I think every--or every healthy--person has an instinctive understanding of what is right and wrong.
A pleasing notion, but logically insupportable. If the understanding of right and wrong was inherent, people belonging to different societies would have the same understanding of what is right and what is wrong. They don't.
Philosophers have spent lifetimes ferreting out what natural law is.
Philosophers spend lifetimes trying to ferret out the obvious.
Natural law is a simple thing. It is the law of the jungle. Eat or be eaten. Reproduce as much as you can before you die. That's the law of nature; it applies to all of nature's creatures. Like nature, it is harsh.
If we want any law beyond that, we have to make it ourselves.
My own belief is that all of our moral codes stem from the simple fact that we are pack animals, and that our survival as a species has always depended on maintaining cohesion and cooperation within the pack. (Note that for most of our recorded history, moral codes have applied only to people within the social group - with outsiders, all is permitted.) Our morality has always stemmed from our experience of what is expedient for the pack; all our thought and philosophy has not changed this. Our thought and philosophy have, however, provided steadily expanding definitions of what expedience is and what our pack is, to the point where we are now reckoning expedience in terms of the remote future, and some of us are beginning to think of the entire species as our pack. These, IMO, are the changes that have driven the evolution of what we call morality. |
