Natural Law Essay, Research Paper

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his ??.. has argued forcefully that the West has lost whatever common ethical grammar it once possessed. In the wake of this ?collapse?, moral philosophers and theologians have offered a variety of proposals to resurrect ethics. Moral theologians insist that ethics be rooted in theological truth, though there are wide differences about what this means. On the one side, Stanley Hauerwas has encouraged Christians to abandon misleading universalisms and live out of their particular tradition and story. Christianity?s answer to relativism, Hauerwas argues, is a Christian community arguing its moral convictions on explicitly Christian, indeed Biblical grounds. I acknowledge the importance of what we might call the Hauerwas project, but do believe that Hauerwas has provided the church with a full set of tools with which to engage modern culture. On the other side, Christian ethicists of certain leanings have suggested that in order to participate in popular moral debate, the church should not argue from explicitly Christian premises, that the church must adopt a moral vocabulary that all participants in the debate can understand and deploy. Natural law, perhaps, can provide the necessary grammar for ordering the moral argument that derives from the various normative stories that are in play in public life, a language into which our many stories can be translated. Natural law, it is argued, is capable of providing a language of truly public moral argument, one that is open to all. The Pope?s Veritatis Splendor is concerned with this ?overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine?, and its reaffirmation of the centrality of natural law is central to its response. The questions central to our discussion here, then, are?????..

We should begin our discussion with a clarification of the meaning of the tradition of natural law. First, we should reject criticisms that the natural law tradition is abstract, intuitional, legalistic, and immobile. Natural law is based on rational reflection on the empirical evidence of human life and history. We can dismiss also the biologist interpretation on the grounds that nothing is clearer in natural-law theory than its identification of the `natural? with the `rational,? or perhaps better, the `human.? In contrast to the assertion that biological drives are primordial, the tradition of reason asserts that man?s truly primordial inclinations are reason and real love.

Having cleared away false conceptions of the tradition, we can sketch the contours of natural law theory. Every system of natural law has its premises; it supposes an epistemology, and therefore a metaphysic (or the absence of one). Natural law?s metaphysic is not, however, presuppositional, since it is simply the elaboration by the reflective intelligence of a set of data that are at bottom empirical. First, it is founded on a realist epistemology that makes the real the measure of true knowledge. Second, it is based on a teleological view of nature, in which the form of nature is the final cause or goal of becoming. Man thus has a natural inclination to achieve the fullness of his own being. Simply by virtue of being a nature, man has the eternal law imprinted on him; to be a nature means to experience the purpose of striving for the fullness of its own being. Third, natural law assumes a natural theology, a belief in God who is eternal Reason, at the summit of the order of being. Finally, though for lower creatures, nature is an order of necessity, for man, as a rational creature, nature is an order of reason and therefore of freedom. Moral order flows from and indeed is an extension of the metaphysical order.

Though the imperatives of natural law emerge as dictates of human reason in man?s confrontation with the basic situations of life, this does not mean that man creates the natural law. Rather, the immanent law of human nature is given as much as human nature itself is given. Human reason carries moral force so that it is sin to act against reason, but this is true only because human reason reflects a higher reason, for therein consists its rightness and its power to oblige. The immanent law of human nature and the transcendent eternal law are in intimate correspondence, as the image is to the exemplar. The language of participation can help explicate this position: Man?s participation in eternal law consists in man?s possession of reason, the Godlike faculty, whereby he knows himself his own nature and end and directs himself freely, in something of a divine fashion but under God, to the plenitude of self-realization of his rational and social being.

The skeleton of natural law is founded on this metaphysical structure. Natural law poses the question, What ought I, as a man and apart from other considerations, do or avoid in the basic situations I encounter? We could perhaps sketch the basic situation of human life as follows:

My situation is that of a creature before God; that of a `self? possessed of freedom to realize its `self?; that of a man living among other men, possessing what is mine as the other possesses what is his.

Natural law theory is both conservative and progressive. On the one hand, it affirms that this basic human situation does not change; every man in every place and time meets himself, others, and God, and in these encounters he is under certain unalterable obligations. On the other hand, the theory recognizes that man?s nature is an historical nature, and therefore the unchanging precepts of natural law unfold and develop as they are applied to historically novel situations.

How does one derive moral conclusions from the metaphysic of natural law? Some modern natural law accounts, are sketchy at this point. This is in part purposeful, and perhaps an attempt to distance the theory from the misconception that the natural law provided a barrel of ready-made moral precepts that could be pulled out and easily applied to any and all situations. The rudiments of an answer are fairly evident.

It is useful to answer this question in terms of various levels of moral perception. At the most general level is the first principle of practical reason, the ethical a priori, namely, that evil is to be avoided and good is to be done. This principle is self-evident and inescapable. Just as the theoretical reason immediately grasps and cannot operate at all without assuming the law of noncontradiction, so the practical intelligence immediately grasps the ethical a priori. This principle does not lie at the end of an argument, but emerges as reason does with consciousness. This principle is known by all men, simply by virtue of their being human.

At the second level is the ability to grasp the meaning of good and evil in the basic situations of human life. Knowledge of these precepts is not deduced from the ethical a priori, but comes through experience and rational reflection on that experience. Simply to know the meaning of parent and disrespect is to know that disrespect to parents is evil. Perception of these obligations, though requiring reflection and experience, is common and easy. As experience unfolds, the intelligence, again with slight reflection, comes to a third level of moral truth, a derivative set of laws roughly equivalent to the moral code found in the Decalogue. Casuistic elaboration of these principles to more complex situations is reserved to what Aquinas called the wise. The wise formulate these elaborations only after intense consideration, reflection, and experience, and the common man learns these applications from the wise.

I have certain questions of the theory at this point. From Aquinas through to contemporary expositions, natural law theory has been founded on the concept of analogy, the notion that human reason reflects the eternal Reason that is God. At best, this seems only formally true; that is, it is true that man?s capacity for rational reflection is part of his imaging of God. But from such an abstract formal correspondence, it seems difficult to derive any substantial norms, unless it is also shown that every act of human reasoning substantially reflects divine reasoning. Yet, it would be absurd to suggest that every act of human thought materially corresponds to divine reason, that because men (or some men) think X is true, it can be legitimately inferred that God thinks the same. Such a conclusion would imply either that differences in the results of human reasoning are illusionary, or that God is inconsistent with Himself.

Certainly, no Christian natural law theory could claim that human reason inevitably corresponds to divine reason in a material sense. Christians acknowledge the reality of sin, the limitations of human thought, the potential for error, and the need for training of inherent reason by experience and authority. Once this concession is made, however, it perhaps becomes more difficult to see how one can proceed on the basis of natural law alone, without any input from special revelation. If human reason is capable of error, it is necessary to find some standard above and beyond human reason to measure the correctness of human reason.

Perhaps we can compare errors in the application of natural law to errors in arithmetic: The fact that one makes a mathematical error does not prove that the laws of arithmetic are invalid. The analogy, I think, though, does not hold, and for a simple reason. The rules of arithmetic are independent of the actual practice of arithmetic. We do not derive the rules of arithmetic from the reflection on the dispositions and inclinations of those doing arithmetic. There is an objective, public standard beyond the actual practice of arithmetic by which that practice may be judged. But the rules of natural law are supposedly derived from rational reflection on human experience and inclinations, from reflection on the nature of man as man, nothing else taken into consideration. Even if it were possible not to take anything else into consideration, how could one identify errors? How does one distinguish between human inclinations that are natural and therefore virtuous from human inclinations that are erroneous and base?

Natural law theory answers these questions by an appeal to the eternal law of Divine Reason. This is the objective and external standard by which human reason and inclinations are judged. But where does one find this unwritten law? Typically, natural law theory has claimed that it is accessible by rational reflection on human experience. This answer, of course, begs the above series of questions.

The Kantian legacy has meant for moral philosophy that any analysis of the operation of internal reason and any universal objective norm, resolves into a question about the extent to which the one can know the other. If man?s internal faculty of reason were to be understood as that very thing only in which in which we are to find universal valuation, then there is no problem, the universal is entirely governed by the fact that the internal can function as such. For natural law, the issue is, of course, much more complex and delicate. Universal moral law is God?s eternal law in which natural law participates; natural law is derived from the universal and objective truth of God?s divine reason, yet it is constituted by internal reason in ?Conscience?. Conscience is to be understood in the words of the Veritatis Splendor ?in its primordial reality as an act of a person?s intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgement about the right conduct to be chosen here and now?. Conscience is then not the unmediated relation of itself to itself, but is constitutively related to, and dependent upon, a reality beyond itself: the eternal law of divine reason. How are we to mediate between the objective and the subjective elements in the functioning of natural law? This is a difficult question, and I am not sure the encyclical has an answer. Mediation seems to oscillate between a heavier emphasis on material correspondence (without ever fully accepting this position), and an assertion that what is being spoken about is just a purely formal correspondence, a formal correspondence that seems unable to do the work demanded of it. Theodor Dieter, in his ?Conscience and Majesterium in Veritatis Splendor?, argues that no such mediation is possible given the self-imposed conceptual framework of the encyclical. And his analysis seems correct: the interplay of the subjective and objective elements is certainly difficult. The objective seems only able to bind the subjective conscience if the eternal law were always fully understood by conscience. If it were always fully understood then conscience would seem to lose its particularly subjective character, would be subsumed under the objective and would never invoke a wrong action from the subjective-intentional perspective.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his ?Ethics?,

The question still stands then as to how we are to know the eternal law of Divine reason? Another possible response is that the magisterium of the church provides the correct interpretation of the natural law, but this answer is hardly consistent with the claim that the natural law may be discovered by unaided reason. In Veritatis Splendour, we read on the one hand that: ?The moral law has its origin in God and always finds its source in him. At the same time, by virtue of natural reason, which derives from divine wisdom, it is a properly human law? (VS 40). By reason, law becomes the law of human beings and gains its obligatory character. Therefore, one would expect the authority of the magisterium to extend only as far as its arguments. But we are expected, apparently, to accept moral precepts proclaimed by the majesterium as binding even if we recognise the ?possible limitations of the human arguments employed by the majesterium?. Here law does not find its binding force in the operation of an individuals? reason. Rather the argument now is that the majesterium can bring to the Christian conscience certain truths. There seems to be here in Veritatis Splendour, a high esteem for reason with a high regard for authority placed next to each other on the epistemological map.

Where else might we find this law? The other answer is that of Thomas Aquinas, who realized, because of the reality of sin and the weakness of human reason, that an accessible standard beyond the merely natural is required; special revelation, Aquinas concluded, is necessary to correct erroneous and sinful reasoning. Once this is conceded, the hope that natural law provides a universal moral grammar that transcends confessional particularities and eliminates the need to appeal to special revelation has been undermined.