Moral Law

We said that we have a universal idea of right and wrong in our last post. However, there are at least two understandable objections.

Firstly, we see that people do not have the same standard of morality. People from different societies with different cultures can have different moral standards. They do not always agree with each other. In fact, people of different ages can have different views of what is right and wrong even if they live in the same society with the same background.

The differences between moralities of people from different cultures, such as that between ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, are actually not as big as we might think. People may not agree on whom you ought to be unselfish to – whether it was your family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. However, they all agree that complete selfishness is not admirable. As another example, we know that some cultures may say that a man can have just one wife, but some other cultures may say a man can have four. However, they all agree that a man cannot just casually have any woman he likes.

Another objection to the idea of universal morality is that morality is just part of basic human instinct. It is developed just like our other instincts such as motherly love, sexual instinct, or the instinct of food. Therefore, it is a result of Evolution that helps the human race to survive.

Suppose we hear a cry for help from a man who seems to be in danger. Out of our herd instinct, we have an impulse to help this man out of danger. Yet, another instinct of ours, the instinct for self-preservation, makes us aware of the possible danger that we may get ourselves into if we go out to help this stranger. Both instincts are working. We have an impulse to help the man, and we also have an impulse to ignore the cry for help or even run away from possible dangers. However, irrespective of our final decision, I think it is fair to say that there is actually a third impulse on the stage. It is the impulse that tells us that we should help the man in danger and suppress the impulse of running away. It is this third impulse that illustrates the universal morality of all humans.

Some people are very pessimistic about human nature, while others are not. No matter how we feel about the people around us, it is clear that we as humans do share a common grand standard of morality. Some people may feel that all humans are declining, and morality is getting irrelevant. However, isn’t such pessimism an indication of our inborn knowledge of morality?

For disclosure, many of the examples and also the main idea of the universal morality of humans I discussed in this and the previous post come from the book “Mere Christianity” written by the late theologian and literary scholar C. S. Lewis. He called the universal morality as “The Moral Law” in his book.