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SOME OBJECTIONS

If they are the foundation, I had better stop to o on Soood many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is

For exa, &039;Isn&039;t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn&039;t it been developed just like all our other instincts?&039; Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law We all knohat it feels like to be prompted by instinct�Cby mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food Itwant or desire to act in a certain way And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct But feeling a desire to help is quite different froht to help whether you want to or not Supposing you hear a cry for help froer You will probably feel two desires�Cone a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation) But you will find inside you, in addition to these two iht to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the ies between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of theht as well say that the sheet of iven moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts arethat the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this If&039; two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature&039;s er of&039; the two must win But at those moments e are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually see us to side with the weaker of the two impulses You probably want to be safe : but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the saht ier than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stiinations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough stea froer than it is The thing that says to you, &039;Your herd instinct is asleep Wake it up,&039; cannot itself be the herd instinct The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note

Here is a third way of seeing it If the Moral Laas one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one iood,&039; always in agreeht behaviour But you cannot There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it e It is a mistake to think that soood, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad All weinstinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rathermother love or patriotism But there are situations in which it is the duty of a e his sexual i instinct There are also occasions on which a mother&039;s love for her own children or a man&039;s love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people&039;s children or countries Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad iot two kind of notes on it, the &039;right&039; notes and the &039;wrong&039; ones Every single note is right at one ti at another The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is sooodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts

By the way, this point is of great practical consequence Theyou can do is to take any one iht to follow at all costs There is not one of them which will not uide You eneral was safe, but it is not If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agree evidence in trials &039;for the sake of humanity,&039; and become in the end a cruel and treacherous , &039;Isn&039;t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, so that is put into us by education?&039; I think there is ahere The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing fro must be merely a human invention But, of course, that is not so We all learned the rew up alone on a desert island would not know it But surely it does not follow that thehuht have ree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else But soht have been different�Cwe learn to keep to the left of the road, but it ht�Cand others of them, like mathematics, are real truths The question is to which class the Law of Hu it belongs to the same class as mathematics The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great�Cnot nearly so great as nise the sah them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent The other reason is this When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be anyfor the better If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised e morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others We do believe that soe the e e would call Reformers or Pioneers�Cpeople who understood hbours did Very well then The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact,that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other But the standard thatdifferent fro the that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that soht than others Or put it this way If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there -some Real Morality�Cfor them to be true about The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true thanquite apart from what either of us thinks If when each of us said &039;New York&039; eachin my own head,&039; how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply &039;whatever each nation happens to approve,&039; there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow h the differences between people&039;s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite But one word before I end I have erate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts For exao people in England were putting witches to death Was that what you call the Rule of Huht Conduct?&039; But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things If we did�Cif we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers frohbours or drive theree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is sireat advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is nothem when you do not think they are there You would not call ato set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house