Natural Law

In the beginning of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis carefully puts forth the concept of natural law. Natural Law is the transcendent moral sense that all men have inside them. Lewis tries to prove that the natural law exists by appealing to his readers own feeling and experience. As he says about the reasons appealed to in an argument, “Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.” When we argue, we always are trying to prove we are right, which requires that there is a right and wrong that we both agree exists. Lewis compares it to soccer, saying “there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.” This basic agreement on right and wrong is universal, crossing cultural and epochal barriers.

Lewis also points out that when we normally refer to the laws of nature, we mean scientific laws. A modern would say that newtons laws were the natural law, and our moral sense would be thought of as something completely different. Lewis argues that just as physical bodies have laws, our minds have laws as well. There is two great difference between the two laws, and one is “that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.” The idea that we could choose to disobey a scientific law is ludicrous, but we disobey the moral law all the time. The other difference, which Lewis does not touch upon explicitly, is that we can imagine a world that had different scientific laws, but not a different moral law. Think of Peter Pan, the fact that he can fly, and others the ability to fly goes against all scientific knowledge, but can all imagine it happening to us. If, however, Peter had been a coward and betrayed his friends and that made him good and a hero, we would find the story absurd because we can not actually imagine a world where that would be a good thing. Scientific laws are unbreakable, but not necessary. The moral law is breakable, but transcendent and unavoidable.