“Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that might is right,..” These are the words of King George the sixth, in his speech to the British Empire, September 3rd 1939, on the philosophy of Naiz Germany. The opposing views of the Third Reich and the rest of the free world brings about several questions, namely; what is the moral authority of a government, where does it come from, and how should it carry out its authority? A government must have some kind of authority or it could not govern, and is therefore a government no longer. What form should this authority take though, legal or moral? The differences between legal and moral authority are slight, but are of the utmost importance to these questions.
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Is there a true right or wrong? This question is answered beautifully by C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, in which he points out that people all have a conscience, quite outside the laws of the land or even instinct. He uses the example of a person being attacked by a wild animal and another man standing near by. Now, by law the bystander is under no obligation to help the man under attack, so whether he helps or not must be an internal decision. He will find inside himself two warring instincts, the first is self preservation, making him want to run away, the other being the pack (or herd) instinct to help his fellow man. If people just lived by instinct, the stronger of the two, whichever that one might be at the time, would win out, but it does not play itself out in that way. The man will have to choose between the two instincts, and his conscience will tell him he should help his fellow man, even if it is the weaker of the two instincts (as it most often is). The man’s act of judging between the two instincts, as well as the fact that people all over the world would feel that one of the two instinct was ‘better” or the “good” one, is just one of the things that Lewis puts forward as proof for the existence of morality. So a government that is moral is naturally going to demand morally good behavior from its
Is there a true right or wrong? This question is answered beautifully by C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, in which he points out that people all have a conscience, quite outside the laws of the land or even instinct. He uses the example of a person being attacked by a wild animal and another man standing near by. Now, by law the bystander is under no obligation to help the man under attack, so whether he helps or not must be an internal decision. He will find inside himself two warring instincts, the first is self preservation, making him want to run away, the other being the pack (or herd) instinct to help his fellow man. If people just lived by instinct, the stronger of the two, whichever that one might be at the time, would win out, but it does not play itself out in that way. The man will have to choose between the two instincts, and his conscience will tell him he should help his fellow man, even if it is the weaker of the two instincts (as it most often is). The man’s act of judging between the two instincts, as well as the fact that people all over the world would feel that one of the two instinct was ‘better” or the “good” one, is just one of the things that Lewis puts forward as proof for the existence of morality. So a government that is moral is naturally going to demand morally good behavior from its