Natural Law vs. Natural Law

Dan Mattson just published an answer in Crisis to my natural law articles, and I want to talk a little about his arguments and why, ultimately, I still don’t think a natural law approach is going to be effective in achieving cultural change on issues of sexual morality.

I want to start by noting that I don’t think we should jettison the natural law in moral theology – but there’s a significant difference between moral theology and popular ethics. Moral theology, which is deeply concerned with discovering and applying the principles of natural law, assumes several things that cannot be assumed in a conversation with secular culture:

a) that there is a rational teleology to nature

b) that this teleology derives from a Divine intent

c) that the Divine author inscribes his law in nature and on the human heart

If you don’t assume these things, the natural law tradition falls apart at the seams. This is why Cardinal Ratzinger chose not to appeal to it in his dialogue with secular philosopher Jürgen Habermas: “The natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the key issue in dialogues with the secular society and with other communities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in common and to seek the basis for consensus about the ethical principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society. Unfortunately, this instrument has become blunt. Accordingly I do not intend to appeal to it for support in this conversation. The idea of the natural law presupposed a concept of nature in which nature and reason overlap, since nature itself is rational. With the victory of the theory of evolution, this view of nature has capsized: nowadays, we think that nature as such is not rational, even if there is rational behavior in nature.” (The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, pp. 69-70).

Mattson is absolutely correct in pointing out that an explication of the natural law, as it relates to Catholic sexual ethics, can have the effect of helping people to see that Catholic sexual ethics are coherent, that they’re based on a rational and consistent model and do not just express the arbitrary whims of homophobic clerics. That was absolutely my experience of reading the Pontifical Council for the Family’s document On the Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality back when I was a young feminist atheist in high-school. I could see that the doctrine was internally coherent and that you couldn’t simply reverse the teaching on homosexuality without causing damage to the entire system of sexual ethics that was being proposed.

My conclusion? Well, that since Catholics seemed to believe in these bizarre premises that they should, as an expression of their right to freedom of belief, be allowed to teach them as part of their faith. As a liberal, I felt I could justly condemn hate speech – but it would have been a violation of my principles to forbid others from practicing their freedom of religion. Imposing the conclusions of that religious scheme on others through secular legislation, however, would have been a very different matter.

I also believe that Mattson’s approach, arguing from the natural law, is effective as a tool of catechesis. The natural law is a part of our faith, and when I criticize its use as a tool in public policy debates and combox wars with secular people, I’m not in any sense arguing that it should be abandoned within the Catholic tradition. Obviously, if you believe that there is a God, and that God is the source of the moral order, that human beings are made in His image and likeness, and that human reason is an imperfect mirror of Divine reason, that nature is His creation, and that the natural order reveals the mind of God, and so on, and so forth, then a belief in natural law follows. Whether such a belief could lead most Christians to accept (at least intellectually) the Church’s conclusions about sexual ethics is another question. However, the fundamental idea of the natural law is, I think, necessary to any kind of rational theism.

The difficulty is that when we are engaging in debate on a secular level, we’re butting heads with a conceptual scheme that is, in profound ways, at odds with traditional natural law. Moreover, we’re butting heads with a conceptual scheme that actually rejects traditional natural law arguments out of fidelity to the first principles of the natural law.

If you look at Aquinas, one of his central claims is that certain first principles of practical reasoning are innate – that is, all human moral thinking derives from these principles. The first, and most fundamental, is that we are to do good and avoid evil. But since this is so super basic that it functionally lacks content, Aquinas follows up with three more concrete moral truths which are inherent in all people:

1. The preservation of individual human life.

2. The preservation and continuation of the human species.

3. The pursuit of truth. (Aquinas specifies that this particularly concerns the truth about God – which is true enough, in that atheists would agree that it’s necessary to know the ‘truth’ that God is a fable.)

I can’t think of any moral system that actually rejects these principles wholesale. Even the most horrific moral atrocities are justified through an appeal to at least one of them: Machiavellian narcissism will prop itself up as an ethic of survival, appealing to the first; brutal eugenic practices have been justified as necessary for the good of the species; even nihilism presents itself as a cold, unflinching, ruthlessly honest gaze into the abyss of truth – namely the truth that there are no moral absolutes.

We simply can’t get away from these principles. All moral discourse appeals to them, and no moral claim can gain persuasive power unless it grounds itself by reference to at least one of these precepts. That’s a pretty resounding reason to accept that Aquinas has accurately defined the set of fundamental values that we’re appealing to when we talk about particular actions being ethical, or unethical.

The problem is that while these first principles are simple enough to outline, after that things get very sticky because each principle poses a question: What is the nature of the human person? What is the nature of society? What is the nature of truth? Depending on how you answer these questions you’re going to arrive at very different ethical conclusions even though you’re starting from the same basic premises.

The fundamental reason why the well-known “natural law arguments” against things like contraception and homosexuality don’t fly in popular discourses is that Christianity presents a fundamentally different view of human nature than that which is widely held in the secular world.

In Christian natural law discourse it makes sense to propose that certain parts of the human body are “designed” for particular purposes – because we assume that there is a Divine Creator who designed our bodies. Attempts to transfer this assumption into the secular sphere don’t work so well, because they essentially need a patch. You’re trying to get Thomistic software to run on a postmodern operating system, and it’s not really designed for that so it’s kind of glitchy and it crashes a lot.

In postmodern secular thought, human nature is understood to be undesigned, evolved and constantly evolving, not fixed, and for the most part particular (as opposed to universal.) Within the context of this idea of human nature, it makes literally no sense to say that any part of the body was “designed” with any particular end in mind. Since evolution does not have a teleological orientation, even if a certain organ evolved in order to fulfill a particular function, there’s no reason why it can’t be adapted to fulfill other, completely different functions as necessary.

According to a contemporary secular, evolutionary view of human nature, the human person stands as the sole possible source of moral values. These values take two forms: those which concern the survival and flourishing of the individual, and those which concern the survival and flourishing of the species. The former is secured through an appeal to personal autonomy (the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness is one of the most classic formulations of modern individualist ethics.) The latter is secured through an appeal to communal, socially constructed ideals which are transmitted throughout society by means of various educational, legal, bureaucratic, political and cultural systems and which are meant to safeguard the common good.

This atheistic evolutionary conception of human nature includes, of necessity, an acceptance that there is no higher moral order which naturally harmonizes the good of the individual and the good of society. Thus, artificial structures have to be developed and maintained in order to ease, as much as possible, the naturally occurring tensions and conflicts between individual and collective interests. The principle that the state should, to the greatest degree possible, enable individual liberty concerning the private behaviour or beliefs of citizens follows as a highly rational and pragmatic means of alleviating these tensions.

Hence the failure of natural law arguments against homosexuality in public policy debates and popular discourse. The principle of personal liberty follows from secular beliefs about the nature of the human person, whereas appeals to a fixed, natural purpose for human sexuality do not. While I’m sure that natural law arguments are deeply persuasive to some of the Christian youth in Mattson’s audiences, I doubt very much that they have the same persuasive power with those who don’t already accept the authority of religious truth claims. Used as instruments of public debate in a self-consciously pluralistic society, these arguments are indeed DOA.

(Just as a note of clarification, since this seems to have been widely misunderstood, I am speaking descriptively not prescriptively with respect to the function of natural law in public debate. I do not, for example, buy the argument that you can’t derive an ought from an is – to me it seems obvious that if you accept this as an axiom of logical reasoning you either deprive yourself of the ability to make meaningful or rational ought statements at all, or you divorce morality entirely from the realm of the real, both of which are unacceptable results. None the less, the belief that the “naturalistic fallacy” is a fallacy has had deep and widespread implications for moral thought over the past century. Similarly, my other points in this article and the ones preceding it are based on an observation of what the lay of the land is, and an analysis of what kind of discursive tactics we should be fielding. To say “We will find it difficult to deploy our heavy artillery effectively because the terrain is very muddy” is not the same as saying “heavy artillery is useless and should never be used.”)

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