Why do you call anything the natural purpose of anything?
Why do we call steering the purpose of your car's steering wheel? Because in the first place it does steer the car, and in the second place that fact is necessary to the explanation of why the car has one.
At a conference several weeks ago, a federal judge told me that some of the defendants in his court weep -- not when they hear their sentence, which would not be surprising, but when they hear the pre-sentence report.
You natural law thinkers seem to be confused about whether natural law comes from God, from nature, from conscience, or from reason.
Mondays are reserved for the perplexities of students.
Question:
If the most general principles of the natural law are at some level known to everyone, why is it so incredibly easy to disobey them?
Reply:
I commented yesterday that widespread cultural adjustment to nihilism has happened before, for Buddhism is the nihilism of the East.
Western nihilism is different. We don’t follow the Noble Eightfold Path, because we no longer admire anything noble. Despite a few superman pretensions, ours is a nihilism for the vulgar.
Nihilism is the belief that everything is meaningless. Usually this belief is coupled with the view that nothing we perceive is even real – that the world is a mocking veil of illusion.
