From time to time in my graduate seminars, I used to pause to say, “Now that would make a good research question.”  By a good question, I didn’t mean “What did so-and-so think about such-and-such?” but “What is the truth about such-and-such?”  Sure, it helps to find out what other people have thought.  That’s how we learn.  But finding out what other people have thought is not the purpose of philosophy.

Here is a short list of questions I think students and scholars ought to be asking about natural law.  Many more could be added.  Feel free.

The ancients thought we don’t really understand what a thing is – not just an artifact, such as a clock, but a natural thing, such as the liver -- unless we can tell four things about  it:  Its form, what it is made of, how it came to be, and what it is for.  For many thinkers, the last one is the sticking point.  “Aren’t purposes in the eye of the beholder?” they ask.  But no, a thing’s purpose is something that it does, such that if it didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a reason for it to exist at all.  The heart exists to pump blood; anger exists to arouse us to defend endangered goods; mind exists to deliberate actions and to find out what is true; and the sexual powers exist to turn the wheel of the generations and bond the procreative partners.  So far, so good, but the natural purposes of many things apart from us are still obscure.  What, for example, is the purpose of a fox?  And don’t tell me “the pleasure of the English lord in hunting him.”  Is this even a useful question?

Besides paying attention to natural purposes, the ancients also paid attention to natural meanings.  Only recently have a few natural law thinkers, such as John Paul II, once again begun to take natural meanings seriously.  What would happen if we all took them more seriously?  We sometimes imagine that anything can mean anything, but try to view a tender kiss as signifying hatred; you can’t do it.

What are the varieties of moral self-deception?  I can think of several.  We make excuses; we try not to think of certain facts; we try not to avoid certain lines of reasoning; we avoid people who might make us aware of having done wrong.  But what other varieties are there?

We sometimes speak as though reasoning about what is the case were independent of reasoning about what to do.  Different from each other, yes; independent of each other, no.  True, a bad man who does bad things may be very good at, say, proving geometrical theorems.  Yet we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that a bad man can be a great mathematician.  After all, if he is bad enough, he may be unteachable.  Or he may ignore evidence that his proof is faulty.  Or he may take credit for other people’s proofs.  He may even concoct fallacious proofs of what he knows to be false.  If he is a moral philosopher, then in order to justify his wrongdoing, he may try to prove that it’s really good.  In what ways are “practical” reasoning (what to do) and “theoretical” reasoning (what is the case) related – and in what ways are they not?

Of course some truths are self-evident, and this helps.  We don’t believe two plus two are four just because we have been told that they are, but because we can see for ourselves.  The Golden Rule has that quality; so do many other moral truths.  So which truths are self-evident, anyway?

That question leads to yet another.  Many people think a truth can’t be self-evident unless everyone agrees to it, but there is nothing to which everyone agrees.  Others think a truth can’t be self-evident unless it literally can’t be doubted, but there is nothing which can’t be doubted.  As the older natural law thinkers recognized, a truth may be evident in itself, yet not evident to us.  What must happen, in order that what is evident in itself may become evident to you and me?  What else must happen, in order to admit to ourselves that it is evident to us?  And how does this bear on the craft of teaching?

If the grasp of what ought to be evident to you and me depends partly on our having good character – as seems to be the case -- then we will not be able to reason very well unless we have already been trained and disciplined in the virtues.  But in that case, I can’t first decide for myself everything about what is and isn’t virtuous, and only then begin to train myself in the virtues.  I have to have some degree of virtue already, or I can’t discern the fine points of what is virtuous and what isn’t.  This fact implies that even sound reasoning depends to some extent on authority, for someone has to help me develop the rudiments of virtue.  How then can we choose good authorities – or, to put it another way, good teachers?

When psychologists say sociopaths have no conscience, they speak inconsistently.  We may grant that sociopaths lack appropriate emotions about moral wrong.  No matter what they have done, they don’t experience the feeling of remorse.  Traditionally, though, conscience was viewed not in terms of what we feel, but in terms of what we know.  What do sociopaths actually know about right and wrong, and how does this affect their culpability?  After all, they are sometimes indignant, which is different from being annoyed because it implies wrong on the other partys fault.  Moreover, they often construct elaborate rationalizations for bad deeds, and you have to know something to do that.

Speaking of culpability, I have been thinking lately of the Lindsay Clancy case.  Can the insanity defense be rehabilitated in criminal law, or is it a lost cause?  Literally not knowing the difference between right and wrong is an absurd criterion.  I may kill you because I hallucinate that you are a lion rather than another human being, and in that case, no, I am not culpable.  But I cannot possibly hallucinate that murdering a human being is in itself a good thing rather than an evil one.  This is a natural law question, because natural law is the measure of the actions of free and intelligent beings who act not just from impulses but for reasons.  We can’t talk about natural law unless we know how reason works.

Some thinkers imagine that natural law reasoning should be “neutral” with respect to theology -- independent of truths about God, for example whether He exists and what He is like.  This couldn’t be so, for if there is a God, then we have a natural duty to obey and adore Him, and if He is the ultimate source of good, then an act which cannot be directed to Him cannot possibly be right.  How much about God, then, must a good natural law thinker know?

Ancient Christians, and pagans too, included in their account of natural law the difference between the naturally seemly and unseemly, the naturally glorious and base, and the naturally beautiful and ugly.  Marcus Tullius Cicero maintains that the virtue of decorum lies in conduct which accords with the dignity of man as a rational being, raised above the beasts.  St. John Chrysostom says that speaking abusively is as filthy as a dog eating his vomit.  St. Paul asks, “Does not nature itself teach you that long hair is the glory of a woman?”  Today, we imagine that opinions about things like the glorious, the filthy, and the decorous result solely from cultural conditioning.  But that assumption seems unreasonable.  How might our reasoning about natural law be enriched by admitting that they aren’t?  And how can one go about making arguments about what is decorous, what is glorious, and and what is beautiful?

BOOK SALE

Now through November 30th, Wipf and Stock, the publisher of my book The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man, is offering the book at a 50% discount, along with with free Media Mail shipping, using code CONFSHIP.  You apply the discount code at checkout.

Here’s the direct link to my Wipf and Stock author page, which includes the link to the book.  The information about me on the page is quite a bit out of date, but so what.