Category: Ethics

From morality to nature and back again

Roland1 Comment

Below is a talk I recently gave at a local apologetics meet-up. The goal was to introduce and partially defend natural law theory to a group of fellow-Protestants who, as far as I was aware, had not engaged extensively with natural law theory before. The talk was recorded in various parts, with video coming in the second part. At the end there is a collection of resources for those interested in some further reading.

In our previous meeting I got the impression that my views on morality as an Aristotelian and Thomist are particularly different from the views of many of you here, as well as Protestants more generally these days. I have two goals here tonight. The first is to introduce and partially defend the views I’ve come to hold on these issues, and the second is to explain how these relate particularly to Protestant approaches to Scripture and modern uses of the moral argument for God’s existence.

We’ll be concerning ourselves primarily with issues of meta-ethics, which is that subfield of ethics that concerns itself with (1) what we mean by certain terms like “good”, “moral”, “virtue”, “justice”, “ought”, as well as (2) how such things are grounded, by which we mean giving an account of what makes things good, moral, virtuous, etc. There are roughly two meta-ethical theories I want to talk about:

  1. Divine command theory, which I imagine is the view many of us here hold.
  2. Natural law theory, which is the view I want to recommend as best.

Now, before we start I should note that these two theories have very different approaches in terms of how they are developed. Like most modern meta-ethical theories, the divine command theory we’ll be talking about takes the term “moral” as picking out some special or mysterious class of facts that need to be defined and grounded by the theory. On the other hand, for the classical natural law theory we’ll be talking about, the term “moral” doesn’t pick out any particularly special, and is defined before we even start the theory. The focus of natural law theory is instead the notion of “goodness”.

This is noteworthy because we’re going to use the word “moral” in both senses tonight, and it can get confusing unless you keep this difference in mind.

1. Essentialist Divine Command Theory

I imagine the divine command theory that is most commonly held here is the so-called essentialist divine command theory defended by people like William Lane Craig and Robert Adams.[1] We can sketch the rough outlines of the theory in about 7 points:

  1. “Moral” picks out those fact which are most fundamental and important. If our government commands us to do something immoral, for example, we still have a duty to refrain from listening to them, since our moral duties are more important than our duties to our government.
  2. We divide moral facts into moral values and moral duties. Moral value refers to the worth or goodness of something. Moral duties refer to the moral obligations or prohibitions that apply to us, what we ought and ought not do, rights and wrongs.
  3. Moral value is ultimately grounded in God’s nature or essence, in the sense that he is the paradigm of moral goodness. Because God is a person, persons are morally valuable. Because God is loving, love is morally good. And so on.
  4. Moral duties are grounded in God’s commands to us, which are given explicitly through revelation or implicitly through conscience. The idea here is that in general duties arise from commands from qualified authorities. For example, when a policeman commands me to do something I have a legal duty to do that, since policemen are qualified legal authorities. God, being the paradigm of moral goodness, is uniquely qualified to be a perfect moral authority, and so his commands constitute moral duties.
  5. God’s commands, and therefore our duties, are not arbitrary because they are based on God’s unchanging nature, which we said in (3) is the paradigm of moral goodness. Nor are they based on something external or “bigger” than him because his nature is something internal to him.
  6. Moral virtues are those habits that dispose us to doing good and right things as they are grounded in God’s nature and commands.
  7. Because moral duties arise from God in this way, it seems that so must our personal motivations for obeying them. In a Christian context this would mean that the reason we follow God’s commands is out (1) love for God and desire to be with him, and (2) fear of just punishment.

2. Thomistic Natural Law Theory

We move now to natural law theory. The particular brand of natural law that I’m interested in here is the one from by Thomas Aquinas, who himself was developing the natural law theory of Aristotle.

2.1. Morality is about practical reason

Now, as I said, as a classical theory we have the term “moral” defined upfront: “moral” picks out things relating to the will, and therefore also our actions. For example, classically we can by divide reason into speculative reason and practical reason. Speculative reason relates to our intellect and has to do with applying reason to further expand our understanding of reality. The habits that lead to good speculative reasoning are called the intellectual virtues. Practical reason relates to our will and has to do with applying reason to govern how we will and act. So habits that lead to good practical reasoning are called moral virtues.

So, while we might have inherited the word “moral” from Aristotle, it no longer has the same meaning. Classically, it did not denote some special or fundamental class of value of duty, it wasnot connected with the will of God in such a way that he could be said to be a lawgiver, and it does not carry the psychological weight of being bound by some law. In his Ethics Aristotle discusses both moral and intellectual virtues, with neither being more important than the other.[2] The reason for this is that both moral and intellectual virtues part of being a good human.

As we said, the best starting point would be how classical natural law understands the notion of “goodness”.

2.2. Good has the nature of an end

Aquinas said that in general the good “has the nature of an end”[3] and we’ll use this as our starting point. In a way, though, our modern ears aren’t prepared for this definition, because we’ve been taught to think of conscious deliberation whenever we think of something working for an end. But for Aristotle and Aquinas our consciousness is just a special case of the goal-directedness that exists throughout nature. For them, everything that exists has tendencies toward certain ends determined by its nature.

The thought is roughly as follows: at every level things exhibit certain natural regularities or tendencies toward certain effects. We see this in living things, like how hearts regularly pump blood, or how dogs regularly grow up to have four legs so they can walk, or how seeds regularly grow into trees. We also see this in non-living things, like how matches tend to combust when struck, the moon tends to orbit the earth, salt regularly dissolves in water, rocks regularly fall to the ground, and so on. In each case we have something consistently producing its specific effect unless its prevented from doing so in some way.

And notice that each regularity involves the production a specific effect rather than something else or nothing at all. Matches produce fire as opposed to producing ice or nothing at all. Seeds grow into trees and not into rocks. Salt dissolves as opposed to combusting. Rocks fall as opposed to exploding. And the same goes for all the numerous regularities that exist throughout the universe. But, that things consistently work to produce their specific effects seems to make sense only if “there is something in them that is directed at or points to specifically those outcomes rather than any others”.[4]

So, in some broad sense hearts are directed at pumping blood, the development process of dogs works to produce an organism that walks on four legs, matches are directed at combusting when struck, salt is directed to dissolving in water, and so on. At the end of the day we find that everything that exhibits some form of natural regularity must be directed by its nature towards that behaviour as kind of end or goal. This is the kind of “teleology” that Aristotle and Aquinas have in mind when they talk about goal-directedness in nature, which by-and-large isn’t due to the conscious deliberation of the things themselves. Of course, working this out completely requires a fairly lengthy side-track into metaphysics and philosophy of nature, but hopefully the examples I gave will give you enough of an intuition.

Now, let’s go back to what Aquinas was saying about good having the nature of an end. What he’s getting at is that whenever we talk about an end we can also talk about goodness: something is good to the extent it fulfills its end and bad or defective to the extent that it fails to fulfill its end. If I’m playing a sports match, for instance, then my actions are good for me to the extent that they help me win the game. On the other hand, losing the game would be bad for me, and could happen because I played badly or because my opponent played better than me. A chair is good to the extent that it realizes the carpenter’s end of making something that holds people up and doesn’t fall over. And a music performance is good the extent that it achieves the orchestra’s end of playing the piece.

2.3. Natural goodness

So we have that (1) everything is in some sense directed toward certain ends by their nature and (2) whenever somethings works for an end we have a measure of goodness for that thing. This gives us a very general sense of goodness that applies to almost everything. Because this notion of goodness is so closely linked with the natures of things we can call it “natural goodness”.

It might sound odd, but this natural goodness is in some sense both relative and objective. It is relative because what is good for you is dependent on the kind of thing that you are. If you had had a different nature, then different things would be good for you. It’s bad for cats to have two legs, but it is good for humans to have two legs. A good match causes fire when used, and a good fire extinguisher stops fire when used. However it’s still objective because at the more fundamental levels you don’t decide your own nature, and cannot change it.

Now, this natural goodness serves as the springboard for all ethical reasoning in natural law theory. The basic idea is that because we can study our human nature through various empirical methods and philosophical reasoning, we can also come to a better understanding on how to live well as humans.

2.4. Accountability, duty, and authority

While we can’t go through all the details here, what I would like to do is give you a rough idea of how on natural law theory we can move from this natural goodness to thinks like moral accountability, duties, and authority.

Accountability, it seems to me, is ambiguous between two things, which we’ll take in turn: responsibility and punishment. We noted earlier that moral virtues are a special case of virtues in general, and I think something similar happens when you consider moral responsibility and responsibility in general. In general, being responsible for an action means that that action was up to you. And people typically that one’s responsibility is in some way proportional to one’s knowledge, or at least one’s capacity for knowledge. The idea here is that an action is up to you only to the extent that you understand what you’re doing. So we generally hold adults more responsible for their actions than children, who we hold more responsible for their actions than our pets, who we hold more responsible for their actions than this or that rock.

Now, humans have been traditionally been called rational animals. We don’t mean by this that humans are always perfectly rational: they’re not. Roughly, what makes animals rational is their ability to grasp and be conscious of universal concepts that particular things fall under. So there’s the particular human called Socrates, and there’s the universal concept of humanness which Socrates, Plato, and all other humans fall under. All animals are conscious in some way of particular things, but rational are those animals which are also conscious universal concepts. Now, this ability to understand universal concepts means we have the ability to understand the natural goodness and evil, that we were talking about earlier, both for ourselves and for others, as well as the ability to choose to pursue or avoid this goodness. This additional understanding about our actions results in us being held more responsible for them, and this additional layer or responsibility is what we mean by “moral” responsibility. At the end of the day, we say that an action is morally good or evil to the extent that the end or means willed in that action are naturally good or evil.

For example, if due to genetic defect or accident I have only one leg this is bad for me but I am not responsible it. In this case we have a natural evil without a moral evil. On the other hand, if I cut my own leg off then this is an evil for which I am responsible. In this case we have a natural evil with a moral dimension, since the natural evil is the product of my will.

As for punishment, one way it arises is as follows: humans are not merely rational animals but also political animals, by which we mean that it is natural and good for us to be part of various communities like families, sports teams, companies, friendships, and states. When a part is a detriment to the good of the whole, it is good for that part to be removed from that whole or to otherwise incur some debt so as to restore the good of the whole.[5, 6] For example, if my hand has gangrene it is good for me to cut it off. This removal or debt will be punishment, and if properly administered it will have to be done according to the principle of retributive justice.[7]

What about duties? On divine command theory we have divine legal duties which arise from God’s commands to us. And although it’s not as big a focus in natural law, we can also say something about duties. We’ve seen that our nature sets certain ends for us, and to the extent that an action contributes to our fulfillment of these ends it is good. This gives us the fact that, if I will the good, then I ought act so as to fulfill my natural ends. But if we think about it, in general we act for something because we will it, and we will it because it seems good to us in some way. “The mugger who admits that robbery is evil nevertheless takes his victim’s wallet because he thinks it would be good to have money to pay for his drugs.”[8] What this means, however, is that we always will what seems good to us, even if sometimes we incorrectly prioritize some goods over others. Combining this with our earlier fact we get to the following conclusion:

  1. If I will the good, then I ought act so as to fulfill my natural ends.
  2. I do will the good.
  3. Therefore, I ought act so as to fulfill my natural ends.[9]

After some reflection on our natures this will result in various duties such as “I ought not steal”, “I ought not murder”, “I ought honor my parents”, and so on. But what kind of duty is this? It’s certainly not a legal duty that we get from divine command theory, since it doesn’t arise from any command. We might call it a rational or a natural duty since it arises out of our natural capacity for practical reason. It serves to show us that we should be interested in what is naturally good for us.

And finally, what of authority? Here we combine some of the points we’ve already made. The idea here is that someone has authority over me if they are in charge of my good, since I ought seek my good, and therefore I ought listen to their commands. Different people will have authority over different areas of my life and to different degrees depending on their position and qualification, and in each case something like this idea applies.

2.5. The four laws

Now, is there any place for a divine legislator on natural law theory? This is one of the main areas where Aristotle and Aquinas differ. For Aristotle, God is not a divine legislator and the only place he takes in the ethics is as the object of our highest end which is philosophical contemplation about him. Aquinas, however, thinks Aristotle made a mistake here. In unpacking what he thinks is the correct view, Aquinas explains that there are ultimately four kinds of law:

  1. There’s the eternal law, which embodies God’s knowledge of all the various natures of things he could have created, and so what would have been good for them.
  2. There’s the natural law, which is what we’ve been speaking about here. For humans this forms the foundation for all our practical reasoning. It tells us what it means to act well as the kinds of things that we are. It’s called “natural” law because all of this derives from our natures.
  3. There’s human law, which are laws promulgated by a human legislator in charge of a community. Natural law is often very vague and general and it’s application in particular cases requires careful consideration by wise people. “[H]uman law is essential for living the good life because it makes the general precepts of the natural law more specific.”[10] Human law is authoritative because it’s based on natural law.
  4. Finally there’s the divine law, which are laws promulgated by God, the divine legislator. This law most closely represents that law that we think of in divine command theory, and they are the laws that are proclaimed through some form of revelation.

So there is a place for divine law, but it’s embedded in this bigger theory of ethics. Ultimately I think every intuition we have explained in divine command theory can be relocated somewhere in natural law theory, with a richer foundation, since natural law gives us accounts of things like authority, responsibility, and so on.

3. Modern Protestant objections

So with that overview of natural law theory, let’s talk briefly about it means for Protestantism. I think a lot of Protestants these days are quite resistant to the idea that moral prescriptions or substantial moral knowledge might come from somewhere outside of scripture. I say “these days”, because neither the church historically nor the reformers themselves had a problem with natural law theory. John Calvin, for example, said the following in his Institutes:

It is a fact that the law of God which we call the moral law is nothing else than a testimony of the natural law and of that conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men.[11]

I think our modern hesitance arises from a combination of two things. On the one hand there’s been an increasing loss of acquaintance with natural law thinking in the past few hundred years, because of what I take to be certain philosophical errors of the early moderns like Descartes and Locke. Recently we’ve started correcting these errors, but our culture as a whole has lost its grip on this kind of thinking. And when we consider certain doctrines like original sin and sola scriptura against this backdrop they might seem to be at odds with what I’ve been saying.

So consider original sin, which says that our natures have been disordered, which in turn undermines our ability for unaided reason and therefore the moral conclusions we draw from it. But there’s nothing in this that contradicts what I’ve been saying. The claim that we can come to know ethical truths through philosophical reflection does not require that we be infallible in our conclusions. All that follows from our fallibility is that our understanding of ourselves, like our understanding of any part of nature, needs to be a community effort that spans many generations and societies. And the same thing can be said of our understanding of scripture itself. To quote John Goyette:

The collective effort required for the development of the arts and sciences is, for Aquinas, one of the reasons why man is a political animal. But the same is true of human law: it a collective effort requiring experience and time, and the wisdom of the wise. Just as men perfect the arts and sciences as part of a community, so do men perfect their knowledge of the natural moral law by participating in the [political community].[10]

What about the doctrine of sola scriptura, or “scripture alone”? There seem to be a number of slightly different of ways of formulating the doctrine, [12] but if it’s to be consistent with scripture it can’t claim that scripture is the only source of moral knowledge, for two reasons. First, because scripture itself references other sources like conscience. One of the clearest places where we see this is in Paul’s letter to the Romans where he talks about the Gentiles and he says that even though they haven’t been given the law through revelation, “they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness.”[13]

The second reason is because scripture must presuppose some knowledge of the world, and this knowledge includes some things pertaining to morality. J. Budziszewski gives the following example:

Consider for example the prologue to the Ten Commandments, where God reminds the Hebrew people of their indebtedness to Him: “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me ….'” How is it that the people of Israel, before the proclamation of the law, already know the law of gratitude? The answer is that the basics of natural law are already impressed upon the innermost design of the created moral intellect. We know a part of God’s will for us even before receiving it in words.[14]

3.1. The role scripture

I suppose we might wonder what does scripture adds if we can to know moral conclusions apart from it. There are a number of things we can say here.[15]

  1. In general there are things about God and ourselves that we can’t know through unaided reason and scripture is needed for these. Things like God’s triune nature or his dealings in human history, particularly what we call redemptive history, what will happen after we die, that marriage is a symbol for Christ and the church, and so on.
  2. Because of God’s revelation to us through scripture and through Jesus we are able know God personally, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise, since friendship requires communication between friends. As Jesus says in John’s gospel, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”[16]
  3. Revelation of God’s commands serves to introduce divine law and duties, which we wouldn’t have otherwise.
  4. Revelation about morality serves as a guide and summary of natural law. We’ve already seen that it can be difficult to work out the details of natural law, and besides that not everyone has the gifts or time to work them out. So through revelation God enables more people to know and will the good.

4. Apologetics

As we close I want to say a few things about what natural law means for apologetics today.

4.1. The moral argument

Like most arguments for God’s existence the “moral argument” is really a family of arguments. The one most heard today is formulated as follows:

  1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

The question I want to address is how natural law effects the prospects for a moral argument like this.

Now, Aquinas gave arguments for God’s existence in various places throughout his writings, although most famous are the so-called “five ways” he lays out in the Summa Theologica. As far as I can tell Aquinas never gave a moral argument. I think the reason for this is that from a natural law perspective morality is not some special part of reality that calls out for an explanation, but is rather the result of the combination of otherwise non-moral features of reality: (1) the goal-directedness we see throughout nature and (2) the wills of rational beings.

The closest thing Aquinas gives to a moral argument is his fifth way, which is a teleological argument.[17] I should note, though, that the teleology Aquinas has in mind is different from the kinds of teleology we see in modern arguments for God’s existence.[18] He’s not concerned with the complexity of living things or the fine-tuning of the universe, for instance, but rather the goal-directedness we spoke about earlier, which is required by the various regularities that exist at all levels of nature both complex and simple.

Now, the question arises of how something can be directed toward and end. It’s clear how this happens with intelligent beings, since there the end in some sense existing in the intellect of that being, and so it can guide the actions of that being. But with non-intelligent things, since they lack an intellect, their ends can’t influence them in the same way. So it seems that non-intelligent things must be directed toward their ends by something with intelligence. And in fact, we could see why this is the case if we spent some time analyzing the notion of intelligence, but we don’t have time for that now. This is how Aquinas summarizes what we’ve been saying in his fifth way:

Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot tend towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exits by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.[19]

Of course there is still lots to be unpacked. After he gives his five ways, Aquinas spends some time explaining why this is the being we call God. He argues for God’s oneness, goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, simplicity, eternity, and a host of other divine attributes, but we just don’t have time to give and defend those arguments now.

Coming back to the moral argument. I think technically we can still use it as I formulated it, but we must recognise that it is partly dependent upon something like the fifth way for its soundness. At the end of the day I think much moral debate can be had without reference to God, since it is based on what is knowable about our nature. But ultimately I think any viable ethics depends on God, including natural law.

4.2. Cultural apologetics

Finally, from the perspective of cultural apologetics natural law serves as a common ground for Christians and non-Christians to discuss ethical issues, since particular moral conclusions do not depend on whether one thinks God exists or not. For example, atheist philosopher Phillipa Foot has said that,

… the Summa Theologica is one of the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover that St. Thomas’s ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the Catholic or other Christian believer.[20]

In the Western world it’s becoming increasingly important that we be able to defend the value of human life, and of family life, and particularly the rights of children. Our culture truly is a “culture of death”, in which people think it’s OK to kill innocent human beings so long as they’re young enough or helpless enough, and more generally in which we ignore the rights of children so that adults can do what they want. All too often these days I see people object to things like these on so-called “religious grounds” and then get ignored because the secular world doesn’t share their religious convictions. But there are good arguments wholly apart from any religious confession, and these need to be the primary go-to point for us.

A secondary point is that as we show the reasonableness of so-called “traditional” moral conclusions, we also show in part the reasonableness of the Christian worldview. In this way natural law can help show our culture that Christianity is an intellectually viable worldview, which is something they’ve forgotten amongst all the hype with the New Atheists.

Other resources

For more on natural law, Feser’s blogpost Whose nature? Which law? which goes into more detail about this technical word “natural”. There’s also his article Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Private Property, which has a short introduction to natural law as well as an example application of it to property rights. If you’re interested in structure of the approach many natural law theorists take when unpacking the specifics of natural law, see my blogpost Goods, basic goods, and facultiesand David Oderberg’s paper The Structure and Content of the Good.

On the topic of original sin, there’s J. Budziszewski’s three-part blogpost series Natural Law and Original Sin (part 1, part 2, part 3).

On the relationship between God and natural law see Edward Feser’s blogposts Natural law or supernatural law? and Does morality depend on God? While the fifth way is a sound argument for God’s existence, I tend to prefer the second way. See Edward Feser’s An Aristotelian Proof for the Existence of God for a good talk on this, as well as a taste of how we might go about arguing why we call this being God. If you’re interested in the fifth way, I recommend his paper Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.

Finally, one of the things that cam up in the question time was the notion of divine simplicity. William Lane Craig on divine simplicity is a blogpost by Edward Feser where he discusses some contemporary objections, and On Three Problems of Divine Simplicity is a paper by Alexander Pruss doing likewise.

For more, see the notes below, as well as the long list of categorised resources over at my blog.

Notes

  1. See, for instance, Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods. In contrast to essentialist versions of divine command theory there are the voluntarist versions like the one put forward by Ockham, which place both values and duties at God’s commands. I’ve also discussed what I call derivative divine command theory, in which duties are prior to values.
  2. I mean more important in the sense of needing to be studied. He thinks that the intellectual virtues are better than the moral virtues, since the highest end of man (or, to use modern terminology, man’s superordinate basic good) is philosophical contemplation of God.
  3. ST I-II Q9 A1 corp.
  4. Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics.
  5. “Now every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part is naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we observe that if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good…” (ST II-II Q64 A2 corp)
  6. “… whatever rises up against an order, is put down by that order or by the principle thereof. And because sin is an inordinate act, it is evident that whoever sins, commits an offense against an order: wherefore he is put down, in consequence, by that same order, which repression is punishment.” (ST I-II Q87 A1 corp) This is a more general version of what was said in [5]. I’ve briefly discussed this comment elsewhere.
  7. The argument, very briefly, is as follows: in order for the good of the whole to be best upheld, punishment ought only be of guilty people, ought be proportional to the crime, and ought be equal (ie. like punishment for like crimes). There are at most four putative theories of justice: deterrence, correction, preventative, and retributive. Only the last safeguards all three of these conditions. This is not to say that punishment couldn’t also include deterrence, correction, and prevention, but it must minimally be based on the principal of retribution. A supporting argument is that only retributive justice sees the agent as a human, and is therefore the only theory that affords them proper respect. Deterrence sees only a behaviour, correction only a patient, and prevention only a future threat.
  8. Edward Feser, Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation.
  9. Compare this argument to the following: (1) If I will to draw a straight line, then I ought use a ruler, (2) I will to draw a straight line, (3) Therefore, I ought use a ruler. (3) is consistent with me not realising that rulers are the best way of drawing straight lines. Similarly, that I will the good is consistent with me not having a perfect grasp of what that involves. And even once I realise it involves acting so as to fulfill my natural ends, I still won’t have a perfect grasp of what such fulfillment involves.
  10. John Goyette, On the Transcendence of the Common Good
  11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV. XX. 15
  12. This arises because we need to find a formulation that is not the Roman Catholic doctrine ofprima scriptura but at the same time doesn’t lead to self-defeat.
  13. Romans 2:15, New International Version.
  14. J. Budziszewski, Does Sola Scriptura Mean “No Natural Law”?
  15. I’m particularly fond of what John O’Callaghan says about the general relationship between theology and philosophy here. A noteworthy quote is: “Theology doesn’t take place in a vacuum just because it something heard from the mouth of God… and so we need to understand what’s presupposed to being able to hear what is being preached to us or what is being revealed to us, and then a systematic reflection upon it. Theology shouldn’t take place in a vacuum.”
  16. John 15:15, English Standard Version.
  17. For a lengthy and substantive defense of Aquinas’s fifth way see Edward Feser’s Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’ Fifth Way.
  18. See Edward Feser’s Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide.
  19. ST I Q2 A3 corp.
  20. Phillipa Foot, Virtues and Vices.

That orders regulate

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In Summa Theologica II-I Q87 A1 corp. Aquinas says the following:

Now it is evident that all things contained in an order, are, in a manner, one, in relation to the principle of that order. Consequently, whatever rises up against an order, is put down by that order or by the principle thereof. And because sin is an inordinate act, it is evident that whoever sins, commits an offense against an order: wherefore he is put down, in consequence, by that same order, which repression is punishment.

The idea is that when one is directed (or “ordered”) toward an end, one is also directed away from contrary ends. Thus insofar as a part moves contrary to the ends of the whole (or “rises up against the order”, an “inordinate act”), it will be counteracted (“put down”) because of the directedness of the whole towards its ends (“by that order or principle thereof”). This will apply to substantial activities which, as we’ll see in a later post, gives us the correct analysis of common goods and human communities in general.

What’s particularly interesting is that from this simple fact we can derive the three, otherwise intuitive, criteria for just punishment:

  1. Guilt: we should only punish those who go contrary to the good of a community, since the order of the whole will only counteract those parts which move contrary to it.
  2. Proportion: punishment should be proportioned to crimes, since the order of the whole need only to counteract enough to restore itself from the part’s deviation.
  3. Equity: punishments are alike to the extent that their crimes are alike, since the reason for the counteraction is the deviation itself and not some irrelevant factor.

On the transitivity of strict preference

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The notion of comparing alternatives often comes up in philosophy, particularly when discussing practical reason. There are various names for this (we can talk about the reasons for choosing A over B, or how A is better than B, or how A is more desirable to B, or how A is preferred to B) but they all amount to the same thing.

The other day I was reading the SEP article on preference and was struck by this counterexample to transitivity of strict preference (I recall my friends mentioning it to me in the past, but I only thought about it critically this time around). In this quote, X≻Y represents that X is strictly preferred to Y, and X∼Y represents indifference between X and Y:

In an important type of counterexample to transitivity of strict preference, different properties of the alternatives dominate in different pairwise comparisons. Consider an agent choosing between three boxes of Christmas ornaments… Each box contains three balls, coloured red, blue and green, respectively; they are represented by the vectors ⟨R1,G1,B1⟩, ⟨R2,G2,B2⟩, and ⟨R3,G3,B3⟩. The agent strictly prefers box 1 to box 2, since they contain (to her) equally attractive blue and green balls, but the red ball of box 1 is more attractive than that of box 2. She prefers box 2 to box 3, since they are equal but for the green ball of box 2, which is more attractive than that of box 3. And finally, she prefers box 3 to box 1, since they are equal but for the blue ball of box 3, which is more attractive than that of box 1. Thus,

a. R1≻R2∼R3∼R1,
b. G1∼G2≻G3∼G1,
c. B1∼B2∼B3≻B1; and
d. ⟨R1,G1,B1⟩≻⟨R2,G2,B2⟩≻⟨R3,G3,B3⟩≻⟨R1,G1,B1⟩.

The described situation yields a preference cycle, which contradicts transitivity of strict preference.

(Note that I’ve added the labels to the listed conditions for the sake of this discussion.)

Now, I haven’t read much of the modern discussion on transitivity of preference (indeed, I didn’t even finish reading the article), so perhaps what I’m about to say is really obvious.

It seems clear to me that the above counterexample motivates the otherwise very natural distinction between (1) being better in some respect and (2) being better simply. Ultimately it has to do with why we prefer something over another. For instance, assume I prefer red balls over blue balls. Then I prefer this red ball over that blue ball simply, and I prefer this box of green and red balls over that box of green and blue balls in some respect.

I say this distinction is “very natural” because it seems necessary if we are to make sense of trade-offs, which are manifold in everyday experience. As a trivial example (which I find myself in often), imagine you need to pick one of two routes to your destination. Route A is longer but has prettier scenery and conversely route B is shorter but has uglier scenery. You have to pick one, but whatever choice you make will involve a trade-off. On account of what is this a trade-off? Well, surely it’s because shorter routes are preferable to longer ones and prettier routes are preferable to uglier ones. That is, A is better in some respect (prettiness) and B is better in some other respect (length).

This distinction resolves the above counterexample by showing us that (a)-(d) equivocate on “≻”. In (a)-(c) X≻Y means X is strictly preferred to Y simply, but in (d) it means X is strictly preferred to Y in some respect.

The SEP article immediately goes on to say the following:

These and similar examples can be used to show that actual human beings may have cyclic preferences. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the same applies to the idealizedrational agents of preference logic. Perhaps such patterns are due to irrationality or to factors, such as lack of knowledge or discrimination, that prevent actual humans from being rational.

Perhaps, but I’m inclined to think life’s more complicated than that. It seems pretty intuitive that there are various types of goods that are incommensurable. One way we might make this intuition precise is as follows: in general there seem to be two ways in which A is better than B:

  1. A and B are both means to C and A is a better means.
  2. B is a means to A.

(1) is where this whole business of comparing of alternatives comes in. Given our above discussion we realise that A can be a better means either in some respect or simply. Aristotle mentions something like (2) at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics. The guiding intuition here is that ends are preferred to means because “it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued” (I.1 1094a15-16).

Now, combining this with our previous discussion on basic human goods, the fact that there are multiple basic goods suggests that at least sometimes two goods will be incommensurable.

Goods, basic goods, and faculties

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We’ve mentioned before that the goodness of some thing is relative to that thing’s nature. It is good for a human to have two legs because our biology is structured in such a way that having two legs is conducive to our flourishing. By the same token, it is not good for a cat to have two legs.

Now, these various goods can be grouped together and structured hierarchically: colour sensitivity, amoung other things, is a good which is subsumed under the good of seeing. Good seeing is itself subsumed under the goods of sensing, which in turn is subsumed under the goods of animal life.

A breakdown of the goods that are subsumed under the good of animal life.
A breakdown of the goods that are subsumed under the good of animal life.

At this point three things can be said. First, the goodness of the lower goods is dependent on the higher goods. Put another way, the lower goods are for the sake of the higher goods. Colour sensitivity, for instance, is for the sake of seeing and is good to the extent that it enables us to see well.

In the opening passage of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle, while discussing human acts, makes the same point:

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity — as bridle-making and other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others — in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. (I.1 1094a7-16)

We might visualise his scenario as follows:

A breakdown of the acts that are subsumed under the act of strategy.
A breakdown of the acts that are subsumed under the act of strategy.

The second thing to note is that this hierarchy has a limit. That is, the tree does not go up indefinitely. Aristotle says that “we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain)” (I.2 1094a21-23). If you are familiar with the distinction between per se and per accidens causes, what Aristotle is getting at here is that the relationship between the lower goods and the higher goods forms a per se final causal chain, and as such has an endpoint. If you are unfamiliar with this distinction, unfortunately space doesn’t not allow me to argue for this here, so you’ll just have to trust me.

Aristotle called these highest goods chief goods, and Aristotelians these days typically call them basic goods. Basic goods are desired for their own sake and not for the sake of another. Now, in simple things there might be only one basic good, but for many things there is more than one, and they can often be quite broad. David Oderberg, for instance, thinks the basic human goods are life, knowledge, friendship, work and play, appreciation of beauty, and religious belief and practice (The Structure and Content of the Good).

In some sense the basic goods
In some sense the basic goods “make up” the nature of a thing.

So how do we figure out what the basic goods of a thing are? This relates to the third thing to be said: the basic goods correspond to the various distinctive faculties something has according to its nature. After all, broadly speaking, being a human is an activity and the basic goods represent the broadest aspects of this activity by which we measure it good or bad. Given that the way a thing acts correspond to the faculties it has, it seems that the basic goods and faculties of a thing would correspond to each other.

Now, at this broad level it’s not always clear how we are to carve up reality, but we can make some comments that will help us on our way. First, it isn’t particularly informative to say that “given that humans are rational animals, the basic human goods must be rationality and animality”. What we’re looking for are the various aspects of what being a good rational animal involves. Second, the basic goods might overlap, but their faculties should not be wholly reducible to one another. This would be a clear sign that we’re not thinking at a broad enough level. Third, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics can be seen as his attempt at studying the basic goods by means of studying the various human virtues.

One clear example of a basic good, given our recent discussion about substantial activities, would be what Aristotle and Oderberg call “friendship”, which corresponds to our faculty for working together toward a common end. More on this another time.

Joy and hope

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In a previous post, I took joy to be happiness with respect to our ultimate good. We also spoke about two ways in which happiness is achieved: through the acquisition of a good or the continued possession of a good.

The Aristotelian inside me was unsatisfied with this, for we usually take happiness to be identical with the ultimate good. Clearly in the earlier post I was using the term in a less precise sense. After thinking about it a bit more I realised that what I actually meant by happiness was “pleasure” or “delight”. But then what is delight? Aquinas takes delight to be the appetite’s rest in good. Appetite, here, is the faculty with which we desire the good, and rest presumably involves the achievement of good (either by acquisition or continued possession).

So delight is to good as joy is to ultimate good. This leaves us free to use happiness in the Aristotelian sense, which pleases me greatly. Indeed, we can say that delight is to good as joy is to happiness.

Let’s take the account further. Hope can be taken as expectation with assent. That is, we expect an outcome to occur that we see as good. To compare this with alternatives: expectation with dissent is dread, doubting with assent is wishing, and unknowing (neither expecting nor doubting) with dissent is fear.

Consider hope with respect to our ultimate good.[1] It seems that this hope supports joy, and is to some extent necessary for it. That we’re looking forward to our ultimate good is clearly related to joy, which just is delight in our ultimate good. However, the expectation part is also important. After all, if in our life we contribute to something that we’re not expecting to achieve at the end of the day, then our efforts will seem to be in vain.[2] That the good is ultimate means that joy and hope involve good that is stable, that is, for continued (indeed, indefinite) possession. We don’t always desire goods in a way that we necessarily desire their continued possession. For example, we desire money for the sake of spending it. Because an ultimate good is not desired for the sake of something else, however, we necessarily desire its continued possession. Our joy, then, needs to be proportioned to (1) the goodness and (2) certainty of achieving our ultimate good as well as (3) the stability of that good.

Perhaps this is at the heart of the problem faced in Ecclesiastes. The Teacher is looking everywhere for an appropriate place for his hope, but finds nothing that is good, certain, and lasting.

Notes

  1. This is what the New Testament usually means by hope.
  2. Or ultimately meaningless. It is no mistake that the word in Ecclesiastes is translated as “meaningless” by some translations and “vanity” by others.

The good of others

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Previously we discussed the general notion of natural goodness, and saw that the natures of things determine what is good or bad for them. In particular, our nature as humans determines what is good or bad for us. We also saw that with humans our actions take on a moral significance to the extent that the ends or means willed in them are good or bad for us. For us; but what about others?

The answer, simply put, is that it is natural for us as humans to enter into various unions (or “communities”) wherein our well-being involves the well-being of others. We already saw a limited example of this in our previous post, where we said that “a lioness that nurtures her young is to that extent a good lioness, and one that fails to do so is to that extent bad or defective.” Aristotle gives a more general statement of this near the end of part 2 of his Politics:

The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.[1]

Once we unpack this, all will become clear.

Parts of a whole

Before we get there, we need to talk about parts and wholes (or unions) and how they relate. Well, that’s too broad: we don’t need a complete account of part-whole relations, since that can get scarily complicated.[2] We just need some basic insights. For instance, a part is good to the extent that it acts for the good of the whole. Or, to phrase this language of “ends,” some of the ends of a part are the ends of the whole.

Some examples might be of helpful at this point. First, consider parts of living things: an organ is bad when it consumes more blood than normal, thereby starving the other organs of needed resources. The same goes for parts of living things we don’t typically call “organs,” like the roots or leaves of a tree. Second, consider co-operative actions: two people are trying to lift up a car, where neither is capable of doing so by themselves. If either refuses to lift their share of the load, they are failing to be a good part of the whole. We might say that they are failing to “play their part.”[3]

In each case we see that the goodness of the part depends on its contribution to the good of the whole. In fact, we can say more about this. After all, part of the good for the whole is the good of all its parts (a good body has good organs, a good tree has good roots, a good co-operative action has good individual contributions). Since a good part is directed towards the good of the whole, it follows that it is also directed towards the good of the other parts.

A second insight about parts, which can also be seen from the above examples, is that parts, by themselves, are incomplete. Or, to put it another way, parts lack self-sufficiency the way their unions do not. Each of the organs in your body depends to some extent on the others and therefore cannot function (at least not for long) without some kind of mutual co-operation with them (that is, union with them). Similarly, neither of the people are by themselves able to lift the car, and therefore depend on each other’s co-operation to achieve their end (again, union). Because co-operating enables these otherwise incomplete members to achieve their ends, it is good for them to enter into these unions. Thus incompleteness of this kind is a mark of “partness,” and can help us identify things as parts without first having to know their wholes.

Our natural dependencies on others

So, in general, when something is directed towards an end which it, by itself, does not have sufficient power to achieve, then it is good for that thing to enter into the relevant union to achieve that end. More specifically, when something is, by nature, not self-sufficient, then it is natural (and therefore good) for that thing to become part of a whole. The point Aristotle is making above is that this is true, in particular, of humans.

We can begin to see this by starting at the smallest and most intimate type of union (or “community”) and moving to broader kinds of unions from there. Before we get there, though, we need a little set up: like any other living thing, part of what is good for us as humans is that we continue to exist.[4] But, of course, humans aren’t immortal and so we must continue our existence in a more general sense of continuing the existence of humanity as a whole, which we achieve through procreation.

Now, humans have the capacity for procreation but are not capable of procreating by themselves.[5] A man and a woman need to work together in a sexual union to begin the process of procreation. I say “begin” because the point of procreation is to produce humans, and not merely human bodies. Thus, procreation also involves bringing up and caring for our children, teaching them the skills they need (both intellectual and non-intellectual) to be good humans. The union in which the full process of procreation can take place, then, is the marital union between a husband and a wife.[6]

With the advent of children comes a broader community: the family.[7] Clearly, children depend on their parents in all kinds of ways relevant to their proper development. And given that it is good for parents to care for their children, they depend on their children’s co-operation which will usually be obedience of some form or another. The family, or household, is a community in which these needs are met, as well as various other everyday activities in which members of the family either help or co-operate in, such as “eating, [or] warming oneself at the fire, and others like these.”[8]

At a broader level, “when several families are united, and the [community] aims at something more than the supply of daily needs, the first society to be formed is the village.”[1] These broader needs might include things like buying food for eating, or buying wood for our fireplace, or some form of security, and so on. Note that when we use the term “village,” we’re using it in quite a general sense. We aren’t using it to refer specifically to one of those quaint towns in a rural area. Any collection of families united into a community directed towards more than daily needs will do. Used in this general sense, your extended family counts as a village![9]

At the broadest level we have the state (or “city”). This is “[w]hen several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing.”[1] Again, we mustn’t get caught up in the words being used. The important bit here is that the state is what we get when combine enough villages together to get a community that is pretty much a self-sufficient whole. And because it is self-sufficient, it’s natural to consider the state as the stopping point.

So, at each level we have various dependencies that are being met which cause the various members to come together as a community. There are also general dependencies, however, that apply at all levels of community: we depend negatively on other members of the communities not interfering with our achieving the goods set for us by nature, and positively on their co-operation in achieving these goods. Examples of the first kind would be our dependence on others not killing or harming us, not stealing property which we own, not coercing us into doing evil, and so on. Examples of the second would be any particular kind of assistance we need of them (which might differ based on the community we have in mind), help developing a virtuous character as opposed to a vicious one, and so on.

The good of others

Now, all the communities considered above were natural in the sense we’ve using the term. That is, it is part of our nature that we depend on others for procreation, that we depend on our children and parents, on other families, and on other villages. Even if we don’t ourselves procreate, we can’t help but form part of families, villages, and states. And even if we can’t so clearly distinguish between the various levels of communities (because of cultural or historical reasons, say), this doesn’t stop them existing and being natural for us as humans.

Since being part of these communities is natural for us, it is therefore (given our previous discussions) good for us. Recall also, from earlier, that it is good for parts to act for the good of the whole and the other parts. Applying both of these conclusions, it follows that it is good for us to act for the good of others in the various communities we form part of, as well as any common good peculiar to these communities.

Notes

  1. Aristotle, The Politics.
  2. Ross Inman, Substantial Priority: An Essay in Fundamental Mereology.
  3. You might not have noticed it, but these two examples actually illustrate two different senses in which parts can relate to their wholes. We’ll have more to say about this in a later post, but for now this difference isn’t relevant, since both examples also illustrate our first insight about parts and their ends.
  4. This actually follows from the general definition of life which is “the natural capacity of an object for self-perfective immanent activity. Living things act for themselves in order to perfect themselves, where by perfection I mean that the entity acts so as to produce, conserve and repair its proper functioning as the kind of thing it is – not to reach a state of absolute perfection, which is of course impossible for any finite being.” (Teleology: Inorganic and Organic, David Oderberg) In fact, continued existence is a good of every substance, but like before I restrict myself to living things. For the more general statement, see Oderberg’s paper titled Being and Goodness.
  5. “He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state of anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue…”[1]
  6. I pretty much just lost your interest if you have an insatiable hate for conservative ethics. Well, keep reading anyway. If you’d like some further reading on these topics, I can recommend Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition (particularly chapter 4), Alexander Pruss’ One Body, and the paper in [3].
  7. “Out of these two relationships between a man and a woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family.”[1] We skipped the master-slave bit, because of modern people’s propensity to misunderstand the sense it which it should be taken. I’m already saying enough “controversial” things in this post and I didn’t see any sense in adding more when it could be skipped.
  8. Aristotle says, “The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants.”[1] Aquinas, commenting on this, says, “among human acts some are performed every day, such as eating, warming oneself at the fire, and others like these, whereas other things are not performed every day, such as buying, fighting, and others like these. Now it is natural for men to communicate among themselves by helping one another in each of these two kinds of work. Thus he says that a household is nothing other than a certain society set up according to nature for everyday life, that is, for the acts that have to be performed daily.”
  9. “And the most natural form of the village appears to be that of a colony from the family, composed of children and grandchildren, who are said to be suckled ‘with the same milk.'”[1]

Links on living well

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I’ve come across two different links today that speak to the broad question of doing this whole “living” thing well:

  1. A blog post by Lydia McGrew in which she reminds us that “An irresistible urge to follow every ephemeral fad is not the mark of a life well-lived.”
  2. A TED talk by Barry Schwartz in which he reminds us that rules and incentives are not sufficient for living properly. What we really need is the virtue of wisdom. He closes with the words, “In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves.” (be sure to also check out this talk and this talk, both of which are also by Barry).

Go check them out. Won’t take too long.

Happiness and joy

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I was thinking about the difference between happiness and joy, considered psychologically. The tricky thing with accounting for the difference is that any account of these two has to explain why happiness and joy seem related, but nonetheless why one can rejoice (ie. express joy) in the face of suffering (that is, experiencing sorrow, which is contrary to happiness).

It seems to me that happiness is experienced in actively achieving a perceived good (experienced as pleasure), or in passively not lacking a perceived good (experienced as contentment), or in an action insofar as it is directed towards one of these goods. We’d say, then, that the object of happiness is the perceived good.

The object of joy, on the other hand, is that which is perceived as an ultimate good (ie. the good which all other goods are directed towards and which itself is not directed towards any good beyond itself). People typically organize their entire lives around what they perceive as their ultimate good.

So happiness and joy definitely have something in common: joy is just happiness with respect to our ultimate good. But it is possible that, in suffering, we nonetheless contribute to our ultimate good, and therefore we can feel joy in the face of suffering.

Natural and moral goodness

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“Cats have four legs.”

What an innocent statement. Who would’ve thought that unpacking it would lead us to a system of ethics?

Natural goodness

We start by noting that statements like this one don’t tell us some quantifiable fact about cats. Rather they tell us what features a cat has by virtue of which it is called healthy or flourishing. That is, healthy cats have four legs, they eat specific kinds of food, they have tails which are certain proportions to their bodies, they have ears structured in a certain way, they procreate, etc. Similarly, it is by virtue of lacking these features that we judge them unhealthy or sickly.

These types of statements have been called Aristotelian categoricals, and they apply to more than just cats. Indeed, each species of living organism has a collection of categoricals describing behaviours, capacities, and other features which specify what it is to be a healthy instance of that species, and the lacking of which contribute to it being an unhealthy instance of that species. Depending on our mood, we might use the words “essence” or “nature” or “kind” instead of “species”, but we would mean the same thing.

Go back to my claim that these statements aren’t quantifiable facts about the natures they describe. Why did I say that? Well, take the statement “cats have four legs.” Surely this isn’t a universal statement, since some cats have only three legs. Nor is it just an existential statement that some cats happen to have four legs. Nor is it (semantically or logically) equivalent to some statistical statement about cats, like “most cats have four legs.” For one thing, it seems plausible that most cats could be unhealthy. What if, say, all but seven cats suddenly ceased to exist, six of which were three legged? Surely those six cats that were previously unhealthy do not all of a sudden become healthy, just by virtue of what happened to the other cats in existence. For another thing, most cats could share features that don’t qualify as Aristotelian categoricals. For example, it could be that most cats are some shade of grey. But whether a cat is grey or ginger doesn’t affect it’s health. Nor would the colour of its eyes, or the size of its ears (within reason), or any number of other features that most cats could share.

So if these categoricals don’t convey quantifiable facts, then what kind of facts do they convey? It seems that they specify ends towards which an organism is directed by its nature, and as such they convey normative facts. That is, in growing and maturing there “are certain ends that any organism must realize in order to flourish as the kind of organism it is, ends concerning activities like development, self-maintenance, reproduction, the rearing of young, and so forth; and these ends entail a standard of goodness. Hence… an oak that develops long and deep roots is to that extent a good oak, and one that develops weak roots is to that extent bad and defective; a lioness that nurtures her young is to that extent a good lioness, and one that fails to do so is to that extent bad or defective; and so on.”[1] To use our cat example, a cat that grows to have four legs, to have an appetite for the right kinds of food, and to be such that it properly takes care of its young (to take three possible examples) would to those extents be a good or healthy cat. And if the cat failed to have one of those features (like only having three legs), it wouldn’t thereby cease being a cat, but rather it would to that extent be a defective or bad or unhealthy cat.

The goodness conveyed by these facts has been called “natural goodness,” since it is by realizing (or failing to realize) the ends set for an organism by its nature that it is called good (or bad or defective) as the kind of organism that it is.[2]

Moral goodness

This natural goodness is a much broader notion than what we might typically refer to as “moral goodness.” To see how this goodness takes on a moral significance with humans, we need to focus our discussion from the natures of living things in general to specifically human nature.

What is it to be a human? Well, for starters, humans are animals. And like other animals, humans have the capacity to sense particular objects in various ways. What follows upon this capacity for sensation is a capacity to be directed towards or away from the deliverances of our senses, which we call appetite.

But there’s more to human nature than mere animality. As Aristotle noted, humans are rational animals. That is, humans have the capacity to (i) abstract concepts from particular instances (like abstracting the concept of “humanness” from the particular human Socrates), (ii) make judgements about these concepts (like “All humans are mortal”), and (iii) connect these judgements to draw conclusions (as in “Socrates is a human, humans are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal”). We might call this capacity the intellect. It is by virtue of having intellects that we can form complex languages, engage in abstract thinking used in our various intellectual endeavours, or apprehend the good we were speaking about in the previous section.

We might draw a parallel between our various senses on the one hand, and our intellect on the other: analogous to how we see the table in front of us, we “see” the conclusion that follows from the premises or we “see” that having four legs is good for a cat. And just like our appetite follows upon our senses, so our will follows upon our intellect. That is, via our will we choose to pursue or avoid the things we “see” or grasp with our intellect. In particular, we can choose to pursue or avoid the good and evil set for us by nature. It is because of our ability to grasp this concept of goodness (and the corresponding concept of evil) and to choose to pursue it or avoid particular instances of it, that in humans this goodness takes on the moral significance that it has.

That is, like all other living organisms we humans have certain ends set for us by our nature. Furthermore, like other living organisms we are good to the extent that we realise these ends, and defective (or bad, or evil) to the extent that we fail to realise these ends. Unlike other living organisms, because of our rational capacities, these realisations or lack thereof take on moral significance to the extent that they are the products of our wills.

That our will is involved is crucial, for we cannot be held responsible for evils that are beyond our control. If Bob (a human) grew up with a leg deformation because of a genetic defect, then while this is an evil (since our natural end is to develop healthy legs), it would have no moral significance, since it was not a consequence of Bob’s willing this way or that. On the other hand, had Bob freely chosen to deform his leg for reasons completely independent of his flourishing as a human, this action would have moral significance. And this is because, in choosing voluntarily, Bob has willed an end or a means that is contrary to the ends set for him by his nature. That is, he has pursued evil instead of good.

So an action is morally good or evil to the extent that the end or means willed in that action are good or evil. We’ll explore this and related topics in upcoming posts.

Notes

  1. Edward Feser in Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation.
  2. This notion of natural goodness can be applied to more than merely living things, but we don’t need such a general notion for the purposes of this post. This business of exhibiting “ends” towards which things are “directed” is what Aristotle and Aristotelians call final causality.

An historical overview of natural law theory from Budziszewski

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In the preface to the second edition of J. Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide he gives a brief account of the history of natural law theory (a meta- and normative ethical theory very much at home in, but not limited to, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy). I liked it, so I’m quoting it at length:

Speaking in the broadest possible terms, the natural law tradition has passed through three historical phases and is now entering the fourth.

Phase one belonged to the philosophers. Ancient thinkers like Aristotle discovered that beings have natures, and tried to develop intellectual tools for thinking about them. Other thinkers, especially the Stoics — although this idea is present in embryo in Aristotle too — suggested that the principles of these natures could be expressed in terms of laws, real laws, which were somehow the work of the divine mind.

Phase two belonged to the theologians. Jewish thinkers worked out the implications of the ancient tradition that before God gave the Torah to the “sons” or descendants of Abraham, He had already given commandments to the sons of Noah, which means to the whole human race. Islamic thinkers of the now much less influential Mutazilite school maintained that good and evil are embedded “in things”, in the structure of creation. Christian thinkers explicitly appropriated the whole philosophical tradition. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger suggested before his accession tot he papacy, in the early days of Christianity, “in an environment teeming with gods”, when believers were asked to which god their God corresponded, “the answer ran: to none of them. To none of the gods to whom you pray but solely and alone to him to whom you do not pray, to that highest being of whom your philosophers speak.” He rightly remarks, “The choice thus made meant opting for the logos as against any kind of myth”, he pointedly adds, “By deciding exclusively in favor of the God of the philosophers and logically declaring this God to be the God who speaks to man and to whom one can pray, the Christian faith gave a completely new significance to this God of the philosophers… [T]his God who has been understood as pure Being or pure thought, circling round forever closed in upon itself reaching over to man and his little world… now appeared to the eye of faith as the God of men, who is not only thoughts of all thoughts, the eternal mathematics of the universe, but also agape, the power of creative love.” In the natural law, the power, love, and wisdom of this God were united, and in the grace of Christ the capacity to follow it was restored. Here I must repeat another point from the first edition: although the thinkers of these faith communities were mindful of their traditions, they were not hermetically sealed from each other. It was no accident that the period during which the thinkers of my faith achieved their greatest insights into natural law coincided with the period during which they were intensely and simultaneously engaged with the pagan thought of Aristotle, the Jewish thought of Maimonides, and the Mulsim thought of Averroës.

Phase three was dominated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. For various reasons — in some cases religious skepticism, in others fear of religious wars — they tried to sever the connections between religion and philosophy, between faith and reason. Their aim was to make natural law theory theologically neutral — a body of axioms and theorems that any intelligent, informed mind would consider obvious once they were properly presented, in fact equally obvious no matter what religion of wisdom tradition the mind followed, or whether it followed any at all. It wasn’t that the Enlightenment thinkers didn’t believe in God. Although some were atheists, others were Christian, of a sort. The problem was somewhat different, and it was twofold.

In the first place, they thought that one could know all the important things about man even while knowing very few of the important things about God. It was enough to work out His existence as a theorem; there was no further need to know His name, the history of His self-disclosure, His mighty deeds in history. In one way this was a regression to the Unknown God of the Athenians, to the “pure Being or pure thought, circling round for ever closed in upon itself without reaching over to man and his little world”. Yet like all apparent regressions, in another way it was not that at all; whenever we try to return to an earlier stage and reject what we have learned since then, we lose what we had then too. The problem with the Athenians was simple ignorance; they had never heard about agape. The problem with the thinkers of the Enlightenment was rejection; they had header about agape but decided that it wasn’t important. This was a kind of intellectual blindness, and it was progressive. Having lost their grip on agape, they came to lose their grasp of the logos too. Consequently, they felt a greater and greater need to make natural law theory to be not only theologically neutral but even ontologically neutral, independent of anything else that might be important. And this was impossible. In the second place, they thought that the ability of the mind to grasp the truth about man was independent of moral virtue. To put it another way, ethics was like mathematics. A scoundrel ought to grasp the virtue of purity just as easily as he grasped the Pythagorean theorem — and if he couldn’t, then perhaps that showed it simply wasn’t a virtue. Needless to say, this had a certain flattening effect on moral philosophy.

The reason we are entering a fourth phase is that the Enlightenment project collapsed. Modern man lost confidence in the possibility of an ethics that was both universal and yet somehow neutral. Some, relativists, retained the idea of ethics but abandoned the idea of universality; they thought each group has its own right and wrong. This reduces statecraft to sheer power, because someone’s right and wrong has to win and there is no way to arbitrate among them. Other, liberals, retained the idea of neutrality but abandoned the idea of ethics. They came to insist that the laws of the state must be justified in a way that is independent not only of theology and ontology, but of “one’s conception of the good”. Because this is impossible, what happens in practice is that their own views of the good prevail without challenge, just by pretending that they aren’t really views of the good.

In this nascent fourth phase, natural law thinkers are beginning to follow a different path. While retaining the idea of a universal ethics, they have abandoned the Enlightenment fallacy of neutrality. Is there a common ground? Yes, because there is a single human nature. But is the common ground a neutral ground? No, because not all views of God, not all views of the structure of reality, not all views of human nature itself are equally adequate, and some make it harder to see the common ground. The new breed of natural law thinkers also reject the fallacy that natural law is like mathematics. To see it well, one must have pure eyes, and this requires moral virtue. Here we enter, not a vicious circle, but what may be called a virtuous circle. The more adequately one has been shaped and formed by traditions and disciplines that conform to the natural law, the more clearly one can discern the underlying moral realities on which these disciplines are based.

Now let me draw some of the consequences. Future natural law philosophers will be free of the delusion that once can reason about natural law independently of how well one has been brought up, in what one places faith, or to what intellectual tradition one is loyal. Natural law theory is itself the product of a tradition, and it thrives better in the soil of some faiths than others. It may seem that this implies that the whole aspiration of natural law is a failure: that there is no universal ethics, that just because our roots suck up nourishment from different traditions, we have nothing to say to each other. On the contrary, what it really implies is that there must be a new way of speaking together. The Enlightenment thought we could speak with each other only by setting aside our traditions and regarding them as irrelevant — it was an antitraditional tradition, which could never look at itself in the mirror for fear of discovering the incoherency at its foundation. The truth is that we must speak with each other from within our traditions, because only these give us something to say to each other. As the first edition suggested, even the appeal to the generic presupposes the particular; for insight into what we hold common, we must fall back on what we do not hold in common. Consequently, rather than being divorced from theology, natural law theory must be reintegrated with it — not despite the desire to find common ground, but even because of it.

Clearly there are many thoughts to be fleshed out in the remainder of the book. I look forward to it.