Subjectivism

In The Poison of Subjectivism, C. S. Lewis argues against the delegitimization of traditional moral understanding. The root of this is, he says, the contention that reason is not valid. Practical reason, or moral judgments is mostly what Lewis is interested in. He argues that either one can have a absolute, rational morality, or none at all.

Lewis states that through out history, morality has always consisted of reason controlling the passions. This has changed. “The modern view is very different. It does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another.” This is completely different from the Aristotelian mean, or Kantian categorical imperative, let alone traditional christian understanding. The idea that moral judgments are nothing more than cultural products is a complete break from the main stream of western thought.

There are consequences of this departure. The most obvious one is that it is impossible to criticize any other culture. If morality is a product of culture, than one can no more say that it is wrong than to say that the dress or music of a society is wrong. Lewis uses an arresting example, “Everyone is indignant when he hears the Germans define justice as that which is to the interest of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will.” He continues, “If "good" and "better" are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another.” Virtue can be nothing more than a fashion, which one can change whenever it suits, but cannot be said to progress in any meaningful sense.

Lewis sums up our position masterfully; “Either the maxims of traditional morality must be accepted as axioms of practical reason which neither admit nor require argument to support them and not to "see" which is to have lost human status; or else there are no values at all, what we mistook for values being "projections" of irrational emotions.” We either can accept natural law, or reject it and say nothing on the subject, because nothing can be said.