Maybe he should also stop “flaunting” HIS ATHLETIC SKILLS as well, drawing attention to himself apart from his team, and setting himself up for the mass public adulation of EVERYBODY…

You are quibbling over a trivial side issue (again), cl. I see no reason to waste any more space on this (unless anyone else has any observations they would care to make).

The other possibility would be that he is merely playing devil’s advocate: “If you think that one morality is better than another, then you must think there is some Real standard of morality.” In 0ther words, he’s not agreeing that he thinks we’ve made moral progress, or that one morality can be better than another, he’s just saying if all y’all liberal types want to say that, then you have to agree that Moral Law really exists. Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality. Oops.

From that, it does not follow that “Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality,” as you claim. It would only follow that neither “Christian morality” nor “Nazi morality” are equivalent to “Real morality,” but that is not logically equivalent to “Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality.”

Do you see what I’m saying?

I think he’s playing to his base here. This is the common thread that the Abrahamic religions have, “You are with us or against us.”

This is, in their view, the Absolute Moral Standard by which they condemn atheists, gays and Muslims.

Lewis likely feels that he is cloaking this overview in this worst-case scenario, “What if the ENEMY were supernatural?”.

I wonder if cl would imagine Lewis being affronted by the notion that his sacred morality is reducible to a childish ‘with-us-or-against-us’ paradigm. I suspect he would. And would not speechless affront be a suitable rebuttal…(hehe)

The moral of the story, if you will, is that we humans have an incredible capacity to rationalize and compartmentalize our behavior. I think this applies to all of us, and it’s one of the reasons why if you want to live “a moral life” it requires that you keep your antennae out and continually reevaluate your own behavior — because we can so easily trick ourselves into believing we’re acting correctly when we ain’t. I remember hearing of a priest who was interviewed about having sexual liaisons with mistresses and was asked why he didn’t divorce his wife (he was Eastern Orthodox, I guess). He answered that the Church would forbid it. So here’s this guy living in total moral contradiction, yet somehow he’s making it fly in spite of the cognitive dissonance. The most extreme example here is the Nazi Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders hit upon the “final solution.” They didn’t propose it as a means to go down in history as monstrous mass murderers. They thought they were doing the morally courageous thing and would be remembered for a thousand years for their heroic decision. Such is our capacity to entertain moral insanity and actually convince ourselves that it is really doing the right thing.

Excellently said. If I might add, without the burden of having to actually work at developing a consistent morality, holding one’s self to that morality, and spending countless hours studying the world to help avoid making mistakes about what is real and what isn’t.

These are difficult things. Being moral is a chore.

Just my, probably unwelcome, two cents.

Oh, wait a second, my irony metre is spinning.

I believe what cl meant is that he did not intend his original comment as a rebuttal, but merely as an “attempt to understand.” This would be consistent with the tactics he has employed in the past, where he has studiously avoided committing himself to anything as openly declarative as a rebuttal, preferring instead to insinuate that the unbeliever’s point is somehow incoherent. Hence the (possibly feigned) inability to understand.

cl -

My point is one of elementary logic. Lewis is making the claim that “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either.” He uses this to argue that Real Morality must exist independently of the two moralities you are comparing, i.e. that neither of the two moralities being compared is Real Morality.

This creates two classes of morality: the “comparable moralities,” which can be compared to one another, and Real Morality, which none of the comparable moralities are (because if you could compare anything to Real Morality, that would falsify Lewis’ claim that “the standard that measures two things is something different from either”).

At this point, then, Christian morality must either be one of the comparable moralities (i.e. one of the moralities that can be compared to other moralities), or it must be Real Morality. If it is Real Morality, then you cannot compare it to any other morality, because of Lewis’ arbitrary requirement that the standard has to be different than the things being compared. If you claim that Christian morality is better than Nazi morality, you are making a comparison, thus (by Lewis’ argument) putting it into the comparable moralities category, rather than the Real Morality category.

The real flaw, of course, is Lewis’ arbitrary and erroneous assumption that the standard must be something different than the two things you are comparing. That’s clearly wrong, since it leaves you with no means of measuring anything: you can’t compare anything to the standard itself!

Trouble is, without that assumption, Lewis’ argument falls apart, because he’s trying to prove that moral progress (i.e. modern vs ancient morality) implies the independent existence of some Real Morality, distinctly different from each of the moralities you’re comparing. He’s trying to force the facts to fit his pet theory, and they don’t want to fit, and he ends up making arguments based on false and arbitrary assumptions.

You said this:-

“Do you think Lewis would call those “kinds of morality,” or the absence thereof? I suspect the latter. I think that would be a suitable rebuttal..”

I responded to the first two sentences, your second agreeing with your appraisal of Lewis’ proposed interpretation.

Now you say that, no, ” Trying to understand somebody is not the same thing as a rebuttal.”

What kind of ‘shell game’ are you playing here? What a joke you are cl, with your notion that you can talk your way around anything.

You’re not ‘rebutting’, no. YOU are just saying that that might be a suitable rebuttal for Lewis to have made.

But it wouldn’t have now, would it?
There is no way that Lewis could say that morality as described in the Bible(some of which some modern day Christians still subscribe to), is any less an attempt at that Absolute Morality which he is trying to impress upon us now, right?

DD,

Well, now I’m even more confused. These are the main parts that are still not making sense:

Lewis has very nearly declared that Christian morality is not Real Morality, and can thus be improved upon.

Presuming that he wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, how so?

The other possibility would be that he is merely playing devil’s advocate: “If you think that one morality is better than another, then you must think there is some Real standard of morality.” In 0ther words, he’s not agreeing that he thinks we’ve made moral progress, or that one morality can be better than another, he’s just saying if all y’all liberal types want to say that, then you have to agree that Moral Law really exists. Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality. Oops.

How does the argument that a Moral Law really exists imply that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality?

This ‘rebuttal’ of yours, cl, seems to be making Deacon Duncan’s point while missing Lewis’ point entirely.

That was pretty much the thought that hit me as I read cl’s comment.

This is SOOO beside the point. Lewis is saying that he thinks that we all have some kind of mysterious knowledge of some absolute morality and is suggesting that our feeble attempts to follow it are reflected in the differing moralities of various groups in different locales and/or at different times.

This ‘rebuttal’ of yours, cl, seems to be making Deacon Duncan’s point while missing Lewis’ point entirely.

Regarding your first question, I can’t say for sure, but I’d be rather surprised if Lewis agreed that the Bible verses I linked to were instances of God telling His people to do something immoral.

Regarding your second question, I believe today’s morals are better than the primitive morals of the Old Testament (and even the New Testament) on the basis of my own personal opinion (which I expect many of my readers to share), and on the basis of an objective evaluation of the outcomes, e.g. by no longer forbidding women to exercise authority over men, we are no longer depriving ourselves of a number of capable leaders.

Lewis’ mistake is that he assumes that morality is drawn from some kind of propositional declaration of what Right and Wrong must be. I do not make that same mistake because I openly acknowledge the fact that one’s perception of Right and Wrong may vary based on circumstances, to the point that the same thing may be Right to one party at the same time as it is Wrong to another. If Lewis’ assumption were true, this would not be possible; either one or the other would have to be mistaken about whether the thing were right or wrong.

You, of course, are free to define your own moral standards differently, but of course if you do so you are also demonstrating the fallacy of Lewis’ assumptions, just as I am.

As for the idea that Christianity is merely an approximation of Real Morality, I think that poses some problems, since it suggests that Jesus’ moral teachings could have been improved upon. Then again, the bigger problem is that there is no Real Morality for Christianity to be an approximation of, so perhaps that’s a moot point.

And finally, if Lewis is not agreeing that moral progress can be made, or that one morality can be compared to another, and is only proposing the argument as a Devil’s Advocate stumper for liberals, then obviously he can’t say that Christian morality is better than Nazi morality, because that would be comparing one morality to another. But the alternative is for him to admit that Christian morality is not Real Morality, which means we can improve on Jesus’ teachings. About time too.

That’s a rather un-mathematical assessment. “Not very great”? In whose opinion?

I agree. I also agree that we need more than opinion to justify our claims.

It seems to me that that the kind of morality that condones selling your daughters for sexual purposes, mutilating the genitals of babies, and committing acts of genocide, is very different from the kind of morality that finds these things abhorrent.

Do you think Lewis would call those “kinds of morality,” or the absence thereof? I suspect the latter. I think that would be a suitable rebuttal to the “morality as convention” argument you appear to be implying [correct me if I've misread you].

What he ought to have noticed, had he been willing to look, is that our moral standards are not merely different today than they were in ancient times, they’re better.

Better? In whose opinion? Aren’t you committing the very same error you criticized Lewis for? It sounds like all you are really saying is, “I know moral conventions are better now, and I hereby declare it so.” You rightfully criticize Lewis for lack of thoroughness, but, where is the objective standard that would allow us to measure your claim?

…sometimes, what [experience] teaches us is that certain situations don’t have a simple, clear-cut distinction between right and wrong.

I agree.

I can’t help but think that Lewis would object here, and would try to deny that Christian morality is different from Real Morality, but that’s the thrust of his argument.

It seems to me that Lewis is arguing that Christian morality is the best approximation of “Real Morality.”

Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality.

I don’t see that it does. How did you get to that conclusion?

But, like Lewis evidently, he also believed that morality was closely analogous to arithmetic: its development happens in the normal course of growing up and interacting with others, and a lot of heavy-handed adult coercion can only stunt and distort that development, and ultimately make the subject much more difficult and intimidating than it ought to be.

I think that this is a bit of word-magic here. We DO learn our local conventions at home and at school but that, in itself does not make them equivalent to arithmetic, simply because we learn arithmetic at home and at school also.

It IS a very sly comparison that seems very reasonable on the surface. It’s the kind of word-magic that will be quickly deemed a matter of opinion to avoid being examined in any detail and the argument will be ‘moved on’ by an astute religionist. It’s what they do.

Seems Mr. Lewis’ style of winning arguements against opponents largely by virtue of their inability to re-rebut is similar to the last guys you took apart.

If Lewis is talking to Christians, and wanted to be honest, he might as well say, “Non-theists have a different opinion, but we theists know that they are wrong!”, rather than pretend to fully examine any specific thing a non-theist may retort and doing such a bad job of counter-argument.

Christians can’t even assert that in the first place, since their God supposedly acts in a nakedly malevolent fashion to begin with, in the sense of creating many people whom he has every intention of torturing for all eternity for reasons beyond their control.

Most of them are “divine commanders,” believers in divine command theory, which is really the only way out of the Euthyphro dilemma. If morals come from God, then they are either arbitrary in the edict of God, or God derived them from a yet higher principle. The latter is a contradiction to omnipotence; the former is a concession to the idea that whatever God says is “good” and whatever else is “bad.” You aren’t even really left with the option to say that God will act benevolently because that is his nature. That is itself a stipulation on the nature of God, and he doesn’t have any. You’re left with the rather unattractive picture of a cosmic totalitarian and his abject subjects.

Lewis claims that the Moral Law is superior because it is universal and supercedes our instincts. It feels like the Right Thing To Do, no matter what our instincts say. But by what standard does he judge universal traits or instinct-superceding actions to be more moral than other kinds? Why are things that feel like the Right Thing To Do actually the right thing to do, and by what moral standard did he make that judgement?

The moral argument presents a dilemma to non-believers: explain where morality comes from and why it is truly moral. What believers miss is that the dilemma presents itself right back: explain why God’s morality is truly moral; show your work. They never do.

The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the sticks of one people and another, do you think that the sticks of one people is ever longer or shorter than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any stick progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of sticks were longer or thicker than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized sticks to savage sticks, or Christian sticks to Nazi sticks… The moment you say that one set of sticks can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Stick, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Length, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Length than others.

Lewis here, is setting the stage for this by telling us to believe that there IS a Moral Law that tells us what the right thing to do is.

I think that Lewis is deliberately over-simplifying this, not very common, ‘self-preservation’ vs. ‘urge to help scenario.’

How much more common is ‘the urge to have more stuff’ vs. ‘the urge to not rip others off’ scenario played out every day?

And this, all too often, turns into a ‘rip the other guy off and rationalize the hell out of it later’ scenario.

Another thing is that saving the life of another is not necessarily something OTHER than instinct overriding the instinct for self-preservation. There are other instincts that involve preservation of fellow human beings as well (collective self-preservation). This doesn’t necessarily have to do with a conscience or guilt at all.

AND not only that, but there are MANY instances of animals saving the lives and caring for other animals, human beings included.

This hasn’t been my experience of how morality operates, except for basic notions about survival. Usually you can shame a person into admitting that killing is wrong, unless conditions are such that both of you agree it might be warranted. Further out on the leafy branches of the tree of morality things are less clear. There are a significant number of people in the US (and unfortunately other countries too) who think that women’s suffrage is an evil thing. I’ve contested them on their own blogs, and I can tell you that they really believe this. It’s not that their instinct to disenfranchise women has somehow overridden an inner voice telling them to treat human being equally.

This might not be a problem if everyone innately and fundamentally believed that it is the righteous male role to dominate submissive women, but it isn’t. Quite a few women disagree fervently (sadly, not all), as do quite a few men.

So the situation is this. For fundamental moral truths, a developmental paradigm appears to fit the human consensus. Everyone seems to agree about things like murder, rape and torture (well, almost). Where morality requires higher cognition there exists wild disparity, yet surely if there is one moral law, there should be consensus there as well.

Of course, Lewis has a trick up his sleeve here. The inner voice is split between God and Satan, whispering in either ear.

Humans think in both near and far mode. But near and far mode often contradict each other, or are internally contradictory. We still have no good way of discerning which impulse is “right”; we just use them in different situations. It doesn’t help that far mode, from which we often pronounce high moral judgements on lowly others, is often more hypocritical.

To make matters worse, what we often think of as moral and good social behavior–cooperation with others, self-sacrifice, empathy–are often combined with our other evolved instincts to do very, very evil things. Because we tend to have an insider-outsider bias, and a generalized love for our fellow man only in far mode, empathy can be very dangerous. This is what happens when we all band together as a society to vote policies that protect rich American workers at the expense of poor Chinese workers, or to protect America’s “security” by torturing Arabs. Our insider instinct is so strong that people can genuinely write, without a hint of irony, that, “An icy indifference as to whether one’s countrymen are winning—be it in a competition for jobs or Olympic medals—is moral treason and the mark of a dead soul.” But indifference to foreigners is hunky dory and the mark of the spiritually righteous! Gotcha!

To be fair, I haven’t read Mere Christianity, so I don’t know if Lewis addresses this problem later, but it seems like a big problem for the Law of Nature: we are programmed en masses to be completely indifferent if not downright agonizing to the welfare of outsiders, and we use so-called “moral” tools such as empathy and cooperation to enforce this atrocity of thought on innocent people. Moreover most people think this is the moral thing to do and that not participating in Two Minutes Hate is a moral outrage.

In today’s segment, you mention: “The rightness or wrongness of the behavior is determined by the consequences of that behavior, not by some arbitrary rule that declares “Thus always shalt thou do.””

I don’t think that the rightness or wrongness is necessarily related to the outcome. For example, trying to save someone may or may not succeed. Even if everything looked easy and safe, you may both still be killed. How would you know beforehand? Was it (with hindsight) wrong to try to save someone?

Or say you cheat on your tax return, and you get away with it. Does that make it right?

People who think for themselves can work out on their own what’s correct. Even if they say they’re just playing the system, deep down, I believe we all know. That moral code has grown as we have grown – shaped by the forces of society, not by some ceiling cat laying down the law (and punishing people – later – if they screw up).

We might expect a professional life-saver to react differently than someone who has absolutely no training in any particular hypothetical situation.

Forrest Gump saving half his squad in an effort to save Bubba, comes to mind.

Wonder how many get saved by people who are too stupid or ignorant to know that they’re attempting the almost impossible, compared to people being saved by those who can properly assess the risk?

And what of the risk of losing face?(a mother would, in hind-sight, gladly risk the lives of a battalion of men to the attempt to save her child.)

I think Lewis is counting on people agreeing with him, coming down hard on the Godly Moral side, because otherwise it’s just ‘chance’.(If only men with the proper equipment had been there etc.)

This gives Lewis lots of ‘goalpost moving’ room once he has re-established the Christian view to his own satisfaction.

Of course he is right that all Christians would agree that there IS the Moral Authority that he is claiming, I think that he is being a bit sneaky implying that it’s coming from some basic natural observations and NOT just some basic Christian doctrine.

I say this because I’ve noted several Christians who openly state they converted because “there is evil in the world.”

It’s an interesting form of rhetorical ju-jitsu, for sure. You take religion’s greatest unresolvable problem (the famed Problem of Evil), and turn it into a strength.

It works as long as you don’t examine your own biases.

I would say, on the basis of personal experience, there are definitely people who convert based on thoughts like those, I was one. At the time I converted, around age 20, I found a lot of things in my life really unsatisfying, and Christianity offered a complete package to deal with them, answers for everything. I suspect I had other things more pressing to be unsatisfied about than the evil in the world, as do a lot of people at that age (girls, loneliness, college!!!). Don’t mean to compare my experience to CS Lewis’, but I do think thoughts like those can be a significant influence in conversion. Face it, most people don’t think through things that well, and the younger we are the less well we tend to do it.

They’ll tell you to look at how wonderful the universe is, look how wonderful life is, look how wonderful humans are. Therefore GOD!

Not impressed?

Okay, look how rotten humans are. But we can’t not KNOW that we’re rotten, can we? And there HAS TO BE a way out, a way to escape our basic rottenness. Therefore GOD!

“BINGO! We ‘got you’ coming and going!”

I’d be willing to bet that food taste has been used as an argument for God

Not quite that — rather, something nearer to a reductio ad absurdum, but see http://www.uvm.edu/~dloeb/GR.pdf .

Phh. Lewis has got you covered, there. “I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean.” The difference between a society that values slavery and that abhors it is really very slight, when you think about it, especially when you consider how alike those societies are in their hatred of loose women. It’s quite obvious that God puts our priorities in the right place, and that we all share a “mere morality” that just happens not to have anything to do with being nice to each other.

Really, this strikes me as special pleading. The same as “all Christianity is the same if I define Christianity as the things the largest sects agree on”, he’s now defined this moral law as “the things everybody I can think of right now agrees are immoral, if I don’t ask any women or black folk. Therefore, it must be from God!” Unfalsifiable hypothesis, anyone?

I doubt that many of us got lessons in Sunday School about proper etiquette while on a raiding party in World of Warcraft, but be greedy and grab the best loot a few times and see how long it takes you to learn moral lessons about the social consequences of online behavior.

I find it kinda funny you mention that, because this study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (kinda summarized informally here), and it basically provides empirical evidence for your point: the authors found that relational networks of people tend to avoid stress-causing relationships (“if you make my life harder, I’m going to go somewhere else” – obvious, but heretofore lacking in evidence), which leads to a more stable overall society.

Basically, a very simple, animal-like response (stress avoidance) leads to stable societies. It’s super cool.

It’s too bad Lewis never tried to explain how his notion of moral law applies to these situations. Of course, it would be a problem for him to admit that, rather than being bound by one shared understanding common to all cultures, humanity’s moral understanding has been improving and growing over time.

“Even though inter-tribal peace will mean the demise of these indigenous people, the author blindly pushes three tribes to join (by taking children away from their own mothers as gifts to the other tribes). I am SURE Don Richardson wouldn’t have given away his OWN children for that end… or would he? And now what do you have? One giant tribe of warring people with modern axes and antibiotics that is fully capable of killing all the OTHER tribes in the area more effectively than ever before. And the author thinks he has done a ‘good’ thing.”

Granted, the Sawi culture was based on treachery and deceit, but it was their culture, not ours. Is ours better? Maybe. Was it Don Richardson’s job to tamper in that culture? I would say no. He even used Sawi tactics to get the 3 main tribes in the region to unite, hence the title of the book.

Lewis is saying that there is a universal morality. How is it universal then that when certain cultures, locked away from “civilization” and left to their own regional contexts, don’t evolve in the same way as others? If God showed up in real life couldn’t he take care of this discrepancy?

I wish you could address this subject in the future. I am a Star Trek fan also and Gene Roddenberry’s Prime Directive of non-interference has always fascinated me. I think the Richardson’s incursion in to New Guinea and forcing the Sawi to accept the Christian belief system might have done more harm than good to that area of the world.