************************************************************************
REEDINGS
. . .
Notes
on Books by Gerard Reed
GEORGE, FINNIS, & NATURAL LAW
Yet there’s a less well known Princeton professor who steadfastly
opposes Singer and his utilitarian ideology:
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, one of
America’s finest philosophers. He
was recently appointed by President Bush to the bioethics committee considering
the implications of stem cell research. A
committed Roman Catholic, George upholds her traditional Natural Law ethics.
His most recent publication--a collection of essays--is entitled The
Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion,
and Morality in Crisis (Wilmington: ISI
Books, 2001). He seeks therein “to
show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on
key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by
secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned
traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality” (p. xiv).
Conflicting orthodoxies clash, George says, in three main areas:
sexual behavior; pro-life issues; and the role of religion in the public
square, themes that recurrently interlace the book’s 15 essays.
The clashing orthodoxies deeply differ in their definition of human
nature. In accord with Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas, the great architects of natural law teaching, George especially
emphasizes man’s unique capacity to reason.
Homo sapiens rightly defines us.
Much that’s wrong with the world, he thinks, results from a widespread
acceptance of Thomas Hobbes’ and David Hume’s definition of human nature as
an admixture of passing passions. “Reason
is and ought only to be,” said Hume, “the slave of the passions, and may
never pretend to any office other than to serve and obey them” (A Treatise
of Human Nature, Book 2, pt. 3, iii; quoted on p. 15).
Reason, he declared, simply rationalizes what we feel.
“Truth,” accordingly, describes subjective impressions, not objective
realities, and changes from time to time and from person to person.
Rooted in Hume’s emotivist “orthodoxy,” implementing its
implications, multitudes of moderns fail to think rationally. Consequently
they slip into epistemological skepticism and ethical nihilism.
And they deny or suppress the only Truth which enables them to live well.
But Truth, to Natural Law advocates such as Professor George, rightly
affirms what is Real and aligns the mind with an objective reality.
There’s a Higher Law to which all human laws must correspond.
“Civil rights,” insofar as they have standing, sink roots in
Something deeper than purely personal preferences.
America’s Declaration of Independence, revealingly, asserts that all
men are created equal and enjoy “certain inalienable rights” that are
derived from the Creator. This means
that truly all men, everywhere, share a given essence.
So too St. Thomas Aquinas declared that man, by nature, “has a share of
the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and
end: and this participation of the
eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law” (Summa
Theologiae, Ia IIae Q. 91, art.2; p.
162). Imbibing Aquinas through
“the judicious Hooker,” John Locke said, in Two Treatises of Government,
“the State of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges
every one: And Reason, which is that
Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or
Possessions” (p. 162).
As the Declaration of Independence insists, the primary natural right we
all claim is the right to life. The
Natural Law ever upholds the sanctity of life--the right to life--throughout the
entirety of one’s life. “If we
lay aside all the rhetorical grandstanding and obviously fallacious
arguments,” George says, “questions of abortion, infanticide, suicide, and
euthanasia turn on the question of whether bodily life is intrinsically good, as
Judaism and Christianity teach, or merely instrumentally good, as orthodox
secularists believe” (p. 8). Indeed
here’s the great question: Is something
in us good--or are we simply things that are good for something?
Pro-lifers hold that everyone is intrinsically valuable.
Pro-choicers think people are valuable only so long as they prove
valuable to others. George examines
various pro-choice arguments, shows how they have shifted over time, and finds
them both factually and logically flawed. This
is because abortion rights advocates forever fail--and cannot but fail--in their
efforts to prove the difference between a genetically “human being” (clearly
discernable from the moment of conception but disposable as a non-person) and a
rights-endowed person (absolutely entitled to life).
Further supporting the Natural Law tradition, Professor George insists
that careful thought--reason alone--leads one to uphold the integrity of
heterosexual marriage. Rightly
defined, “Marriage is a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons that is
consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, whether or not
they are reproductive in effect . . . . The
bodily union of spouses in marital acts is the biological matrix of their
marriage as a multi-level relationship; that is, a relationship that unites
persons at the bodily, emotional, dispositional, and spiritual levels of their
being” (p. 77). This excludes
“same sex marriage.” Gay and
lesbian activists, seeking to legitimatize their relationships, champion laws to
that effect. Laws, however, teach
ethics as well as protect personal “rights.”
Laws that “teach that marriage is a mere convention which is malleable
in such a way that individuals, couples, or indeed, groups, can choose to make
it whatever suits their desires, interests, subjective goals, etc.” (ibid),
inevitably encourage blatantly unnatural beliefs and behavior.
Finally, Natural Law thinkers cannot embrace today’s firmly entrenched
political liberalism. “Contemporary liberal political theory abets the culture
of death. My point,” George says,
“in so bluntly saying so is not to be polemical or even provocative; rather,
it is to be soberly descriptive. Self-described
liberal political theorists in the United States and elsewhere have, over the
past two decades or so, quite explicitly set for themselves the task of
justifying and defending the regime of abortion, euthanasia, and, increasingly,
infanticide that constitutes the culture of death in the contemporary developed
world” (p. 39). This liberalism is
best illustrated in the thought of John Rawls, the highly influential Harvard
philosopher, who insists that religious values be excluded from public life.
Any questions capable of religious answers, Rawls declares, must be
excluded from democratic discussion. In
a pluralistic society, he holds, decisions must be made behind a “veil of
ignorance,” following purely pragmatic, instrumental criteria.
Following a careful, detailed critique of Rawls’ version of democratic
liberalism, Professor George insists it “cannot withstand intellectual
scrutiny” (p. 55).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Professor George has also published In Defense of Natural Law (New
York: Oxford University Press, c.
1999), a collection scholarly essays, most of which earlier appeared on
legal or philosophical journals. Some
of the essays pit himself and his allies (John Finnis and Germain Grisez)
against other Catholic Natural Law advocates (such as Ralph MacInerny),
illustrating a spirited debate raging over the proper interpretation of Thomas
Aquinas. Consequently, for folks
less than consumed by the intricacies of this discussion, portions of this
collection lose value.
Nevertheless, many of the themes that appear in The Clash of
Orthodoxies found earlier expression in these essays.
George’s spirited defense of the sanctity of life, of heterosexual
marriage, of the importance of religion, provide the reader with well-documented
reasons to advocate such positions. Illustrative
of George’s prescience is his refutation of the relativism often espoused by
modern liberals. “Consider,” he
says, “the following chain of reasoning:
(i) All Moral
views are relative.
(ii) Thus, no one has
the right to impose his view of morality on anyone else.
(iii) Therefore, laws
forbidding allegedly immoral activities on the ground of their immorality are
wrong.
The
glaring defect in the logic of this argument,” he continues, “has been
pointed out by virtually every serious writer on the subject . . . .
Propositions (ii) and (iii) express moral judgments.
These judgments are either relative or non-relative.
If they are relative, as (i) says that all moral judgments are, then
there is no reason for someone who happens not to share them to revise his view
in favor of the liberal position. If
they are non-relative, then proposition (i) is false and cannot provide a valid
premise for propositions (ii) and (iii)” (pp. 302-303).
Case closed!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A decade earlier George edited Natural Law Theory:
Contemporary Essays (New York: Oxford
University Press, c. 1992). Both
supporters and critics of the Natural Law hold forth in these pages, providing
an illuminating debate over its basic tenets.
Increasingly, philosophers have found the dominant ethical
theories--utilitarianism, existentialism, Kantianism, contractualism--inadequate.
Thinkers like Alistair MacIntyre, for example, have refurbished the
“virtue ethics” of Aristotle and Aquinas with clarity and conviction.
Understandably, as a major plank in the “perennial philosophy” which
has ebbed and flowed for 2500 years, the Natural Law tradition has attracted
renewed attention. And it has been
paralleled, Michael S. Moore, a professor of law at the University of
Pennsylvania, says, by an “increased acceptance of moral realism within
philosophy” (“Law as a Functional Kind,” p. 188).
As a reviewer in the journal First Things noted, this book is a
“superb collection of original essays on natural law theory . . . for anyone
who might still believe that natural law theory is merely a relic of bygone
days, discussion of which is kept alive by aging seminary professors and
benighted religious traditions, Professor George’s book provides an
indispensable antidote” back cover).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Edinburgh University Professor Neil MacCormick says that John Finnis’s Natural
Law and Natural Rights is “a book which for British scholars has brought
back to life the classical Thomistic/Aristotelian theory of natural law”
(“Natural Law and the Separation of Law and Morals,” in Robert T. George,
ed., Natural Law Theory, p. 105).
Finnis, for more than 30 years, teaching and writing at Oxford
University, has influenced an ever-widening circle of legal scholars and
ethicists. To MacCormick, Natural
Law and Natural Rights proved to be “an intellectual landmark; one of
those few books which bring about a permanent change in one’ understanding; a
shift on one’s personal paradigm” (p. 106).
Finnis is, without question to anyone reading him, one of the most
erudite and effective advocates of the classical natural law tradition.
Finnis published Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York:
Oxford University Press) in 1980, and it remains a definitive exposition
of his position. It is, above all
else, a careful presentation of his understanding of Thomas Aquinas.
Importantly, Aquinas taught that “the basic forms of good grasped by
practical understanding are what is good for human beings with the nature they
have” (p. 34). Given the fact that
man is a rational creature, Aquinas said, “’whatever
is contrary to the order of reason is contrary to the nature of human beings as
such; and what is reasonable is in accordance with human nature as such.
The good of the human being is being in accord with reason, and human
evil is being outside the order of reasonableness’” (Summa Theologiae,
I-II, q. 71, a. 2c; quoted pp. 35-36). Thus
vice and virtue differ insofar as they contradict or conform to reasonableness.
But we struggle to implement our convictions in daily activities.
So to Finnis, “the real problem of morality, and of the point or
meaning of human existence, is not in discerning the basic aspects of human
well-being, but in integrating those various aspects into the intelligent and
reasonable commitments, projects, and actions that go to make up one or other of
the many admirable forms of human life” (p. 31).
We cannot not know, by nature, what’s ultimately good, though we
can easily suppress or deny it. As
St. Paul said, all men have “the work of the law written in their hearts,
their conscience also bearing witness” (Ro. 2:15).
Accordingly, Finnis holds that we naturally acknowledge basic principles,
seven “universal values:” (1) life; (2) knowledge; (3) play; (4) aesthetic
experience; (5) sociability (friendship); (6) practical reasonableness; and (7)
religion. Everywhere, at all times,
people recognize life’s value and endeavor to preserve it.
Life’s valuable, absolutely! Our
instinct for self-preservation bears witness to our intuitive certainty that
life’s precious. So too does that
fact that premeditated murder, the deliberate taking of an innocent person’s
life, is universally condemned. Equally
important, folks who value life also value procreation and prescribe codes
regulating sexual behavior. Rape,
incest, blatant promiscuity are universally condemned, for they violate the
reverence for life all men share. Knowledge
is also valuable. People everywhere
desire to know the truth. They value
honesty and decry lies. Keeping
one’s word has always been expected as something due the one who hears it.
Men and women always try to educate their young--whether in practical
matters such as hunting and cooking or in esoteric rituals celebrating the myths
and traditions of their tribe or nation.
People everywhere design and enjoy games, testifying to the fact that
human life involves more than satisfying elemental needs.
Indeed, Johan Huizinga, a fine historian, defined man as homo ludens
to emphasize how incessantly he engages in purely playful behaviors.
Ball games, races, card games, wagers, word games and riddles seem
intrinsic to the human experience. Equally
important is artistic work--whether painting on the walls of caves or
intricately carving knife handles or decorating water vases.
And from antiquity to the present we humans treasure friendships and
encourage social bonds. Solitary
“brutes” there may be, but men forever prefer to live together with others
of their kind. Families, villages,
hunting expeditions, sewing bees, all reveal our essentially social nature.
Folks also want to know how to live well and make wise decisions.
And they have pervasive concerns for ultimate realities, basic to
religious expression. The bodies of
departed loved ones are treated with respect, demanding religious ceremonies.
Marriages, sicknesses, family meals and beautiful sunsets all provoke
deeply religious responses.
Any honest study of human history, Finnis holds, proves man’s need for
such basic goods. Consequently, we
can assert, with equal confidence, certain absolute “rights,” rooted in
these goods. We have a right to
life--no one should take it from us. We
have a right to know the truth, so we have a “right not to be positively lied
to in any situation (e.g. teaching, preaching, research publication, news
broadcasting) in which factual communication (as distinct from fiction, jest, or
poetry) is reasonably expected” (p. 225).
Desiring such “rights,” aware of ultimate “goods,” Finnis holds,
we should naturally lift our minds to God, the Ultimate Good.
Indeed, the great architects of the Natural Law tradition have found
theism compatible with their views. “It
must never be overlooked that, for nearly two millennia, the theories of natural
law have been expounded by men who, with few exceptions, believed that the
uncaused cause has in fact revealed itself .
. . to be indeed supremely personal, and to be a lawgiver whose law for man
should be obeyed out of gratitude, hope, fear, and/or love” (p. 392).
Deeply underlying the thought of Plato and Aristotle, “is their faith
in the power and objectivity or reason, intelligence, nous” (p. 392).
And man’s nous directly participates in the divine nous.
Both Plato and Aristotle, Finnis says, claimed “a certain experiential
access to the divine” (p. 394). Thinking
rightly enables us to know (to a degree) God’s Mind.
Wondering, the beginning of philosophical inquiry, is man’s response to
a “divine attraction.” Finding
answers, discerning truths, involves sharing in some ways the thoughts of God.
Aristotle, famously, began his Metaphysics with the assertion that
“’by nature [physei] all men desire to know’.
From there he proceeds not only to the affirmation (i) that the most
desirable object of knowledge is ‘the highest good in the whole of nature [physei],
a good which he identifies as God, but to the further affirmations (ii) that
understanding [or thought] ‘in the highest sense’ is concerned with God;
(iii) that the supreme object of understanding or truth is God and that
‘intelligence [or thought] [nous] understands [or thinks] itself
through participation [metalepsis] in the object of understanding [or
thought]; for it becomes an object of understanding by being touched and
understood, so that intelligence [nous] and the object of understanding
are the same’; and (iv) that the best and most pleasant state, which is
enjoyed only intermittently by us as always by God, is the contemplation (theoria)
of that actuality which understanding has, as a divine (theion)
possession, when it thus participates in its supreme object” (p. 395).
Similarly, we find Plato writing, in Laws:
“God, as the old saying says, holds in his hand the beginning, end and
middle of all that is, and straight he travels to the accomplishment of his
purpose, as is (his) nature [kata physin]; and always by his side is
Right [dike: justice] ready
to punish those who disobey the divine law [theiou nomou].
Anyone who wants to flourish [eudaimonesein] follows closely in
the train of Right, with humility . . . What
line of conduct, then, is dear [phile] to God and a floowing of him?
. . . Well, it is God who is for us the measure [metron] of all
things; much more truly so that, as they [sophists, notably Protagoras] say,
man. so to be loved by such a being,
a man must strive as far as he can to become like that being; and following out
this principle, the person who is temperate-and-ordered is dear to God, being
like him” (Laws IV; p. 396).
St. Thomas Aquinas most clearly expressed this with “his definition of
natural law as participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura:
the participation of the Eternal Law in rational creatures” (p. 398).
The ultimate good for man, beatitudo, “human flourishing,”
comes through knowing God. Participatio--participating
in the very being of God--finally fulfills man’s deepest longings.
Aquinas held that “‘it is from God that the human mind shares in [participat]
intellectual light: as Psalm 4 verse
7 puts it “The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us.”’
The same scriptural quotation caps his account of natural law as a participatio
of Eternal Law” (p. 400).
Natural Law, therefore, reveals God’s Truth to those whose minds are
open to the Light. As the extensive
quotations indicate, Professor Finnis writes on a highly theoretical, thoroughly
scholarly, level. One never speed
reads Finnis! Yet, when patiently
studied, his works never fail to inform and challenge.
The Natural Law, as fundamental for ethics and law, certainly makes
sense. No wonder many of the
greatest thinkers in the past championed it.
Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights is without question one
of the finest works published during the past three decades.
###