![]() ![]() Begin from them and we may get somewhere in thinking about what we ought to do. These are the starting points for all moral reasoning, deliberation and argument they are to morality what axioms are to mathematics. We would not be wrong to call them the basic principles of natural law: the requirements of both general and special beneficence duties both to parents/ancestors and to children/posterity and requirements of justice, truthfulness, mercy and magnanimity. These “primeval moral platitudes” (as Screwtape, in Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, once terms them) constitute the human moral inheritance. What do we know when we know moral truth? Most fundamentally, we know the maxims of what Lewis-in his book on education, The Abolition of Man-calls the Tao. Lewis’ understanding of morality, we have to distinguish three elements: (1) what moral truths we know, (2) how we know them, and (3) how we become able to know them. ![]()
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