Societies and civilizations could not exist without the social contract, and it still exists in every society today, just some are more complicated than others.
Continued: (I hope this doen’t violate forum rules)
Other people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law
just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?” I
think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are
usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents
and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of
course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A
child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it
does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention,
something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made
different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent
Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn
everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which
might have been different-we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it
might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right-and others of
them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the
Law of Human Nature belongs.
There are two reasons for saying 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-not nearly so great as
most people imagine-and you can recognise the same law running through 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 any moral progress. Progress means
not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas
were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring
civilised morality to savage 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 some of the people who tried to
change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or
Pioneers-people who understood morality better than their neighbours did.
Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better
than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying
that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But
the standard that measures two things is something different from either.
You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting
that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people
think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than
others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of
the Nazis less true, there must be something-some Real Morality-for them to
be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less
true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from
what either of us thinks. If when each of us said “New York” each meant
merely “The town I am imagining in my own head,” 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
“whatever each nation happens to approve,” 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 morally better or
morally worse.
I conclude then, that though the differences between people’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 met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not
distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief
about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred years ago
people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the
Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not
execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we
did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold
themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return
and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or
bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the
death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of
moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may
be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral
advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You
would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so
because he believed there were no mice in the house.
).