CS Lewis, Morality & Intuition as a Scientific Tool

In a previous post I looked at William Lane Craig’s concise argument from objective morality. With that as the foundation, time to look at CS Lewis’s pithier, more literary version. Lewis was a very good writer, which can make the same mistakes more infuriating than in someone like Craig. Here’s a paragraph that summarises most of Lewis’s argument [bolding is mine]:

There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it. [Source]

Consider Mencius’s classic argument about the child in the well. You’re walking in the wilderness when you see a well with a child about to fall in. Mencius thought¹ that everyone’s first, “gut” impulse is to drop everything and sprint to save the child. Therefore, human nature is intrinsically good.

Now, let’s paraphrase Lewis’s example from another part of the chapter. It’s a more complex version of the Mencius argument. You’re walking on the seashore in an expensive outfit. You see a child drowning in the sea. Lewis says you want to save the child but you want to preserve your outfit too. What then drives your action to save the child (which Lewis also thinks almost all of us will do)? A third feeling that guides your decision between the other two, the knowledge that you ought to save the child.

Of course Lewis has no reason to believe that this third feeling of “oughtness” is anything special compared to the first two desires. What makes it seem special is that it’s about something transcendent, something that “should” happen regardless of anyone’s desires. But there’s no reason to suppose this feeling is correct. Lewis is making the same mistake William Lane Craig is, just much more eloquently. It’s no different to literal Platonists who assume that because we can conceive of a perfect abstraction like the number five, that this number five must exist in some heavenly realm of perfection. Lewis is assuming a Platonic moral reality based on his intuition that “my moral intuition is more than a [mere] intuition”.

But the most interesting thing about the paragraph quoted is the start and end. He explicitly says that this feeling of moral transcendence can never be verified scientifically! This brings to mind an interesting and revealing relationship to other claims (I’ve placed Lewis’s at the bottom of the list):

• Even if one day we understand every physical process happening in a person, we’ll never know what that person’s full experience is without being “in” their head. [Therefore there is more to consciousness than the "merely" physical.]
• Even if one day we understand every physical process happening in someone’s decision-making, this still does not explain how “they” (and not their brains) are the cause of their decisions. [Therefore a magical, mystical free will exists tat cannot be explained by the "merely" physical.]
• Even if one day we understand every physical process happening in a person, we’ll never understand their experience of the moral law. [Therefore a vague, undefinable objective morality exists, that cannot be explained by the "merely" physical]

It’s very interesting that these 3 concepts are so entangled. They are reactions against the following the implications of science and materialism to their full extent². All of them are examples of glorifying human intuition — as our inability to imagine these things intuitively reflects badly on scientific enquiry and not our intuitions! Lewis seems to revel in the fact that his moral law is indetectible

Another important feature of these arguments is their worship of ignorance (more from The Master). Each one seems to revel in the fact that something’s “mysterious”. This is how religion gets to conflate “mysterious” with “profound”, but it’s used outside of religious contexts as well.