I. The Law of Human Nature
A. Unlike the Law of Gravitation, humans have a choice if they wish to obey this Law or not. It is the one law we do not have in common with animals
B. All ancient civilizations and modern cultures today, do have minor differences in morality, but they are relatively the same
C. All human beings believe they should act in a certain way
D. Human beings usually do not behave in this way
II. Some Objections
A. This Moral Law is just herd instinct
1. It can't be an instinct if it itself is telling us to side with one or the other of our instincts, just like you can't say "the sheet of music which tells you at a given moment to play one note on the piano is itself one of the notes"
B. This Moral Law is just a social convention
1. It is not a simple convention that could be different if we had felt different while we were making it, it always has been and is relatively univeral in all cultures, despite different cultural values, teachings, and conventions.
2. If it were a social convention, then there would be no better or worse way of doing things, so there could be no wars, there is no right or wrong so no country could say one country is a bad country and couldn't pick between "Christian morality
and Nazi morality"
III. Reality of the Law
A. Unlike Law of Gravitation, this means what humans ought to do, not what they do.
B. People try to follow the Law because they know that happiness can only come from "individuals being honest and fair and kind to each other"
C. It is not something man created and it constanstly looms over us.
IV. What Lies Behind the Law
A. The Law is above and beyond all the facts of human behavior, we didn't invent it so it must have come from a higher power and we knew we should obey it
B. Two views of the universe: one, materialistic which is basically that the universe is just one big coincidence and nobody knows why. and two, religious which believes something beyond it with a mind created it with a purpose in mind for all the creatures in it
C. Man, ourselves, is the only thing we know more about than we could ever learn from external observation
D. If there is a controlling power behind our uinverse, it could never reveal itself to us because our capacity for thought and reason is limited by that power
There are billions of different people on the word and different cultures that raise these people to value different things and to try and gain certain things in life, that just on the materialistic and physical viewpoint, it is relatively impossible to make a claim on how to acheive happiness for everyone on the planet.
Once we get past the materialism of a person though, when we venture into what really makes that person who they are, their deepest desires and feelings, I think we can see a general path to attaining happiness. The differences in cultures and societies aren't great enough that they set us completely apart from each other in the world. We studied moral systems from several different parts of the world, that had no contact with each other when they were being founded. However, they all stressed that the right way to act and to become better people and therefore lead a happier life is to treat others with kind and respect and all had some form of the Golden Rule in their teachings. In the Declaration of Independence, it states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."The founding fathers believed that the means to acheive happniess for everyone was to have freedom. I don't think there is anyone ever or now who believes that you gain happiness through enslavement. I believe there is one set way to acheive happiness because I am a man and I know from personal experience, as C.S. Lewis says "man is the only thing we know more about than we could learn from external obersavation." The reason Aristotle can say there is one right plan for happiness, and the U.N. can make a "Declaration for Human Rights" is because all of them are human and know what is best for themselves. A dog couldn't decide what is best for a cat, because it does not know what it is to be a cat. A human could decide what is best for another human and how to get that because they themselves are human and have the same basic morality, follow the same natural law.