The Taproot of Moral Law

I talked in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion" about Mere Christianity, the primer on Christian belief by a great defender of the faith whose lectures on British radio during World War II that still-popular book recapitulates. It was a time when the great evil of Nazi aggression under Hitler threatened to undermine European and world civilization. As bombs were falling on London, Lewis told his countrymen of God's ongoing battle with Satan, the Prince of This World.

Lewis's argument toward God and Christ in Mere Christianity begins from the axiom that we all believe, deep down, in right and wrong. That is, we all think that the right is really and truly distinct from the wrong, even if our fumbling attempts to say what is right in particular situations often result in honest disagreements among ourselves, and even if none of us manages to obey even our own conscience with notable constancy.

Francis S. Collins, in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, says the Lewis book was and remains a touchstone of his commitment to Christian belief, following a period of atheism as a young man. Lewis also started out as an atheist. Collins, again like Lewis, cites the existence of a universal notion of Moral Law among us humans as (along with a common experience of spiritual longing) a prime reason why he now firmly rejects his former nonbelief on God.

Collins says science cannot explain the sense we humans invariably have of an absolutely real right-wrong, fair-unfair, unselfish-selfish, good-evil dichotomy. Lewis, in his discussion, pretty much ignores whatever advances science may or may not claim to be capable of making towards filling the "gaps" in our naturalistic understanding of why things are the way they are, including why we humans think the way we do. For the most part, he simply assumes that the Moral Law binds us, ergo there must be something real outside this world to which we are thereby bound.

At some point, it seems to me, these two arguments run the risk of circularity, of begging the question. Either by treating the phenomenon of our awareness of right and wrong as a brute fact needing no further explanation (Lewis) or by assigning it to an explanatory realm wholly beyond scientific inquiry (Collins), both arguments fail to convince those who begin from a different axiom: that all that can be explained, science will eventually explain.

Of course, those who propose such an axiom are prone to their own sort of circularity. There is something better — i.e., more good, more right — about adopting a wholly materialistic view of the world, they seem to say. But that implies a "higher standard" of what is good and right and proper, a yardstick by which their worldview ought to be judged superior to the theistic worldview.

They may well say their yardstick is reason, or human progress, or (since so many injustices have been committed by religion) justice. But even so, they are making Lewis's and Collins's point: we all believe there is such a yardstick.


My approach to resolving this deadlock of dueling circularities is to try to figure out which, if any, brute fact about our common human experience we ought to treat axiomatically, as a given.

In addressing such a question, I don't think Collins hits the nail bang on the head when he identifies the Moral Law mainly with our capacity for noble, unreciprocated, entirely altruistic acts which, especially when they are done in secret, cannot boost our evolutionary "fitness." While that argument is true as far as it goes, it doesn't encompass human goodness in its entirety. Most of the good we do is not that pure or noble. A lot of it comes, quite grudgingly, out of a sense of duty which overrides our usual inclination to bypass doing the right thing.

In this regard Lewis is spot on. He acknowledges time and again our absolute incapacity to do the right thing all the time, or even most of the time. The insufficiency in his discussion, by today's scientific standards, is that he doesn't actually specify in no uncertain terms exactly what the feature of the human soul is that we would like science to explain, without foreseeable result. Instead, he resorts to homely examples that (quite successfully, in my opinion) call up for us the experience of being committed to a higher standard.

One is tempted at first to call this scientifically inexplicable feature of the universal human experience a sense of "duty," or perhaps of "obligation." We all know we have a moral duty, an obligation to live by some high standard of conduct which, if lived by, would keep us from doing evil.

So I would say that what science has to try to explain, entirely under its own steam, is the combination of our knowledge of a higher standard and our wavering — yet sometimes passionate, and never quite dead — commitment to it.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

This goes along with something I said a while back in a post in another blog. The blog is called Beyond Darwin, and the post was Non-Crazy Questions (II). It was one of a series of posts looking into Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright, who is a science writer, not a scientist, suggests that life on earth has a non-intelligent designer: natural selection itself. Natural selection processes information in the form of feedback from the environment and "decides" which variants of existing life forms are best-suited to survive. In so doing it blindly pursues a goal: ever more elaborate expressions of living complexity.

That sort of thing is pretty much bound to result, eventually, in the advent and further increase of intelligent life, in the form of organisms that are ever better at doing their own information processing and maximizing the gains they realize from playing "non-zero sum games" with one another. Positive non-zero sum games are interactions in which both parties benefit. Wright says they predominate in evolutionary history over either one-winner-one-loser zero sum games or negative non-zero sum games in which both parties lose.

But, says Wright, intelligence is not the same as consciousness, no matter how high creaturely IQs soar. Consciousness — sentience, subjectivity, "inner" experience — is not necessary to evolutionary fitness. It's an add-on. There might exist in the world (though there aren't actually) quite clever living and breathing zombies with no inner experience whatever, "robots with unusually good skin" (pp. 320-1), who would be just as expert as we human beings are at gaming the environment and fostering their own evolutionary success.

Crucially, these imaginable-if-nonexistent zombies provide us with a moral lesson, says Wright. Because they lack subjective, sentient inner experience, they partake of the same moral standing as a computer. It is not morally wrong to turn off a computer, or to dismantle it into its component parts, or to throw it on the junk heap when its useful life is over. The same would be true of these hypothetical zombies: Thou Shalt Not Kill would not apply to them.

In other words, the taproot of our moral obligation lies in the soil of our sentience. If we were not conscious, the whole idea of moral imperatives borne toward one another would be null and void.


I find this a crucial addition to the argument that both Collins and Lewis make about how there exists a basic Moral Law, common to all humans, that serves as a signpost to God. If we are aware of bearing a shared, mutual commitment to a higher standard, however much we may waver and wobble in living by it, then both the awareness and the commitment bespeak our non-zombieness. The fact that we are conscious, something the most highly evolved robotoids could never be, shows that there is something extra in our makeup.

Accordingly, Wright's argument that the existence of God is a "non-crazy question" patterns closely with the logic of Collins and Lewis. They too advert to a "something extra" in us which Darwinian evolution by natural selection cannot account for. In their case, it is the Moral Law. In Wright's, it is the sheer fact that we are conscious, though we needn't be.

I would be remiss here if I didn't note, by the way, that Wright's ideas about human consciousness being superfluous to our underlying brain states/processes is not universally held. Philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett dispute that consciousness is anything at all above and beyond a strict identity with those underlying mechanics.

Or, sometimes, Dennett and others like him talk as if consciousness does exist as a mental state, separate from the underlying brain mechanics — but one with its own independent causal functionality, such that natural selection would "see" it and act on it.

Wright carefully admits to there being such a view as Dennett's, while stating how incomprehensible it seems to him. The gist of Wright's rebuttal, extended a bit by me, is this: if there is no distinguishable human trait of consciousness, apart from our brain mechanics, then any advanced robotoids who evolve naturally on some hypothetical planet elsewhere in the galaxy, and who have the same brain mechanics as we do, will perforce be as conscious as we, and it would accordingly be a sin to destroy them. Put another way, such non-human robotoids as these imaginary ones could never ever be — they'd be as "human" as we are!

But that would mean that Thou Shalt Not Kill would apply to them too. Reducing consciousness to a mere identity with certain neurochemical mechanics of the human brain fails utterly to obviate the Moral Law which serves us a signpost to God.

Or, if consciousness is a real mental state above and beyond the brain's neurochemical transactions, but it is not transparent to natural selection — if it produces its own causal effects in the material world, that is — then science as we know it cannot properly deal with it. "Truly scientific models," Wright says in an endnote on p. 398, "must invoke only 'publicly observable' causal phenomena (neurotransmitters, etc.)." Purely "mental forces," even if they exist, are not "publicly observable" and as such lie outside the legitimate range of scientific inquiry!

Again, in this case, science fails to explain the Moral Law. Thus Wright argues (I think quite convincingly) that human consciousness is something which science alone cannot account for. I accordingly find it to be the soil wherein lies the taproot of Moral Law.


But there is another essential part of the argument concerning the Moral Law, one which I don't think Collins pays enough attention to: the sheer impossibility we encounter in trying to live by this standard. Lewis says:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. (p. 54, Collier ppbk.)

It is this feature of our situation, our wavering commitment to a higher standard, which makes the Christian religion so specifically appropriate. Jesus, after all, made the shocking claim to forgive us our sins, just as if he were God and the wrongs we have done were wrongs against him (see p. 55).

P.D. James says in one of her Adam Dalgleish mysteries that all murders are motivated by Love, Lust, Lucre, or Loathing, with Love being paradoxically the most dangerous. You would think our sense of moral obligation would invariably be clarified by it, but no. Love can be a killer.

I attribute this wrinkle in the fabric of our nature — as well as our susceptibility to Lust, Lucre, and Loathing — to the fact that we who possess the Moral Law descend from species that do not. Their instincts, passions, and moral blindness linger on in us today. Here is another reason why Christians ought to feel Darwinian evolution is their ally, not their enemy!