quote:
In other words, why should I care about society. I've been cheated before and probably will be again, why shouldn't I cheat in turn? Why should I care about anyone else if I don't need them to further my own interests? Why should I be concerned with the species if my personal interests are better served by cheating, lieing, stealing, killing, etc?
Why should anyone keep the 'moral law'? What are their incentives?
I think these are not the interesting questions - reading Lewis, or Kant before him, or Aquinas, or Saint Paul (Romans 2:15) - should suggest that the key is not why
should I keep the moral law, but why
do I. This is Lewis's point that you probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the drowning man, but still feel compelled to help the drowning man.
But Lewis dismisses the moral sense as an instinct. Why? His drowning man example is not sound - I personally have watched wild animals clearly torn between fleeing and helping their young, eventually helping their young at great personal danger. But I cannot know whether they did so by instinct or by moral sense. He also fails to deal with the possibility that instinct can operate beyond the personal level. Yet altruism can be seen to have considerable evolutionary advantages.
There are circumstances where it may be better for the species that an individual take an action quite different from that which they would take on the basis of self interest alone. Rescuing your young from a predator could well fall into that category. Such an instinct which overrode other instincts - however uncomfortably - could bestow considerable advantage.
It is common enough to find that people act altruistically under stress without thinking about it. I once pulled a child from a burning car - looking back it was absolutely crazy, I could very easily have been killed (leaving my own child fatherless, ironically) but there was no question of should I do it - I just did it. And I am not a brave man at all - I am actually quite cowardly, with a considerable fear of physical pain. Nor was there the slightest moral consideration in the act - it was pure instinct.
If species may benefit from altruism at the cost of indiviudalism, so likewise may societies. Societies, however, act slightly differently, operating rather through culture, or as we should say, religion.
I posted this in a much earlier discussion
...
For example, the Hindu prohibition against eating cows ensures that the main source of protein (from milk and ghee), fuel(from dung) and draft labour is not sacrificed to short term expediency in time of hardship. It would be difficult to explain to a starving man why he should not kill his cow to feed his family on the basis that when the crisis is over he will need his cow if any who come through the crisis are to survive long term. A religious taboo so strong that it would disgust him to contemplate it is very useful in such circumstances.
The British, who disdained the logic of this, discovered its sense during the famine of 1942/3 - at the height of the war. They made the killing of cows a hanging offence, precisely because the lack of cows would have extended the crisis far beyond the point at which it might naturally have recovered.
...
This remains, for me, the key flaw in Lewis's argument from morality - that he thinks always in terms of individuals as fully empowered to make decisions. This is, of course, has been at the heart of the humanist tradition from just before the Reformation, and has helped to clarify much moral discussion since then - from Kant to Sartre - but it needs revisiting if one brings the evolutionary advantages of altruism into the picture.
Have fun over the weekend.
[This message has been edited by Mister Pamboli, 03-28-2003]
™ Version 4.2