Lewis's Argument on Moral Issues and the Natural Law of Right and Wrong

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Right and Wrong as Clue to the Meaning of the Universe A. The argument starts off with the fact that people quarrel about moral issues. Discuss what he means by this Lewis believes that quarrels often involve arguments about what is right or wrong regarding the issue at hand. Thus quarreling provides a platform for one of the parties involved to show the other that they are in the wrong. “Everyone has heard people quarreling. 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 kinds of things they say.” (Lewis 3). When one man is arguing with another, “He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about.” (Lewis 3) “Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong.” (Lewis 4) “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 4) G. E. Moore believes that, “by establishing that people do agree on moral questions, he has proved the possibility of ethical knowledge hence refuted ethical skepticism.” (Johnson 482) “The argument from disagreement holds that widespread differences of opinion on moral questions are evidence against moral realism.” (Loeb 282) B. He thinks that quarreling about morals implies that people think that there is a standard of right and wrong, a standard or natural law that humans should follow. Lewis’s belief that most people quarrel about morals stems from an underlying argument that there is a naturally occurring standard of right and wrong in human beings guiding their behaviors and interactions with others. “He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about.” (Lewis 3) “And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’” (Lewis 4) “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.” (Lewis 4) “If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word.” (Lewis 4) “Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.” (Lewis 4) “But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature.” (Lewis 4) “This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it.” (Lewis 5) “J. L. Mackie presented one of the most sophisticated treatments of the argument, directing it primarily at ethical intuitionism, which held that people have the ability to apprehend certain moral truths directly.” (Loeb 282) Thomas Aquinas states that, “when speaking of what belongs to natural law to begin with there are certain most general precepts known to all.&r...