Gentle readers, I have just posted a new item to the Read Articles page of this website:  “Why Natural Law Is for Everyone” (National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Winter 2023).  You can go directly to the article, or see the whole Read Articles page.  A snippet:

Although I have spoken of the shared moral sense of the plain person, the actual theory of natural law is not so plain.  In fact, it can be abstruse.  This is one of the things that upsets some critics, for if there really is a common moral sense, then apart from the sheer joy of knowledge, why do we need a theory of it at all?  People do not have to be able to analyze what natural lawyers call the procreative and unitive goods just to avoid cheating on their spouses, do they?  Well, no, just as they do not have to know much about what electricians call alternating current just to avoid sticking their fingers into wall sockets.  And yet there are times when it does help to reflect on the natural goods that shape the norms of marriage -- just as there are times when it helps to know something about electricity ….

A wise natural law thinker will not teach natural law to me in a bookish way.  He may not even weigh me down with anything as academic as a “theory of natural law,” although that theory will always be in the background.  First he will remind me of things that I know that I know -- for example, the sweetness of bringing children into the world.  Then he will dredge from the depths of my mind things I know at some level but may not notice that I know -- for example, that a true union between spouses requires the complementary difference of the two sexes.  Finally, he will be on the alert for smokescreens and self-deceptions which have to be dispersed, for it is one thing for me to know something -- and another to admit to myself that I know it.  My desire not to admit it makes the natural law a scandal or stumbling block.

Considering how controversial the idea of natural law has become in our own day -- “Aren’t we beyond all that now?” -- and how little most educated people even remember about the tradition, perhaps the best way for this essay to proceed is simply to call to mind challenges and respond to them.  We find that although from time to time there are new objections, most of the same old ones keep rolling around, as though they had not been refuted over and over.

Query:

An author I’m reading asks “Can reason get us to divine truth?”  He answers “No,” saying the god of natural law is not the true God.  Quoting from the Lutheran theologian Karl Barth, he says the god of natural law is an idol, which cuts us off from the true God because the Redeemer is discoverable only through revelation.  He argues that “whatever is found by human reason is merely a human invention.”  What do you say to this?

Reply:

For all I know, your author might be a clever fellow, but concerning natural law, I’m afraid that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  His argument rests on a fallacy of equivocation, for the question “Can reason get us to divine truth?” can be taken in either of two ways, and they don’t have the same answer.  Unfortunately, he mixes them up.

If the question is taken to mean “Can reason, by itself, tell us anything about God?” then the answer is “Obviously, yes,” and despite his claim to be relying on revelation instead of human reason, this is the biblical answer too.  St. Paul knew well that arrogance about the products of our intellects leads to pride and error, but he never told us not to use our intellects.  When he criticized the pagans, his criticism wasn’t that they couldn’t know anything about God, but that they suppressed what they knew: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.   Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”  He also believed that one of the things even a pagan can know through reason is the basics of moral law, for he says a little later, “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them.”

But if the question is taken to mean “Can reason, by itself, tell us what we need to know about God in order to be redeemed, in order to be forgiven of our sins and reconciled to Him?” then the answer is “Obviously, no.”  Reason is a great gift, but it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know, and natural law thinkers don’t claim that it does.  We need God’s revelation – and He has given it to us.  We need Him to come among us – and in Jesus Christ, He was made man.  We need Him to do something about our debt of sin and guilt – and He has paid the price by dying in our place on the Cross.

I must also protest that the expression “the god of natural law” is profoundly misleading.  Natural law gives us an incomplete picture of the same God that revelation portrays more adequately.  They are not different gods.

But wait!  If revelation portrays Him more adequately than natural law does, then why not just study revelation and do without natural law?  We can’t, for two reasons.

The first reason is that revelation itself speaks of natural law as real, for example in the quotation from St. Paul which I gave above.  If natural law were useless, then why would God give it to us, and why would He point out that He had done so?

The second reason is that revelation presupposes the knowledge of natural law.  For if we didn’t already have its precepts written on our hearts, then the additional instruction God gives us in words wouldn’t make sense to us.  For example, in the prologue to the Ten Commandments, God gets the attention of the Hebrew people by reminding them of what He did for them: “"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  But had He ever commanded in words, “Thou shalt have gratitude for good things done for you”?  No.  Then how did they know that they had incurred the debt of gratitude?  Because He had written the law of gratitude on their hearts.  It is a precept of natural law.

Barth’s idea that if we know what reason tells us about God, then we will be hostile to the revealed truth about God, is also profoundly unbiblical.  If it were true, then why would our missionary model, St. Paul, have preached as he did in Athens?  The book of Acts depicts him as commending the Athenians for being religious, quoting their own pagan writers, and even calling attention to one of their altars, which was intriguingly inscribed “To an Unknown God.”  Then he said, in effect, “Let me tell you who He is.”

If Paul had followed Barth’s advice, he wouldn’t have done any such thing.  Obviously the pagans didn’t know enough – but they did know that there was something beyond the supposed gods of their mythology, and he offered to show it to them.  We see then that Paul alluded to what the Athenians already knew by reason just because it might open their minds to revelation.  In fact, Holy Scripture says that he did win some converts that day, including the woman Damaris and the man Dionysius, who later became bishop of Athens.

To finish off my reply, let me comment on your author’s remark that whatever is found by human reason is merely a human invention.  This prompts at least three questions.

The first:  If reason is so useless, then why does your author suppose God gave it to us?

The second:  If everything found by reason is merely a human invention, something not discovered but made up, then would he say that two plus two might just as well be called five?

And the third:  If reasoning is futile, then why is he trying so hard to reason us out of using it?

Query:

I’ve been thinking of the ethics of voting for the lesser evil.  The Trump/Vance campaign wants to mandate free IVF coverage.  The National Catholic Register points out that that more embryos are destroyed each year by way of IVF than by way of abortion.  In a post-Christian, Hobbesian society, this seems like a sure-fire way to turn the children who survive IVF into commodities.  Can voting for candidates who actively seek to degrade the meaning of sex in this sort of way be justified as a lesser evil, compared to the overt celebration of abortion on the Harris/Walz side of things?

Reply:

To paraphrase Joseph de Maistre, a nation gets the candidates that it deserves – and this is now happening with a vengeance.  You may be interested in this October 2020 post, which works through the logic of choosing lesser evils.  But to respond just to your three points:

You’re right that myriads of unwanted embryos are discarded after IVF.  Even so, it is possible to perform IVF without killing any of them – in fact some activists propose reforms such as requiring practitioners not to fertilize so many ova in the first place.  By contrast, abortion just is killing.  Killing and abortion cannot be separated.

You’re right that the intention in IVF is perverse.  But although it is a grave moral injury to the child to be conceived outside the loving embrace of his parents, it is nothing like killing him.  Most people who ask for IVF do so because they want to have a child (and for some reason refuse to consider adoption).  But in abortion, the aim is the child’s destruction.

Finally, you’re right about turning children into commodities, because IVF converts procreation into something more like factory production.  But at least in IVF the little human “products” are allowed to live, and perhaps even cherished.  I can’t think of a more drastic and terrible way to turn babies into commodities than to sell their shredded tissue, which is more and more what abortion is about these days.

Besides, it isn’t as though the Harris/Walz team doesn’t believe in IVF.  And let’s not forget that although they and their media flacks say it isn’t true, they aggressively and “joyfully” promote not only every sort of abortion at every stage, but even the killing of babies already born.  Last year, for example, Governor Walz signed a bill which removed previous statutory language in requiring medical personnel to “preserve the life and health” of babies born alive, replacing it with language requiring them merely to “care” for them.  This means that although you don’t have to do a damn thing to keep the babies alive, you should keep them “comfortable” as they gasp out their last breaths.  Yes, this is the standard of medical practice, not only in Minnesota but in a number of other states too.  And yes, this is actually being done.

So for me, the particular choice of lesser and greater evils before us does not seem difficult -- just painful.  Promoting IVF isn’t remotely comparable to cheerleading for abortion and infanticide.

The danger for the future is very great, and I agree with Edward Feser that anyone who does recognize the Trump/Vance ticket as the lesser evil must also vigorously protest the Republican Party’s betrayal of its former commitments.  His suggestions about how to pull off such a balancing act deserve close consideration.

Even a thick-skulled scholar can sometimes learn something new.

I wrote in 2016 that “A political movement can be based on shared virtues, shared interests, or shared passions.  The Founders of our republic hoped for the first, expected the second, and feared the third.  They desired the citizens to elect persons of virtue.  They tried to pit competing interests against each other so that none could overwhelm the common good.  As to passion, their best hope was to keep it from bursting the dams, and if it broke forth nonetheless, at least to delay decision until it dissipated:  For passion, once released, is a torrent that scorns boundary and restraint.”

I was concerned about Mr. Trump, I said, because rather than trying to direct the flood, he rode it like someone surfing a tidal wave, “slipping and skidding across the sloping water, now this way, now that, at each moment contradicting what he had said just a moment before.”  And I blamed his allies, saying it would be a wonder if they didn’t drown in the torrent.

There is a lot not to like about the former president, and I will have more to say about that next week.  Today I want to discuss only the rise in the political temperature.  Since I still think passion is deadly dangerous in politics, what in my thinking about it has changed?

The first change has been recognition that although Mr. Trump catches most of the blame for making politics hotter, most of the vitriol during the last eight years has come from the other side.  Why does he catch more blame?  That’s an interesting question.  A reason I didn’t sufficiently appreciate in 2016 is that his opponents lie with utter abandon about what he has actually says.  For example, they claim he said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis at an explosive demonstration in Charlottesville, though they know he said “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”  The same smearers endlessly reiterate the many-times-discredited claim that he threatened civil war if he wasn’t elected, though in context he was obviously speaking of a “bloodbath” of automotive jobs, not loss of lives.

Another reason is that Mr. Trump’s tweets and name calling make it easier than it might otherwise have been to believe the more outlandish claims about him.  Some of his raillery is merely hilarious, like his nickname “Evita” for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.  On the other hand, calling Gavin Newsom “Governor Newscum,” is over the top.  Yet despite his excesses, it's difficult to see how any of Mr. Trump’s satirical remarks are remotely comparable to the despicable things he himself is called, or to the numerous demands by his opponents that he be “eliminated.”  Shades of Tony Soprano!  More than one entertainer has won laughs and approval by displaying what is supposed to look like his bloody severed head.  After the first assassination attempt, a Democratic congressional aide expressed the wish that the shooter would “get some target practice so you don’t screw up next time.  Oops, I didn’t say that.”  The aide prefaced the remark, as such people always do, with the words “I don’t condone violence, but.”  Sure, you don’t.

Compounding these two reasons is strategic misdirection.  When some people at a rally whom Mr. Trump encouraged to demonstrate peacefully got out of hand, breaking and entering the capitol building, this was called an insurrection.  It was a brief riot, to be sure.  But if you want to use the word “insurrection,” you should apply it to the thousands of thugs all over the country just a few short months earlier who occupied downtown areas for weeks, terrorizing innocents, looting businesses, and setting fire to police stations, all with the enthusiastic praise of the entire woke establishment.  Apparently Mr. Trump’s opponents want even more of this sort of thing, but only provided that their own partisans do it.  Responding to his policies, Nancy Pelosi said “I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.”  Not to worry, Mrs. Pelosi deplores violence too.  Of course she does.

The second change in my thinking has been recognition that although passion in politics is dangerous, trying to pen it up without an outlet is dangerous too.  For years, the slow simmer of the people to whom Mr. Trump appeals has been coming to a boil.

They resent being called “phobes” of one sort or another because they want their children to be safe and not taught to celebrate sexual deviance, they are tired of being called “racists” because they want criminals to be detained and the borders to be policed, and they are weary of being called “deplorables” because they don’t want their government to become ever bigger, more arbitrary, and more intrusive.  They are insulted that the government tries to bribe them by taking their money and promising to give some of it back, frightened that the law is sicced on parents who speak peacefully at school board meetings, and furious because they think they have been lied to – and not just by the other side.

For years, the strategy of most Republican leaders toward all this grievance has been to bottle it up.  To this day, politicians of an older stripe, like Mitch McConnell, who seems to be a decent man, don’t seem to grasp why people are angry at all.  The old joke about the Republican leadership was that it advocated “the same, but less.”  Despite the real differences between the parties, many of today’s voters wonder only about the “but less.”

Although I have always sympathized with the frustration of these voters, what I didn’t fully appreciate in 2016 was what happens if such frustration is given no outlet.  Mr. Trump seems to them to provide one.  His supporters may think his mouth is too big, but they don’t mind a big mouth if it gives them a voice.  He says in public what they think in private.

It’s all well and good to warn about explosions of passion, as I did and still do, but the longer resentment is bottled up, the more explosive it may be when it does burst forth.  Better a little electoral passion now, when it aspires to reform, than later, when it really could become insurrectionist.

The Left has already crossed that Rubicon.

Some people, like the late John Rawls, say that we should set aside our religious and philosophical disagreements – our “comprehensive doctrines,” he calls them -- for the sake of practical agreement.  Others say that we can’t do that, and that it’s futile to try.

Can we, or can’t we?  It depends on what you mean.

I can usually reach agreement about quite a few practical matters with an everyday materialistic atheist.  For example, he will probably agree with me that murder is wrong, even though I think God exists and he doesn’t, and even though he thinks matter is all there is but I don’t.  If this sort of thing weren’t possible, I don’t see how we could even live in the same society.

Notice, though, that this practical agreement isn’t philosophically or theologically neutral.  The very idea of a “right” and a “wrong” is itself a profound point of philosophy and theology, even if the other fellow doesn’t recognize the fact.  Very often, he doesn’t recognize it.  For example, sometimes people tell me they don’t see why there has to be a lawgiver for there to be a moral law, or why a materialist can’t have a conscience.

And I agree with them – in part.  A person doesn’t have a conscience just because he holds a theory which says that there is such a thing as conscience.  He can’t help having one, even if his theory can’t account for it.  It belongs to him as a human being.

Nevertheless, if his theory has no room for it, he has a problem.  If, as a matter of astronomical theory, I denied that there was a sun, I would still see light and dark, but I would be in an awkward position, for with no source of light, how there can even be a light and dark?  There shouldn’t be -- but there is!  How awkward.

Now if someone called the awkwardness of my view to my attention, I could do either of several things.  I could change my mind, admitting that there must be a source of light after all – or I could change in the other direction, deciding that since there isn’t any source of light, my perception of a difference between light and dark must be an illusion.

In the same way, if, as a matter of religion or metaphysics, I denied that there is a moral lawgiver, I may still experience the weight of moral law, like Raskolnikov.  If I didn’t acknowledge any authority of which conscience is the voice, I might still hear its voice.  And if I thought matter is all there is, I might still, despite myself, perceive a difference between right and wrong, both of which are nonmaterial.  My perceptions and experiences wouldn’t go away just because of my philosophy. 

But here too I face a choice.  I might try to make these perceptions and experiences go away.  For even if it is true that my having a conscience doesn’t depend on which theory I hold, it doesn’t follow that I have a well-formed conscience.  The fellow who says light and dark are illusory will probably blunder into all sorts of things that his eyes tell him to avoid.  The fellow who says right and wrong are illusory will probably allow himself all sorts of bad conduct that his conscience warns him against.

There is also the problem of what his conscience says.  If the classical theory of conscience is correct, then there are certain first principles we “can’t not know.”  For example, Thomas Aquinas maintains that deep down everyone really knows the wrong of murder.  But in the first place we may try to convince ourselves that we don’t really know what we know, for we humans are unusually capable of self-deception.  In the second place we may go badly wrong about the details.  For example, I may acknowledge the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life, but say that you aren’t innocent because you’re descended from people who long ago took my ancestor’s land.  And in the third place, even if deep down I know that even that isn’t true, I may not allow myself to admit it.

Natural law is a fact, pressing upon us by its own weight, like gravity.  The theory comes afterward and explains it.  Unfortunately, this home truth doesn’t make it unimportant to have the theory.  Although people who don’t understand how it is with heavy objects may not often walk off the edges of cliffs, they may have a very hard time making buildings that don’t fall down – and although people who deny the natural law may not lose human society altogether, they will probably live wretchedly.

These difficulties have not been so great that people have never been able to form communities and live together, but the quality of the communities they form is another matter.  The Aztecs had law and government, but they also practiced the ritual murder of captives taken in war.  Modern societies which recognize what the Aztecs did as murder nevertheless cut themselves exceptions for the very old, the very young, and the very weak, and the cut-outs are getting bigger.  It isn’t that we can’t reach practical agreement.  The problem is that the agreements we reach are increasingly perverse.

So rather than asking whether we can set aside our religious and philosophical disagreements for the sake of practical agreement -- as though this were a yes-or-no question – we ought to ask how much religious and philosophical agreement about which matters is necessary for what kinds of practical agreement.

It may be that no abstract answer to this question is possible.  Can we reach practical agreement about this or about that?  Perhaps we can find out only by trying.

But what if one of the points of religious and philosophical disagreement is whether we even should try?  Let’s not suppose that religion and philosophy can simply be set aside.