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.
