Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
Lewis goes on to argue that at any given time a person may be under the influence of multiple conflicting instincts. That no one of these instincts is “good” or “bad” in itself. But that each is appropriate under certain circumstances. The mechanism, in turn, by which people choose one instinct over another cannot, itself, be another instinct.
It’s this mechanism that sets humans apart from other creatures as unique. Lewis observes that this mechanism often leads people to respond, when two instincts are in conflict, to the weaker instinct. As such this mechanism points to a set of governing principles for human behavior that is beyond simple survival.
In addition to maintaining the trajectory of his initial argument, Lewis establishes two other important points in this chapter. First, he affirms each human appetite and impulse. Whereas each has the potential to express itself at an inconvenient time or in an inappropriate way; none is, in itself, corrupt or “sinful” (to use religious terminology). Second, Lewis identifies the folly in allowing any one instinct to take absolute precedence. He puts it this way:
There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong" ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
By the way, this point is of great practical consequence. The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity," and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
Referring again to Romans 1, Paul identifies this tendency in those who overindulge their physical appetites. He asserts that the way God punishes people is by “giving them over” to become slaves to these appetites. When one single ambition, desire, or pleasure becomes a person’s driving force, it proves to be an unforgiving and unrelenting master. We are not creatures of instinct. We’ve been given the unique capacity to judge between, and even keep in check, our needs and appetites. An almost godlike capacity to choose. Where could that have come from?
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