A primer on moral law, with reference to same-sex marriage.

shall begin where I did ear­li­er, with the open­ing sen­tence of Book II of Aris­totle’s Physics [1]: “Of things that exist, some exist by nature, and some from oth­er caus­es.” With the help of Aquinas, we may amend that to read, “Of things that exist, some owe their exis­tence to God, and some to oth­er caus­es.” That is the begin­ning of all right rea­son. And if it applies to the ques­tion of Rights, as I argued in the first part, it applies no less to the moral law. No one, I expect, would argue that Aris­totle’s words apply to only tan­gi­ble things. Rights, though intan­gi­ble, exist; for that is how peo­ple talk about them. Peo­ple talk as though intel­lect, and love, and rea­son, and log­ic, and free­dom do exist, and do mat­ter, in a much more pro­found way than a world of tan­gi­ble things. Where­fore, that is how we should speak of the moral law, too, and whence it derives.

C.S. LEWIS AND THE REALITY OF THE MORAL LAW

With that in mind, let us turn to how C.S. Lewis estab­lish­es the real­i­ty of the moral law, in the open­ing para­graphs of Mere Chris­tian­i­ty [2]:

Every one has heard peo­ple quar­relling. Some­times it sounds fun­ny and some­times it sounds mere­ly unpleas­ant; but how­ev­er it sounds, I believe we can learn some­thing very impor­tant from lis­ten­ing to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if any­one did the same to you?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—‘Why should you shove in first?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’—‘Come on, you promised.’ Peo­ple say things like that every day, edu­cat­ed peo­ple as well as une­d­u­cat­ed, and chil­dren as well as grown-ups.

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. He pre­tends that there is some spe­cial rea­son in this par­tic­u­lar case why the per­son who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite dif­fer­ent when he was giv­en the bit of orange, or that some­thing has turned up which lets him off keep­ing his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both par­ties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behav­iour or moral­i­ty or what­ev­er you like to call it, about which they real­ly agreed. … And there would be no sense in try­ing to do that unless you and he had some sort of agree­ment as to what Right and Wrong are. (Lewis 3–4)

That is so brief, so decep­tive­ly sim­ple, that we are like­ly to miss all that Lewis has accom­plished in just over 300 words. With a sin­gle, every­day example—which all of us have witnessed—he demol­ish­es the notion that stan­dards of right and wrong are rel­a­tive. The rea­son he demol­ish­es it is because no one believes it. A lot of peo­ple think they do; a lot of peo­ple say, “Oh, why should I fol­low your standard?”—at least when it comes to a point in the moral law that is incon­ve­nient or dif­fi­cult. But at the same time, they have all sorts of moral stan­dards that they expect every­one else to know and fol­low. Ask a rel­a­tivist whether you should be free to push some­one over a bridge because of the col­or of his skin; after all, why should you have to fol­low some oth­er man’s moral law? Lis­ten to the answer you’ll get. All of a sud­den the “rel­a­tivist” believes in a stan­dard that applies to every­one.

To return to Lewis:

What was the sense in say­ing the ene­my [dur­ing World War II] were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bot­tom knew as well as we did and ought to have prac­tised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair. [3] (Lewis 5)

If moral good and evil are no more than rel­a­tive stan­dards that dif­fer from time to time and place to place, then ask the rel­a­tivist to explain why slav­ery or seg­re­ga­tion were wrong. Were these not just an expres­sion of the cul­ture of the South? Should they not have been left to die of their own accord, rather than both­er to fight a Civ­il War or launch a civ­il rights move­ment? Or ask the rel­a­tivist to explain why the Holo­caust was wrong. Was­n’t that just an expres­sion of Ger­man cul­ture in the thir­ties and for­ties? Why go to war to stop it? If moral right and wrong are mere­ly rel­a­tive stan­dards, what was going on at the Nurem­berg tri­als? Why was Adolf Eich­mann exe­cut­ed?

It is non­sen­si­cal to assume the Ger­mans did not know that geno­cide was wrong, just as it is non­sen­si­cal to assume the South did not know, at bot­tom, that slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion were wrong. For indeed, as Lewis points out, any points of dif­fer­ence between cul­tures in their moral under­stand­ing “have nev­er amount­ed to any­thing like a total dif­fer­ence. If any­one will take the trou­ble to com­pare the moral teach­ing of, say, the ancient Egyp­tians, Baby­lo­ni­ans, Hin­dus, Chi­nese, Greeks[,] and Romans, what will real­ly strike him will be how very like they are to each oth­er and to our own. … I need only ask the read­er to think what a total­ly dif­fer­ent moral­i­ty would mean. Think of a coun­try where peo­ple were real­ly admired for run­ning away in bat­tle, or where a man felt proud of dou­ble-cross­ing all the peo­ple who had been kind­est to him. You might just as well try to imag­ine a coun­try where two and two made five.” (Lewis 5–6)

I appre­ci­ate Lewis’s math anal­o­gy in the last sen­tence. The anal­o­gy has become some­thing of a cliché now, but the point of it is worth under­scor­ing: The claims of reli­gion and of moral­i­ty are truth claims, and as such they have as much real­i­ty stand­ing behind them as does a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion. It is impor­tant to empha­size that fact, because we have come to a point at which peo­ple don’t think of the ques­tion that way. Instead, peo­ple tend to think of reli­gious propo­si­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to sin, as though they were mere opin­ions that ought not to be imposed upon any­one else.

TED OLSON AND FALSE MORAL EQUIVALENCE

But it is worth not­ing that, when peo­ple want to argue in favor of same-sex mar­riage, many of the argu­ments they make are moral ones. To be sure, it is a false morality—or a true moral­i­ty misapplied—and I will show that at the prop­er time. But to see that the same-sex mar­riage pro­po­nent makes moral argu­ments, we may turn once more to Ted Olson’s op ed in Newsweek, “The Con­ser­v­a­tive Case for Gay Mar­riage.” Mr. Olson writes:

The expla­na­tion men­tioned most often [for keep­ing mar­riage between a man and woman] is tra­di­tion. But sim­ply because some­thing has always been done a cer­tain way does not mean that it must always remain that way. Oth­er­wise we would still have seg­re­gat­ed schools and debtors’ pris­ons. Gays and les­bians have always been among us, form­ing part of our soci­ety, and they have lived as cou­ples in neigh­bor­hoods and com­mu­ni­ties. For a long time, they have expe­ri­enced dis­crim­i­na­tion, and even per­se­cu­tion; but we, as a soci­ety, are start­ing to become more tol­er­ant, accept­ing, and under­stand­ing. … It there­fore seems anom­alous to cite “tra­di­tion” as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for with­hold­ing the sta­tus of mar­riage and thus to con­tin­ue to label those rela­tion­ships as less wor­thy, less sanc­tioned, or less legit­i­mate. (Olson 2)

The entire pas­sage is premised on false, and frankly offen­sive, comparisons—such as the sug­ges­tion that keep­ing mar­riage between a man and a woman is no dif­fer­ent than keep­ing a school seg­re­gat­ed. Or the sug­ges­tion that homo­sex­u­al peo­ple, by being denied mar­riage, are forced to live life in a type of debtors’ prison. These com­par­isons are not meant to describe real­i­ty, but instead to evoke emo­tions.  Does Mr. Olson real­ly mean to sug­gest that the Catholic Church, say, is on a par with George Wal­lace, or the vil­lain in a Dick­ens nov­el? This is not rea­son, but pathos.

I would also point out the faulty premise that, just because some things in soci­ety have changed, there­fore any­thing may be changed. In the con­text we are talk­ing about, it is par­tic­u­lar­ly faulty since, with respect to seg­re­ga­tion, change brought soci­ety clos­er to the moral law.  But with respect to same-sex mar­riage, change would take soci­ety fur­ther from it. Mr. Olson needs to explain why same-sex mar­riage is a moral good, which is in doubt; not that it is change, which no one doubts.  Change is not an inher­ent good, but its moral val­ue must be mea­sured against the nature of the change itself.  No one, I trust, would argue that we should re-intro­duce slav­ery because it would rep­re­sent change.  “Change” is a vac­u­ous polit­i­cal mantra; it is not a seri­ous argu­ment.

Under­ly­ing these false com­par­isons and errors in log­ic, how­ev­er, is an appeal to moral good—not the moral good of same-sex mar­riage, but instead the good of “tol­er­ance,” of “accep­tance,” of “under­stand­ing.” I would reply to Mr. Olson by say­ing that these virtues are not with­out lim­it; there is no “tol­er­ance,” no “accep­tance,” no “under­stand­ing” of sin. Com­pas­sion for peo­ple, yes, but none for immoral behav­ior; and Mr. Olson is beg­ging the ques­tion. Still, he does not say that all moral val­ues are false. Instead, he appeals to moral val­ues that he pre­sumes every­one to believe in, and attempts to per­suade soci­ety to accept same-sex mar­riage on the basis, not of its own val­ue, but oth­ers.

Thus the ques­tion of same-sex mar­riage does not involve the real­i­ty of the moral law. You can show in a mat­ter of sec­onds that no one believes in moral rel­a­tiv­i­ty, regard­less of whether he says he does. Not even Christo­pher Hitchens believed in moral rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Those who claim to believe in it prob­a­bly mean instead, “I don’t want to be both­ered with what you Chris­tians tell me I ought or ought not do.” But that’s dif­fer­ent. Behind every claim to moral rel­a­tiv­i­ty is some­one mak­ing an excuse, either for him­self or for some­one else. He knows the behav­ior in ques­tion is wrong, but is attached to it, or per­haps does not wish to make the nec­es­sary effort to cor­rect it. Per­haps he feels it would require too much effort. Or per­haps he does­n’t wish to give offense—which is the false moral sen­si­bil­i­ty of our age.

The real ques­tion is Aris­totle’s: Where does the moral law come from? Every­one, even lit­tle kids, knows instinc­tive­ly that it exists, and it requires the self-delu­sion of a sopho­more, or a philoso­pher, to deny it. But where does it come from? “There is a dif­fer­ence,” the philoso­pher Dou­glas Wil­son points out, “between know­ing the exis­tence of good and evil, and being able to give an account­ing of it” (~1:50–1:55). And here, as with the ques­tion of Rights, there are only two options: Either the moral law comes into exis­tence on its own, or it comes from God. And if it comes from God, we have to con­sid­er both the nature of who He is and the pur­pose for which he designed us.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE MORAL ARGUMENT FROM ABSENCE

As I said, Hitchens did not deny the exis­tence of moral­i­ty; indeed his argu­ment against Chris­tian­i­ty was that it is, in his judg­ment, immoral. So how does an athe­ist pro­mote him­self moral judge of reli­gion:  How does he explain the real­i­ty of a moral stan­dard apart from the reli­gion he seeks to den­i­grate? First, con­sid­er the fol­low­ing state­ment (part of Hitchen­s’s stan­dard exordi­um when in debate). Chris­tian­i­ty, he says, is immoral “by mak­ing love com­pul­so­ry, by say­ing that you must love. You must love your neigh­bor as your­self—some­thing you can’t actu­al­ly do. But you’ll always fall short so you can always be found guilty. … This is not men­tal­ly or moral­ly or intel­lec­tu­al­ly healthy.” (~2:00–2:25)

Note that Hitchens describes Chris­t­ian moral­i­ty as a species of trap, which demands of us what we can­not pos­si­bly achieve. For Hitchens, per­fect moral­i­ty, if it exists, appears to be achiev­able—with­in every­one’s capac­i­ty. The sin­less life (if Hitchens had accept­ed the word “sin”) is pos­si­ble. In this view, the source of moral action is not out­side the human per­son but with­in. That, at least, is con­sis­tent with Hitchen­s’s belief in an evolved human “species.” If the human per­son evolved, it fol­lows that the moral sense would have to have evolved as well. Thus Hitchens explains moral­i­ty as a devel­op­ment toward what he calls “human sol­i­dar­i­ty.” Here again is Hitchens, this time from his debate at Kings Col­lege with Dinesh D’Souza.

What we think of as “moral­i­ty” or “ethics” comes from human sol­i­dar­i­ty and pre-dates all forms of monothe­ism. Don’t let it be said that … [the Israelites] wan­dered all that time under the belief that per­jury and mur­der and theft were okay, only to even­tu­al­ly bump into Mt. Sinai and receive the news it was­n’t kosher after all. … Any soci­ety who believed those things would­n’t have got that far. … Name me a moral state­ment uttered by a believ­er or an eth­i­cal state­ment, that could not be uttered by a non-believ­er. … We cal­cu­late that the human species, homo sapi­ens, has been around now … I would say 100,000 years, not more nor less. … For those 100,000 years peo­ple were born, died, many of them in child­birth, either the moth­er or the child. Life expectan­cy 20 years, per­haps 25. Peo­ple died of microor­gan­isms they did­n’t know exist­ed; Gen­e­sis does­n’t men­tion them because the peo­ple who wrote Gen­e­sis did­n’t know there were microor­gan­isms. Earth­quakes would have been terrifying—tsunamis, vol­ca­noes, mys­te­ri­ous events, war and famine super­im­posed on all this. … That was our life for tens of thou­sands of years. Maybe a grad­ual upward curve of a sort; we seem to have made some progress, very painful­ly and with infi­nite suf­fer­ing and labor, and with our sol­i­dar­i­ty still intact. (~19:55–20:42, 25:54–27:33)

Hitchens relied on this exordi­um in debate after debate; it was his only attempt to explain the exis­tence of a moral law with­out God. And the errors are many. For one, Hitchens assumes the human “species” to exist pri­or to monothe­ism, but nev­er explains how he knows that to be true. He pre­sumes Chris­tian­i­ty to teach that God com­mu­ni­cates the moral law to human beings for the first time on Mt. Sinai, and exclu­sive­ly by means of a writ­ten code. But the very Scrip­ture which tells us about this event also says that God has writ­ten the law upon our hearts (Jer. 31:33; Rom. 2:15; Heb. 10:16). That explains how non-believ­ers know about it (it explains how Cain knew about it long before Mt. Sinai); although Hitchens seemed to believe he had the Chris­t­ian backed into a cor­ner when he asks the ques­tion, he was attack­ing a straw man and a fan­ta­sia of his own cre­ation.

Final­ly, note how, at the end of the pas­sage, Hitchens describes the strug­gle for sur­vival among human beings as a type of the evo­lu­tion of moral sen­si­bil­i­ty: Out of that shared strug­gle for sur­vival comes “human sol­i­dar­i­ty,” which is Hitchen­s’s pre­ferred expres­sion, rather than “moral­i­ty” or “ethics” or “virtue.”

But “human sol­i­dar­i­ty” is not the same thing; indeed, it is less, for it involves noth­ing greater than the mere recog­ni­tion that there are oth­er crea­tures like your­self that you are bound to for sur­vival. It brings with it no sense of oblig­a­tion to them out of jus­tice. Nor does it bring with it any sense of moral oblig­a­tion to one­self or to the Cre­ator of all things. If I had had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to debate Christo­pher Hitchens, I would have asked him how it is that, if moral­i­ty has an evo­lu­tion­ary expla­na­tion, and if it is achiev­able, no one has ever ful­filled it per­fect­ly.  (Oth­er than Christ, because He was God, and Mary, because she was giv­en a unique grace.)  Even Hitchens under­stood that there are peo­ple walk­ing around liv­ing immoral lives.  But if the moral sense—the instinct toward “human solidarity”—is an evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment, would­n’t vicious­ness be as impos­si­ble as for­get­ting to breathe?  Where was Mohamed Atta’s sense of human sol­i­dar­i­ty?  Or was he an evo­lu­tion­ary freak?

Instead what we find is that we have to train our­selves in right­eous­ness (1 Tim. 4:7). And we have to war against the impulse to trans­gress. In a lec­ture on C.S. Lewis (linked to here), British schol­ar Philip van der Elst explains how attribut­ing moral­i­ty to evo­lu­tion or instinct miss­es the mark. Extrap­o­lat­ing from a pas­sage in Mere Chris­tian­i­ty, he asks his lis­ten­er to imag­ine walk­ing by a cold riv­er and see­ing a drown­ing child. On the one hand, you have an instinct to jump in and save the child; on the oth­er hand, you have an instinct not to risk your own life. But you know that you ought to sup­press the instinct to save your­self and fol­low the instinct to jump in and res­cue the child. What is that tells you to fol­low the one instinct and sup­press the oth­er? What­ev­er it is can’t itself be anoth­er instinct. It has to be some­thing out­side (~18:04–20:17).

But in his effort to avoid the the­o­log­i­cal expla­na­tion, Hitchens leaves too much else unex­plained. He dimin­ish­es the human per­son to a mere col­lec­tion of evolved instincts, as though we were no bet­ter than an ani­mal, as though moral action were no dif­fer­ent than a cat bathing itself. But if Hitchens is right in this, how can it be said that we should be sur­prised by any­thing a human being does? Why ful­mi­nate against reli­gion on the basis that it is “immoral”? Is not the reli­gious impulse just one more evolved instinct in human beings? What sense does it make to argue against it? Indeed, to argue against it, and on the basis that Hitchens does, is—in the words of Dou­glas Wilson—to bor­row moral val­ues from the Chris­tian­i­ty he seeks to dis­cred­it.

To accept that the moral law comes from God cre­ates no such prob­lems. All human beings pos­sess an aware­ness of it—even chil­dren, even the une­d­u­cat­ed, even unbe­liev­ers, even those who attempt to deny it; and the rea­son they do is because God has writ­ten it upon their hearts. If that is the case, it fol­lows that the con­tent of the moral law must be derived from the nature of who God is and the pur­pose for which he cre­at­ed us.

On that, con­tin­ue along with me as the series pro­gress­es. Next up in Part 3, “A Primer on Nat­ur­al Law, With Ref­er­ence to Same-Sex Mar­riage.”

ENDNOTES

[1] Aris­to­tle. Physics.  Trans. Robin Water­field.    New York:  Oxford UP, 2008.

[2] Lewis, C.S. Mere Chris­tian­i­ty (1952).  New York:  Harp­er Collins, 2001.

[3] Just a par­en­thet­i­cal remark here, but did you catch the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion Lewis makes between the char­ac­ter­is­tics a per­son is born with, and his behav­ior?  Lewis does not labor under any mis­be­got­ten belief that cer­tain Ger­mans liv­ing in the 1930s and 1940s had been born with a pre­dis­po­si­tion to be mur­der­ers, as though they were slaves to their DNA.