Chapter 2: Still not doing well

Just a quick follow up. Having read chapter 2, Lewis is not doing much better. This chapter discusses "Some Objections" to his previous chapter. (I guess I'm not the only one then.) First, he tries to distinguish morality from 'instinct', which is all well and good. But then he confuses the issue by calling things like 'patriotism' and instinct. Interestingly, he then states that following these sort of drives as absolutes would lead to disaster, which again I'd agree with. But his argument that (pseudo)universal values systems (i.e. morals) are somehow other than these instincts (such as patriotism) are weak indeed, and effectively boil down to just a simple axiomatic statement, disguised underneath some frankly ill-advised metaphors.

We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.

Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.

What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.