"C.S.Lewis. Mere christianity " - читать интересную книгу автора

Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had
committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of
football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of
Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean
things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the
older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they
really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies
are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so
the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that
a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but
a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected
to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is
free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot
disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice
about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various
biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That
is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the
law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with
animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he
chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every
one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean,
of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did
not know it, just as you find a few
people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the
race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was
obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then
all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in
saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the
Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they
had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have
had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the
colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent
behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and
different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their
moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching
of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and
Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each
other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in
the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our
present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different
morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for
running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the
people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a
country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what