LawfulGood's Journal: Societies and Moral Law

In response to:

Those societies that behave as though there is a moral law, outperform...

Thanks for the reply!

Those societies that behave as though there is a moral law, outperform (an an evolutionary sense) those who do not; i.e. a society that promotes the wwell-being of its fellow-members must increase in numbers more than one that doesn't.
An excellent point. I fully agree that we do possess various instincts that promotes our own survival as well as the survival of our community (herd). And that this instinct is probably purely natural.

However, I would argue that there is more at work here. For example, suppose that you look outside your window late at night and see a young woman being attacked. Immediately you'll be affected by at least two natural instincts. You'll have an instinct to protect the herd by intervening and helping the woman. But there is also danger involved. You'll likely feel fear at the possibility of being injured or killed if you intervene. So there's a herd instinct to help and a self-preservation instinct to not get involved.

But there's also a third thing in play. You know that you ought to help the woman. It's the right thing to do. There's something inside us that tells us which instinct should be encouraged and which should be suppressed. It judges the two instincts and assigns a moral priority. If you don't help the woman, you'll feel shame. And other people will view you with disgust.

If the moral law is nothing but instinct, and only those instincts are in your mind, then the stronger of the two instincts must win out. But very often the prompting of the moral law encourages us to choose the weaker of the two instincts. For example, you may want to be safe much more than you want to help a woman you don't even know. But at times like this the moral law is most visible, encouraging us to "wake up" or strengthen our herd instinct and suppress our survival instinct. The thing that is doing this encouraging cannot itself be the herd instinct. The herd instinct can't say "I'm asleep, wake me up!" It has to be something else, something that is not an instinct and is above instinct. And this thing I argue to be the supernatural moral law.