As Lewis is inclined to believe, we as human beings are not entitled to ‘right to happiness’ or at least not legally or morally while stepping at someone else’s contentment. This is an opinion that, I too, subscribe to. As she supports her argument, and to which I agree, if you have a right to something, legally, you are allowed to you use any possible means to achieve it as long as you do not tread on other people’s rights. But what she vehemently differs with is the use of legal human liberty to marriage and divorce, coupled with a biased morally defined ‘right to happiness’ as a lame excuse for sexual infidelity and promiscuity. Also, the definition where happiness is only seen in the context of sexual contentment or rather the fulfillment of misguided erotic cravings, is not the best of definitions.
This could be true if the recent skyrocketing divorce and remarriage statistics in addition to the non-ending crusade on human rights in the western world is to be put on record. I tend to believe this considering in Lewis’s instance, Mr. A and Mrs. B are choosing to pursue their own ‘pleasure’ with little consideration of those who were accountable for their happiness in previous times; a thing that doesn’t rhyme well with the moral umbrella under which they are hiding. A thing that is very adamant in today’s society.
Lewis has well represented the actuality that even in the present civilized society, or even at the height of feminism, women stakes as far as conjugal infidelity and promiscuity goes, are nowhere near men’s. She has convincingly detailed how all is not right in treating sex related misdeeds in an immune double standard. From this, I wish I was more knowledgeable on the fact that most of those we call moralists, are the most driven anti-advocates of the very virtue they are supposed to preserve. But I ask; if I may, don’t every living person have an obligation to him/her to make his/her life content?
Works Cited
Lewis, C. S.. God in the dock: essays on theology and ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. Print.
Plateris, Alexander A.. Divorce statistics analysis, United States, 1962: an analysis of the national divorce statistics for 1962 and of the personal characteristics of husbands and wives divorced in Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, and Wisconsin during the years 1960 and 1961. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service :, 1965. Print.
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