a stone is  "the wrong  shape" if  you want to use it for a  rockery, or

that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give  you as much shade as you

expected. But all you  mean is that the  stone or tree does not happen to be

convenient for  some purpose of  your own.  You  are not,  except as a joke,

blaming  them for that. You  really  know, that,  given the weather  and the

soil, the tree could not have been any different. What we, from our point of

view, call a "bad" tree is obeying  the laws of its nature just as much as a

"good" one.

     Now have you noticed what follows? It follows that what we usually call

the  laws  of nature-the  way  weather works on a tree for  example-may  not

really be laws  in  the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking. When

you say that  falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this

much the same as saying that the law only means "what stones always do"? You

do not really think that when a stone is  let go, it suddenly remembers that

it is under orders to fall to  the  ground.  You only mean that, in fact, it

does fall.  In other  words, you  cannot be sure that there is anything over

and  above the facts  themselves, any  law about  what  ought to happen,  as

distinct from what does happen. The laws  of nature, as applied to stones or

trees, may  only mean "what Nature, in fact, does."  But if  you turn to the

Law of Human Nature, the  Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter.

That law certainly does not mean "what  human beings, in fact, do"; for as I

said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey

it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them;

but  the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings  ought to do and do

not. In  other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes

in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave)

and you also have something else (how  they ought to behave). In the rest of

the  universe  there  need not  be  anything but the  facts.  Electrons  and

molecules behave in a certain way,  and certain results follow, and that may

be the whole story. (*) But  men behave in a certain way and that is not the

whole  story,  for  all  the  time  you  know  that  they  ought  to  behave

differently.

     ----

     [*] I do not think it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean

that, as far ax the argument has gone up to date, it may be.

     ----

     Now this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it

away. For instance, we might try to  make out that when you say  a man ought

not  to act as he does, you only mean the same  as when you say that a stone

is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient

to you. But  that  is simply untrue. A man occupying the  corner seat in the

train because he got there first, and  a  man who slipped  into it  while my

back was  turned and removed  my bag, are both equally  inconvenient. But  I

blame the  second  man and  do  not blame  the first. I am not  angry-except

perhaps for a moment  before I come to my senses-with  a man who trips me up

by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up  even  if he does

not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not. Sometimes the

behaviour  which I  call bad is not inconvenient to me  at all, but the very

opposite. In  war,  each  side may  find a  traitor  on the other side  very

useful. But though they use him and pay him they regard him as human vermin.

So you cannot say that what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the

behaviour that happens to  be useful to us. And  as for decent  behaviour in

ourselves,  I  suppose  it  is  pretty obvious  that it does  not  mean  the

behaviour  that  pays.  It means  things  like  being  content  with  thirty

shillings when you might have got three pounds,  doing school  work honestly

when it would be easy to cheat,  leaving a girl alone when you would like to

make love to  her, staying in  dangerous places when you could  go somewhere

safer, keeping promises  you would rather not  keep, and  telling  the truth

even when it makes you look a fool.

     Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each

particular  person  at a particular  moment,  still,  it means what pays the

human race as a whole; and that consequently there  is no mystery about  it.

Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real

safety or happiness except in a  society  where every one plays fair, and it

is because  they see this that  they try to behave decently. Now, of course,

it  is  perfectly  true  that  safety  and  happiness  can  only  come  from

individuals, classes, and  nations being honest and fair  and  kind  to each

other. It  is  one  of  the  most important truths in  the world.  But as an

explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the

point If we ask: "Why ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is

good for society," we may  then  ask, "Why  should  I  care what's  good for

society except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have

to say, "Because  you ought to  be unselfish"-which simply brings us back to

where we started. You are  saying what is true, but you are  not getting any

further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not

be much good saying "in order to  score goals," for trying to score goals is

the game itself, not  the reason for the game, and you would really  only be

saying that football was football-which is true,  but not worth  saying.  In

the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no

good replying, "in order to benefit society," for trying to benefit society,

in  other words  being unselfish (for "society" after all only  means "other

people"), is one of the  things  decent behaviour consists in; all  you  are

really saying is that decent behaviour  is  decent behaviour. You would have

said just  as much if you had stopped at  the  statement, "Men  ought to  be

unselfish."

     And that  is  where  I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish,  ought to be

fair. Not  that men are  unselfish, nor that  they like being unselfish, but

that  they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply

a fact about human behaviour in the same way  as the Law of  Gravitation is,

or may be, simply  a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand,

it  is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most  of the

things we say  and think about men would be reduced  to  nonsense if we did.

And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men  to behave for

our own convenience; for the behaviour we call bad or  unfair is not exactly

the  same  as the  behaviour  we  find  inconvenient, and  may  even  be the

opposite. Consequently,  this  Rule  of Right and  Wrong,  or  Law  of Human

Nature, or whatever you  call  it, must somehow or other be a  real thing- a

thing  that is  really there, not made up by  ourselves. And yet it is not a

fact in the ordinary sense, in the  same way as  our  actual  behaviour is a

fact. 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  behaviour, and yet quite definitely

real-a real law, which none of as made, but which we find pressing on us.