The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

336 chapter 29We do not know about Reality, the Wesen, in any way that would elevate itabove mere pragmatic reality with a small r. But we do know, Lewis is arguing,the extrapositivistic fact about our ethical selves. I think, thereforeI self-judge.As you might expect, Lewis draws theistic conclusions from the fact. Buta prejudice against belief in God need not stand in the way of admittingLewis’s observation: what we really know is ethical. Iris Murdoch, who wasnot a Christian, wrote that “the possession of a moral sense is uniquelyhuman,...‘as ifit came to use from elsewhere.’ It is an intimation of ‘somethinghigher.’” 14 Her system of scare quotes suggests some unease notshared by Lewis. But the point, I repeat, can be given an entirely nonspookyrationale. As Stuart Hampshire put it,“There is a distinct kind of knowledgewhich a person normally has of her own conduct and intentions.” 15 Whatwe know together as reality is what we should agree on for practicalpurposes, such as crossing the Oostzeedijk. What we Know as Reality, ifanything at that exalted level, is only ethical. We Know Ought, not Is.In The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant makes a similar point,most gloriously. Ask a man who claims that he operates only under materialcompulsion, and that he has no freedom to act ethically against, say, anopportunity for gratifying lust, “if a gallows were erected before the housewhere he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereonimmediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not thencontrol his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply.” Sofar the behaviorist man is acting in a manner consistent with his behaviorist,antiethicist theory. He resists the lust merely because he is an Epicurean,merely because gratification-plus-hanging is materially unpleasant. He is aPrudence-Only economist.Ask him, however, if his sovereign ordered him, on pain of the same immediateexecution, to bear false witness against an honorable man, whom the princemight wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible inthat case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhapsnot venture to affirm whether he would do so or not, but he must unhesitatinglyadmit that it is possible to do so. He judges, therefore, that he can do a certainthing because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free—afact which but for the moral law he would never have known. 16Perhaps we know the starry skies above. Perhaps we know what we instrumentallyprefer to consume. But we most assuredly know the moral law within.