Compelling Reason

by C. S. Lewis

  And that is why, if I may say so without discourtesy, Professor Smart and I both matter so little compared with Drs Morris and Buckle. We are only dons; they are criminologists, a lawyer and a psychiatrist respectively. And the only thing which leads me so far off my own beat as to write about ‘Penology’ at all is my intense anxiety as to which side in this immensely important conflict will have the Law for its ally. This leads me to the only serious disagreements between my two critics and myself.

  Other disagreements there are, but they mainly turn on misunderstandings for which I am probably to blame. Thus:

  (1) There was certainly too little, if there was anything, in my article about the protection of the community. I am afraid I took it for granted. But the distinction in my mind would not be, as my critics suppose [Morris and Buckle, p. 232], one between ‘subsidiary’ and ‘vital’ elements in punishment. I call the act of taking a packet of cigarettes off a counter and slipping it into one’s pocket ‘purchase’ or ‘theft’ according as one does or does not pay for it. This does not mean that I consider the taking away of the goods as ‘subsidiary’ in an act of purchase. It means that what legitimizes it, what makes it purchase at all, is the paying. I call the sexual act chaste or unchaste according as the parties are or are not married to one another. This does not mean that I consider it as ‘subsidiary’ to marriage, but that what legitimizes it, what makes it a specimen of conjugal behaviour at all, is marriage. In the same way, I am ready to make both the protection of society and the ‘cure’ of the criminal as important as you please in punishment, but only on a certain condition; namely, that the initial act of thus interfering with a man’s liberty be justified on grounds of desert. Like payment in purchase, or marriage as regards the sexual act, it is this, and (I believe) this alone, which legitimizes our proceeding and makes it an instance of punishment at all, instead of an instance of tyranny – or, perhaps, of war.

  (2) I agree about criminal children [see Morris and Buckle, p. 234]. There has been progress in this matter. Very primitive societies will ‘try’ and ‘punish’ an axe or a spear in cases of unintentional homicide. Somewhere (I think, in the Empire) during the later Middle Ages a pig was solemnly tried for murder. Till quite recently, we may (I don’t know) have tried children as if they had adult responsibility. These things have rightly been abolished. But the whole question is whether you want the process to be carried further: whether you want us all to be simultaneously deprived of the protection and released from the responsibilities of adult citizenship and reduced to the level of the child, the pig and the axe. I don’t want this because I don’t think there are in fact any people who stand to the rest of us as adult to child, man to beast or animate to inanimate.10 I think the laws which laid down a ‘desertless’ theory of punishment would in reality be made and administered by people just like the rest of us.

  But the real disagreement is this. Drs Morris and Buckle, fully alive to dangers of the sort I dread and reprobating them no less than I, believe that we have a safeguard. It lies in the Courts, in their incorruptible judges, their excellent techniques and ‘the controls of natural justice which the law has built up’ [p. 233]. Yes; if the whole tradition of natural justice which the law has for so long incorporated, will survive the completion of that change in our attitude to punishment which we are now discussing. But that for me is precisely the question. Our Courts, I agree, ‘have traditionally represented the common man and the common man’s view of morality’ [p. 233]. It is true that we must extend the term ‘common man’ to cover Locke, Grotius, Hooker, Poynet, Aquinas, Justinian, the Stoics and Aristotle, but I have no objection to that; in one most important, and to me glorious, sense they were all common men.11 But that whole tradition is tied up with ideas of free will, responsibility, rights and the law of nature. Can it survive in Courts whose penal practice daily subordinates ‘desert’ to therapy and the protection of society? Can the Law assume one philosophy in practice and continue to enjoy the safeguards of a different philosophy?

  I write as the son of one lawyer and the life-long friend of another, to two criminologists one of whom is a lawyer. I believe an approximation between their view and mine is not to be despaired of, for we have the same ends at heart. I wish society to be protected and I should be very glad if all punishments were also cures. All I plead for is the prior condition of ill-desert; loss of liberty justified on retributive grounds before we begin considering the other factors. After that, as you please. Till that, there is really no question of ‘punishment’. We are not such poltroons that we want to be protected unconditionally, though when a man has deserved punishment we shall very properly look to our protection in devising it. We are not such busybodies that we want to improve all our neighbours by force; but when one of our neighbours has justly forfeited his right not to be interfered with, we shall charitably try to make his punishment improve him. But we will not presume to teach him (who, after all, are we?) till he has merited that we should ‘larn him’. Will Dr Morris and Dr Buckle come so far to meet me as that? On their decision and on that of others in similar important offices, depends, I believe, the continued dignity and beneficence of that great discipline the Law, but also much more. For, if I am not deceived, we are all at this moment helping to decide whether humanity shall retain all that has hitherto made humanity worth preserving, or whether we must slide down into the sub-humanity imagined by Mr Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and partially realized in Hitler’s Germany. For the extermination of the Jews really would have been ‘useful’ if the racial theories had been correct; there is no foretelling what may come to seem, or even to be, ‘useful’, and ‘necessity’ was always ‘the tyrant’s plea’.

  19

  THE PAINS OF ANIMALS (1950)

  A Problem in Theology1

  The Inquiry by C. E. M. Joad

  For many years the problem of pain and evil seemed to me to offer an insuperable objection to Christianity. Either God could abolish them but did not, in which case, since He deliberately tolerated the presence in the universe of a state of affairs which was bad, I did not see how He could be good; or He wanted to abolish them but could not, in which case I did not see how He could be all-powerful. The dilemma is as old as St Augustine, and nobody pretends that there is an easy way of escape.

  Moreover, all the attempts to explain pain away, or to mitigate its stark ferocity, or to present it as other than a very great evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, are palpable failures. They are testimonies to the kindness of men’s hearts or perhaps to the queasiness of their consciences, rather than to the sharpness of their wits.

  And yet, granting pain to be an evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, I have come to accept the Christian view of pain as not incompatible with the Christian concept of the Creator and of the world that He has made. That view I take to be briefly as follows: It was of no interest to God to create a species consisting of virtuous automata, for the ‘virtue’ of automata who can do no other than they do is a courtesy title only; it is analogous to the ‘virtue’ of the stone that rolls downhill or of the water that freezes at 32°. To what end, it may be asked, should God create such creatures? That He might be praised by them? But automatic praise is a mere succession of noises. That He might love them? But they are essentially unlovable; you cannot love puppets. And so God gave man free will that he might increase in virtue by his own efforts and become, as a free moral being, a worthy object of God’s love. Freedom entails freedom to go wrong: man did, in fact, go wrong, misusing God’s gift and doing evil. Pain is a by-product of evil; and so pain came into the world as a result of man’s misuse of God’s gift of free will.

  So much I can understand; so much, indeed, I accept. It is plausible; it is rational; it hangs together.

  But now I come to a difficulty, to which I see no solution; indeed, it is in the hope of learning of one that this article is written. This is the difficulty of animal pain, and, more particularly, of the pain of the animal world before man a
ppeared upon the cosmic scene. What account do theologians give of it? The most elaborate and careful account known to me is that of C. S. Lewis.

  He begins by making a distinction between sentience and consciousness. When we have the sensations a, b and c, the fact that we have them and the fact that we know that we have them imply that there is something which stands sufficiently outside them to notice that they occur and that they succeed one another. This is consciousness, the consciousness to which the sensations happen. In other words, the experience of succession, the succession of sensations, demands a self or soul which is other than the sensations which it experiences. (Mr Lewis invokes the helpful metaphor of the bed of a river along which the stream of sensations flows.) Consciousness, therefore, implies a continuing ego which recognizes the succession of sensations; sentience is their mere succession. Now animals have sentience but not consciousness. Mr Lewis illustrates as follows:

  This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no coordinating self which can recognize that ‘I have had two pains’. Even in the single pain there is no self to say ‘I am in pain’ – for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation – the bed from the stream – sufficiently to say ‘I am in pain’, it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience.2

  (a) I take Mr Lewis’s point – or, rather, I take it without perceiving its relevance. The question is how to account for the occurrence of pain (i) in a universe which is the creation of an all-good God; (ii) in creatures who are not morally sinful. To be told that the creatures are not really creatures, since they are not conscious in the sense of consciousness defined, does not really help matters. If it be true, as Mr Lewis says, that the right way to put the matter is not ‘This animal is feeling pain’ but ‘Pain is taking place in this animal’,3 pain is nevertheless taking place. Pain is felt even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and to future pains. Now it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it, or whether any continuing consciousness feels it, in a universe planned by a good God, that demands explanation.

  (b) Secondly, the theory of sentience as mere succession of sensations presupposes that there is no continuing consciousness. No continuing consciousness presupposes no memory. It seems to me to be nonsense to say that animals do not remember. The dog who cringes at the sight of the whip by which he has been constantly beaten behaves as if he remembers, and behaviour is all that we have to go by. In general, we all act upon the assumption that the horse, the cat, and the dog with which we are acquainted remember very well, remember sometimes better that we do. Now I do not see how it is possible to explain the fact of memory without a continuing consciousness.

  Mr Lewis recognizes this and concedes that the higher animals – apes, elephants, dogs, cats and so on – have a self which connects experiences; have, in fact what he calls a soul.4 But this assumption presents us with a new set of difficulties.

  (a) If animals have souls, what is to be done about their immortality? The question, it will be remembered, is elaborately debated in Heaven at the beginning of Anatole France’s Penguin Island after the short-sighted St Mael has baptized the penguins, but no satisfactory solution is offered.

  (b) Mr Lewis suggests that the higher domestic animals achieve immortality as members of a corporate society of which the head is man. It is, apparently, ‘The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead’5 who survive. ‘If you ask,’ he writes, ‘concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer, “Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life – in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body.” In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself.’6

  Whether this is good theology, I do not know, but to our present inquiry it raises two difficulties.

  (i) It does not cover the case of the higher animals who do not know man – for example, apes and elephants – but who are yet considered by Mr Lewis to have souls.

  (ii) If one animal may attain good immortal selfhood in and through a good man, he may attain bad immortal selfhood in and through a bad man. One thinks of the overnourished lapdogs of idle overnourished women. It is a little hard that when, through no fault of their own, animals fall to selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel masters, they should through eternity form part of selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel superpersonal wholes and perhaps be punished for their participation in them.

  (c) If the animals have souls and, presumably, freedom, the same sort of explanation must be adopted for pain in animals as is offered for pain in men. Pain, in other words, is one of the evils consequent upon sin. The higher animals, then, are corrupt. The question arises, who corrupted them? There seem to be two possible answers: (1) The Devil; (2) Man.

  (1) Mr Lewis considers this answer. The animals, he says, may originally all have been herbivorous. They became carnivorous – that is to say, they began to prey upon, to tear, and to eat one another – because ‘some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene … If there is such a power … it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared.’7

  I have three comments to make:

  (i) I find the supposition of Satan tempting monkeys frankly incredible. This, I am well aware, is not a logical objection. It is one’s imagination – or perhaps one’s common sense? – that revolts against it.

  (ii) Although most animals fall victims to the redness of nature’s ‘tooth and claw’, many do not. The sheep falls down the ravine, breaks its leg, and starves; hundreds of thousands of migrating birds die every year of hunger; creatures are struck and not killed by lightning, and their seared bodies take long to die. Are these pains due to corruption?

  (iii) The case of animals without souls cannot, on Mr Lewis’s own showing, be brought under the ‘moral corruption’ explanation. Yet consider just one instance of nature’s arrangements. The wasps, Ichneumonidae, sting their caterpillar prey in such a way as to paralyse its nerve centres. They then lay their eggs on the helpless caterpillar. When the grubs hatch from the eggs, they immediately proceed to feed upon the living but helpless flesh of their incubators, the paralysed but still sentient caterpillars.

  It is hard to suppose that the caterpillar feels no pain when slowly consumed; harder still to ascribe the pain to moral corruption; hardest of all to conceive how such an arrangement could have been planned by an all-good and all-wise Creator.

  (2) The hypothesis that the animals were corrupted by man does not account for animal pain during the hundreds of millions of years (probably about 900 million) when the earth contained living creatures but did not contain man.

  In sum, either animals have souls or they have no souls. If they have none, pain is felt for which there can be no moral responsibility, and for which no misuse of God’s gift of moral freedom can be invoked as an excuse. If they have souls, we can give no plausible account (a) of their immortality – how draw the line between animals with souls and men with souls? – or (b) of their moral corruption, which would enable Christian apologists to place them in respect of their pain under the same heading of explanation as that which is proposed and which I am prepared to accept for man?

  It may well be that there is an answer to this problem. I would be grateful to anyone who would tell me what it is.

  The Reply by C. S. Lewis

  Though there is pleasure as well as danger in encountering so sincere and economical a disputant as Dr Joad, I do so with no little reluctance. Dr Joad writes not merely as a controversialist who demands, but as an inquirer who really desires, an answer. I come into the matter at all only because my answers have already failed to satisfy him. And it is embarrassing to m
e, and possibly depressing to him, that he should, in a manner, be sent back to the same shop which has once failed to supply the goods. If it were wholly a question of defending the original goods, I think I would let it alone. But it is not exactly that. I think he has perhaps slightly misunderstood what I was offering for sale.

  Dr Joad is concerned with the ninth chapter of my Problem of Pain. And the first point I want to make is that no one would gather from his article how confessedly speculative that chapter was. This was acknowledged in my preface and repeatedly emphasized in the chapter itself. This, of course, can bring no ease to Dr Joad’s difficulties; unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative. I mention the character of the chapter to underline the fact that it stands on a rather different level from those which preceded it. And that difference suggests the place which my ‘guess-work’ about Beasts (so I called it at the time and call it still) had in my own thought, and which I would like this whole question to have in Dr Joad’s thought too.