WEBVTT NOTE 1. Natural Law and Reason 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.520 Part I. Introduction. Natural Law. Chapter I. Natural Law and Reason. 2 00:00:13.520 --> 00:00:19.080 Among intellectuals who consider themselves scientific, the phrase the nature of man is 3 00:00:19.080 --> 00:00:25.880 apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. Man has no nature, is the modern rallying 4 00:00:25.880 --> 00:00:45.880 and Typical of the Sentiment of Political Philosophers Today was the assertion of a distinguished political theorist some years ago, before a meeting of the American Political Science Association, that man's nature is a purely theological concept that must be dismissed from any scientific discussion. 5 00:00:45.880 --> 00:01:00.880 In the controversy over man's nature and over the broader and more controversial concept of natural law, both sides have repeatedly proclaimed that natural law and theology are inextricably intertwined. 6 00:01:00.880 --> 00:01:14.880 As a result, many champions of natural law, in scientific or philosophic circles, have gravely weakened their case by implying that rational philosophical methods alone cannot establish such a law, 7 00:01:14.880 --> 00:01:20.440 that theological faith is necessary to maintain the concept. 8 00:01:20.440 --> 00:01:25.480 On the other hand, the opponents of natural law have gleefully agreed, since faith in 9 00:01:25.480 --> 00:01:31.200 the supernatural is deemed necessary to believe in natural law, the latter concept must be 10 00:01:31.200 --> 00:01:37.280 tossed out of scientific secular discourse and be consigned to the arcane sphere of the 11 00:01:37.280 --> 00:01:39.440 divine studies. 12 00:01:39.440 --> 00:01:45.080 In consequence, the idea of a natural law founded on reason and rational inquiry has 13 00:01:45.080 --> 00:01:47.920 been virtually lost. 14 00:01:47.920 --> 00:01:54.720 The believer in a rationally established natural law must then face the hostility of both camps, 15 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:59.600 the one group sensing in this position an antagonism toward religion, and the other 16 00:01:59.600 --> 00:02:05.680 group suspecting that God and mysticism are being slipped in by the back door. 17 00:02:05.680 --> 00:02:11.440 To the first group, it must be said that they are reflecting an extreme Augustinian position, 18 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:16.520 which held that faith, rather than reason, was the only legitimate tool for investigating 19 00:02:16.520 --> 00:02:20.080 man's nature and man's proper ends. 20 00:02:20.080 --> 00:02:27.720 In short, in this Fideist tradition, theology had completely displaced philosophy. 21 00:02:27.720 --> 00:02:33.620 The Thomist tradition, on the contrary, was precisely the opposite, vindicating the independence 22 00:02:33.620 --> 00:02:51.320 If belief in a systematic order of natural laws open to discovery by man's reason is 23 00:02:51.320 --> 00:02:58.500 per se anti-religious, then anti-religious also were St. Thomas and the later scholastics, 24 00:02:58.500 --> 00:03:02.840 as well as the devout Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius. 25 00:03:02.840 --> 00:03:08.560 The statement that there is an order of natural law, in short, leaves open the problem of 26 00:03:08.560 --> 00:03:14.280 whether or not God has created that order, and the assertion of the viability of man's 27 00:03:14.280 --> 00:03:19.800 reason to discover the natural order leaves open the question of whether or not that reason 28 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:22.760 was given to man by God. 29 00:03:22.760 --> 00:03:28.600 The assertion of an order of natural laws discoverable by reason is by itself neither 30 00:03:28.600 --> 00:03:32.680 pro nor anti-religious. 31 00:03:32.680 --> 00:03:38.300 As this position is startling to most people today, let us investigate this Thomistic position 32 00:03:38.300 --> 00:03:40.300 a little further. 33 00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:45.340 The statement of absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence 34 00:03:45.340 --> 00:03:51.540 of God was implicit rather than flatly asserted in St. Thomas himself. 35 00:03:51.540 --> 00:03:56.940 But like so many implications of Thomism, it was brought forth by Suarez and the other 36 00:03:56.940 --> 00:04:01.360 brilliant Spanish scholastics of the late 16th century. 37 00:04:01.360 --> 00:04:07.040 The Jesuit Suarez pointed out that many scholastics had taken the position that the natural law 38 00:04:07.040 --> 00:04:14.320 of ethics, the law of what is good and bad for man, does not depend upon God's will. 39 00:04:14.320 --> 00:04:19.960 Indeed, some of the scholastics had gone so far as to say that, even though God did not 40 00:04:19.960 --> 00:04:25.960 exist or did not make use of his reason or did not judge rightly of things, if there 41 00:04:25.960 --> 00:04:31.700 There is in man such a dictate of right reason to guide him, it would have had the same nature 42 00:04:31.700 --> 00:04:34.480 of law as it now has. 43 00:04:34.480 --> 00:04:42.000 Or, as a modern Thomist philosopher declares, if the word natural means anything at all, 44 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:48.360 it refers to the nature of a man, and when used with law, natural must refer to an ordering 45 00:04:48.360 --> 00:04:53.760 that is manifested in the inclinations of a man's nature, and to nothing else. 46 00:04:53.760 --> 00:05:02.880 Hence, taken in itself, there is nothing religious or theological in the natural law of Aquinas. 47 00:05:02.880 --> 00:05:12.960 Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius declared, in his Dei Uri Belli Ac Pacis, 1625, 48 00:05:12.960 --> 00:05:18.080 What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that 49 00:05:18.080 --> 00:05:24.520 which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God. 50 00:05:24.520 --> 00:05:30.880 And again, measureless as is the power of God, nevertheless it can be said that there 51 00:05:30.880 --> 00:05:35.400 are certain things over which that power does not extend. 52 00:05:35.400 --> 00:05:41.560 Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not make four, so he cannot cause 53 00:05:41.560 --> 00:05:47.040 that which is intrinsically evil be not evil. 54 00:05:47.040 --> 00:05:49.040 John Trev concludes that, 55 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:54.040 Grotius' definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary. 56 00:05:54.040 --> 00:06:01.040 When he maintains that natural law is that body of rules which man is able to discover by the use of his reason, 57 00:06:01.040 --> 00:06:07.040 he does nothing but restate the scholastic notion of a rational foundation of ethics. 58 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:11.040 Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that notion, 59 00:06:11.040 --> 00:06:17.360 which had been shaken by the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of thought. 60 00:06:17.360 --> 00:06:22.600 When he declares that these rules are valid in themselves, independently of the fact that 61 00:06:22.600 --> 00:06:30.320 God willed them, he repeats an assertion which had already been made by some of the schoolmen. 62 00:06:30.320 --> 00:06:36.340 Grotious aim, Dontrev adds, was to construct a system of laws which would carry conviction 63 00:06:36.340 --> 00:06:42.980 in an Age in Which Theological Controversy Was Gradually Losing the Power to Do So. 64 00:06:42.980 --> 00:06:49.940 Grotius and his juristic successors, Pufendorf, Borlamacqui and Fattel, proceeded to elaborate 65 00:06:49.940 --> 00:06:55.940 this independent body of natural laws in a purely secular context, in accordance with 66 00:06:55.940 --> 00:07:01.740 their own particular interests, which were not, in contrast to the school men, primarily 67 00:07:01.740 --> 00:07:03.060 theological. 68 00:07:03.060 --> 00:07:10.220 Indeed, even the 18th century rationalists, in many ways dedicated enemies of the scholastics, 69 00:07:10.220 --> 00:07:17.380 were profoundly influenced in their very rationalism by the scholastic tradition. 70 00:07:17.380 --> 00:07:24.540 Thus let there be no mistake, in the Thomistic tradition natural law is ethical as well as 71 00:07:24.540 --> 00:07:31.320 physical law, and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason, not 72 00:07:31.320 --> 00:07:37.360 without faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else. 73 00:07:37.360 --> 00:07:43.800 In the contemporary atmosphere of sharp dichotomy between natural law and reason, and especially 74 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:51.640 amid the irrationalist sentiments of conservative thought, this cannot be underscored too often. 75 00:07:51.640 --> 00:07:56.580 Hence St. Thomas Aquinas, in the words of the eminent historian of philosopher, Father 76 00:07:56.580 --> 00:08:02.780 Professor Copleston emphasized the place and function of reason in moral conduct. 77 00:08:02.780 --> 00:08:08.960 He, Aquinas, shared with Aristotle the view that it is the possession of reason which 78 00:08:08.960 --> 00:08:14.860 distinguished man from the animals, and which enables him to act deliberately in view of 79 00:08:14.860 --> 00:08:20.740 the consciously apprehended end, and raises him above the level of purely instinctive 80 00:08:20.740 --> 00:08:22.140 behavior. 81 00:08:22.140 --> 00:08:29.500 Aquinas, then, realized that men always act purposively, but also went beyond this to 82 00:08:29.500 --> 00:08:36.260 argue that ends can also be apprehended by reason, as either objectively good or bad 83 00:08:36.260 --> 00:08:38.220 for man. 84 00:08:38.220 --> 00:08:43.740 For Aquinas, then, in the words of Copleston, there is therefore room for the concept of 85 00:08:43.740 --> 00:08:50.460 right reason, reason directing man's acts to the attainment of the objective good for 86 00:08:50.460 --> 00:08:52.020 man. 87 00:08:52.020 --> 00:08:57.060 Moral conduct is therefore conduct in accord with right reason. 88 00:08:57.060 --> 00:09:02.740 If it is said that moral conduct is rational conduct, what is meant is that it is conduct 89 00:09:02.740 --> 00:09:09.840 in accordance with right reason, reason apprehending the objective good for man and dictating the 90 00:09:09.840 --> 00:09:12.940 means to its attainment. 91 00:09:12.940 --> 00:09:19.860 In natural law philosophy, then, reason is not bound, as it is in modern posthumian philosophy, 92 00:09:19.860 --> 00:09:25.580 to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means 93 00:09:25.580 --> 00:09:33.500 to arbitrarily chosen ends, for the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason, and right 94 00:09:33.500 --> 00:09:40.100 reason dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment. 95 00:09:40.100 --> 00:09:46.060 For the Thomist or natural law theorist, the general law of morality for man is a special 96 00:09:46.060 --> 00:09:51.480 is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each 97 00:09:51.480 --> 00:09:55.100 with its own nature and its own ends. 98 00:09:55.100 --> 00:10:01.200 For him, the moral law is a special case of the general principles that all finite things 99 00:10:01.200 --> 00:10:06.800 move toward their ends by the development of their potentialities. 100 00:10:06.800 --> 00:10:12.700 And here we come to a vital difference between inanimate or even non-human living creatures 101 00:10:12.700 --> 00:10:14.740 and man himself. 102 00:10:14.740 --> 00:10:19.740 For the former are compelled to proceed in accordance with the ends dictated by their 103 00:10:19.740 --> 00:10:26.820 natures, whereas man, the rational animal, possesses reason to discover such ends, and 104 00:10:26.820 --> 00:10:30.500 the free will to choose. 105 00:10:30.500 --> 00:10:36.740 Which doctrine, natural law or those of its critics, is to be considered truly rational, 106 00:10:36.740 --> 00:10:42.340 was answered incisively by the late Leo Strauss in the course of a penetrating critique of 107 00:10:42.340 --> 00:10:47.900 Value Relativism in Political Theory of Professor Arnold Brecht. 108 00:10:47.900 --> 00:10:54.300 For in contrast to natural law, positivistic social science is characterized by the abandonment 109 00:10:54.300 --> 00:10:58.060 of reason or the flight from reason. 110 00:10:58.060 --> 00:11:02.560 According to the positivistic interpretation of relativism, which prevails in present-day 111 00:11:02.560 --> 00:11:08.860 social science, reason can tell us which means are conducive to which ends. 112 00:11:08.860 --> 00:11:15.380 Reason cannot tell us which attainable ends are to be preferred to other attainable ends. 113 00:11:15.380 --> 00:11:19.680 Reason cannot tell us that we ought to choose attainable ends. 114 00:11:19.680 --> 00:11:26.380 If someone loves him who desires the impossible, reason may tell him that he acts irrationally, 115 00:11:26.380 --> 00:11:31.900 but it cannot tell him that he ought to act rationally, or that acting irrationally is 116 00:11:31.900 --> 00:11:34.820 acting badly or basely. 117 00:11:34.820 --> 00:11:40.340 If rational conduct consists in choosing the right means for the right end, relativism 118 00:11:40.340 --> 00:11:44.860 teaches in effect that rational conduct is impossible. 119 00:11:44.860 --> 00:11:51.540 Finally, the unique place of reason in natural law philosophy has been affirmed by the modern 120 00:11:51.540 --> 00:11:55.620 Thomistic philosopher, the late Father John Toohey. 121 00:11:55.620 --> 00:11:59.780 Toohey defined sound philosophy as follows. 122 00:11:59.780 --> 00:12:04.300 Philosophy in the sense in which the word is used when scholasticism is contrasted with 123 00:12:04.300 --> 00:12:10.460 and Other Philosophies is an attempt on the part of man's unaided reason to give a fundamental 124 00:12:10.460 --> 00:12:12.820 explanation of the nature of things.