"True law is right reason is agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting. It summons to duty by its commands and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions." Cicero
In ancient Athens the philosopher Plato and his pupil Aristotle considered the question of how human beings should act. Both started by reflecting on the meaning of "goodness".
What is goodness?
For Plato an object or action is good if it reflects something of the "form of the good", a metaphysical essence which we somehow know through reason though we cannot experience it through our physical senses. We don’t encounter the number "2" when walking down the high street but understand what "2" is and can see manifestations of the concept all around us, when we see a pair of swans in the park or a couple walking on the beach. Think about yellowness. How could you describe it without giving specific examples of yellow things? We cannot experience pure yellow in the physical world but we know what yellowness is and can judge things we experience to be more or less yellow, to reflect the idea or form of yellow to a greater or lesser extent.
Plato thought this also applied to goodness. We cannot experience pure goodness in this world but we understand the idea or form of goodness through our reason and can see when goodness is reflected in things and people around us. Sometimes it is difficult to explain why a thing, a person or an action is good.
A painting might be good despite being inaccurate, even incomplete – think about Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Nobody thinks that Jesus and his disciples really looked or dressed as da Vinci has them in the painting, nor does it reflect the seating arrangements recorded in any gospel or book of Roman customs, nor is it technically well finished, having been the subject of constant conservation efforts since it was painted using an experimental paint. Yet The Last Supper is still one of the most famous paintings in the world and da Vinci one of the best known artists; The Last Supper has been credited with inspiring many people down the ages, most recently Mel Gibson and author Dan Brown.
A person might be good even though they are not physically perfect and might even do things that are generally disapproved of – think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a plump, balding and bespectacled priest who was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. An action might be good even if it is not strictly rational, legal or likely to produce the most happiness. Think about a pilot landing his helicopter in a minefield to save an injured soldier. It doesn’t make sense but somehow we know that the pilot does something right in making the attempt and we rejoice when it pays off and lives are saved.
Plato and Aristotle
So, for Plato, ideals like goodness are metaphysical – they are above and beyond experience and are only reflected in the world we live in. Reason can aspire to understand what goodness is, but it may always elude our grasp and certainly will be impossible to explain definitively. Unsurprisingly, while Plato’s philosophy has always been appealing, it has not been the starting point for many attempts at normative or applied ethics. Plato argued that human beings have innate ideas which are confirmed through experience, i.e our understanding is not formed by experience but exists independently of it. Aristotle did not accept this. For Aristotle metaphysical discussion can only be speculation. The root of our understanding is in experience, what we sense through taste, smell, feel, hearing and sight. The only way that we can understand things is by observing them, by collecting and inducing from data. Whereas Plato thought of the "forms" existing in another world, metaphysically, Aristotle saw them as concepts, categories of understanding in this world. Everything is defined by its formal cause, this is what makes a cat a cat and not a stick of rhubarb and is a mark of order in the world, but formal causes have no independent existence, they are made real by things fulfilling their form to a greater or lesser extent. Goodness comes from something fulfilling its form, its nature.
A good cat is sleek, furry, purry and is fond of fish – a cat that is missing some of its cattiness is deficient, naturally evil. A good stick of rhubarb is red, straight and sharp-tasting. Limp tasteless rhubarb is bad rhubarb. This also applies to human beings; a person who fulfils human nature is good and one who falls short is evil, either naturally or (if by choice) morally. The question, of course, is what is human nature?
Defining human nature
Plato defined humanity in terms of reason. As human beings we have instincts and emotions but above all the potential to think, to control our feelings and animal urges. Reason gives us the freedom to choose how to behave, to be selfish or altruistic, to act on principle or thoughtlessly. Aristotle expanded upon this definition, drawing on his experience of life and society. For Aristotle human beings and human societies flourish when people live peacefully, work and prosper, learn and develop wisdom, reproduce and pass on wisdom to the next generation. A fulfilled and good person is living, healthy, peaceable, prosperous, engaged in philosophy (the love of wisdom) in that they are curious about the world they live in and seek understanding of it, and are engaged in passing on understanding to the next generation. Evil originates in naturally or morally failing to fulfil part or all of human nature so defined.
This is the basis for natural law. Aristotle and all those Philosophers who have followed in his tradition see ethics as the business of defining human nature and from that definition deriving laws, principles of behaviour which either support or prevent human flourishing. Clearly not all philosophers agree on the definition of human nature, nor on the laws that depend on it, but the pattern of reasoning is the same for all naturalistic systems of ethics.
Aquinas' view of natural law
In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas saw in Aristotle’s philosophy a rational foundation for Christian doctrine. In his Summa theologica and other works he set out, systematically, a new approach to the philosophy of the Christian religion, based on Aristotle, which saw all aspects as interconnected and necessary, to all other aspects. Like one of the great Gothic cathedrals which were being built as Aquinas wrote, he saw the great weight of the Christian concept of God as being distributed equally onto many pillars of doctrine, among them analogy and the specific interpretation of terms such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and the interpretation of scripture, of the relationship between faith and reason, of natural law and morality. Each doctrinal pillar was integral to the structure of Aquinas’ philosophy: undermine one and the whole edifice is in danger.
From Aristotle, Aquinas drew the belief that human beings can use reason to discover how they should behave, to appreciate the existence and the nature of natural laws and the human ability to choose to follow them and flourish, to go against them and fall short. While Aristotle was noncommittal about the existence of God as creator or sustainer, for Aquinas this had been revealed through Christ and the scriptures, therefore using reason to understand natural laws was using reason to gain insight into God’s will. It was possible, for Aquinas, for a heathen to live a naturally good life, though as might be expected from a Catholic writer, he believed Christian education, baptism and sacraments are necessary for a person to achieve salvation. Like Aristotle, Aquinas understood goodness as something fulfilling its nature; for Aquinas this meant doing God’s will in being what he created it to be, fulfilling its divinely willed potential.
Living well
For Aquinas, reason dictates that a good life is lived long, peacefully, productively, in the pursuit of wisdom and with a commitment to passing it on to the next generation. He only differs from Aristotle in seeing the necessity of religious practice, seemingly as part of philosophy, in allowing people access to the revealed truths that are necessary for salvation and encouraging in them a sense of awe and humility, of thankfulness for the gifts of life and reason, rather than suggesting pride in human achievements.
Think about it: a dead person cannot be a good person. They cannot fulfil any aspect of their human potential to move, think, act or decide. Life must therefore be the first requirement for goodness and a person who is alive cannot be all bad because they are still a person, fulfilling some of their divinely willed potential if not any of the aspects of that potential that are under their control. This supports the Christian belief in the sanctity of life; even Hitler or Pol Pot are human beings and worthy of respect and love as such. We all deplore their moral choices but fundamentally human life is still life and is an inherently good thing, not to be destroyed lightly.
Fulfilling potential
Sometimes people are unable to fulfil human potential naturally; perhaps they have a disability, are infertile, irrational for some reason beyond their or anyone else’s control. In this case, while alive they are still good and valuable, even if we regret the natural evil which prevents them from being all that human beings can be. Aquinas suggests that natural evil is a lack of good, an occasional falling short in God’s creation, allowed by the creator in order that the existence and nature of true goodness may be facilitated, understood and appreciated. A person naturally prevented from fulfilling human potential in some aspect can always try to compensate in other aspect; somebody who cannot have children of their own could adopt and give a home to a child who has no parents or they could throw themselves into study or business, even teaching, perhaps being more able to succeed because of the single-minded application they are able to give than those who have families to balance with work.
Indeed, sometimes fully actualising human potential in one aspect requires focus and concentration which may be made easier by choosing not to pursue another aspect. For example, Catholic priests and monks are expected to devote themselves to prayer, study and working to make life better for others. Pursuing worldly wealth and having families tends to get in the way of this. Jesus himself chose to remain single and to abandon the family business in order to spread God’s message. In the Middle Ages, around the time that Aquinas wrote, the Church began to enforce celibacy for all priests and to prevent them from engaging in many other kinds of work they were doing, from medicine to soldiery. This was justified, according to Aquinas, because the conscious choice of some people not to actualise some aspects of their potential made human beings in general more able to be fulfilled.
Aquinas characterises the qualities of a fulfilled existence: life, peace, prosperity, procreation, philosophy, praise, pedagogy as the primary precepts of natural law. These are the ends which all naturally good actions will serve and the ends which no naturally good action will prevent or hamper. It follows from this that some types of actions will generally be categorised as positive and some negative. Murder will always prevent the end of someone living and therefore is naturally evil, always wrong. It is a secondary precept of natural law that murder is wrong.
After Aquinas
Since the time of Aquinas most moral philosophers who have engaged in describing natural moral law as a normative system of ethics have agreed with this basic structure. Some have developed slightly different interpretations of the primary precepts, which in turn may give slightly different secondary precepts, but there has been a general consensus. This consensus has had the effect of making the focus of discussions of natural moral law the detail of how it should be applied; it has become very legalistic. This may not be particularly helpful or even true to Aquinas. Aquinas followed Aristotle in arguing that ordinary people through ordinary reason have the power to understand the difference between right and wrong; the more complex a system is developed out of natural law, the less it can serve as a basic and universal system for determining values.
Today, ethicists who use the natural law approach differ in their interpretation of:
1. What the universal human nature (formal cause) and purpose (final cause) is. They each have slightly different lists of primary precepts, sometimes called "basic goods". For example:
a. Germain Grisez (1983): self-integration, practical reasonableness, authenticity, justice and friendship, religion, life and health, knowledge of truth, appreciation of beauty, playful activities
b. John Finnis (1980): life, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, play, friendship, practical reasonableness, religion – introduced ‘the marital good’ in 1996
c. TDJ Chappell (1995): friendship, aesthetic value, pleasure and avoidance of pain, physical and mental health and harmony, reason, reasonableness and rationality, truth and knowledge of it, the natural world, people, fairness, achievements
2. How we should deal with a situation where an action seems to contribute to one but takes away from another of the primary precepts or basic goods? Most scholars operate a "master rule" approach, holding that there is a single essential principle which underpins all the others and takes priority or that one of the primary precepts takes priority in a dispute.
a. Aquinas, for example, held that the primary precepts could be summarised in the Christian Golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you)– in other words – always want to do what is right and consider the impact on everybody else before acting, trying to act in everybody’s best interests, not just selfishly.
b. Grisez suggested that the "first principle of morality is voluntarily acting for human goods and avoiding what is opposed to them, one ought to choose and otherwise will those possibilities whose willing is compatible with a will towards integral human fulfilment."
c. Finnis now affirms Grisez’s master-rule approach, though in the 1980s he felt that any "master rule" approach was likely to suffer from not being able to answer the simple question "Who says this is the master rule?" satisfactorily. In the past Finnis argued that all basic goods are known through practical reason (i.e. experience and common sense) equal and that it would always be wrong to intend the destruction of an instance of a basic good i.e. no lying as knowledge is one of his basic goods, no murder as life is a basic good etc. If there really is a clash that can’t be reasonably worked out, there is something wrong with our list of basic goods, our interpretation of experience.
Some natural law theorists adopt a "virtue" approach however – and argue that we should focus less on specific actions and precepts and more on the character traits which will help us to achieve our ultimate fulfilment, individually and as a people. Virtue ethicists who develop the natural law approach include Alistair Macintyre and Philippa Foot.
Paradigmatic approaches
Most of those who follow a new natural law approach also adopt a paradigmatic approach, i.e. they accept a single explanation for why the world is the way that it is. The most common paradigm for a natural law ethicist to belong to is the religious paradigm: God created the world and everything in it and wills us to fulfil his plan. Aquinas is one example of a religious paradigmatic approach to natural law, Grisez is another. There are those who adopt a non-religious paradigm or explanation for things being the way that they are. Evolution and natural selection may be one paradigm which would enable a non-believer to follow natural law Some humanists, for example Richard Dawkins, would belong to this approach. However, other scholars are non-paradigmatic in their approach i.e. they don’t explain why things are the way they are; they just accept it and argue that it seems common-sense. Aristotle was such.
Most followers of natural law ethics accept that:
a. Human reason is a reliable tool for determining what the final cause of human beings and other beings/things is.
b. When people choose to do bad things it is usually because they are pursuing an apparent good – i.e. they think it will be better for them if they murder, lie, steal etc. it will contribute towards the good of their continued peaceful life, their prosperity maybe. If they reconsidered they would realise that they are being mislead and would instead choose the real good of not murdering, stealing or lying as the general flourishing of mankind is the condition upon which individual flourishing rests.
c. We should try to act with a good motive as well as to produce good results – this because the motive comes out of and informs the character and a character can be made un-virtuous if it allows itself to act from poor motives, even if the general results are not bad. This is what Aquinas called the importance of interior as well as exterior acts.
New natural law is used as the basis for a philosophy of law as well as normative ethics by some scholars. Some see the civil law as valid or invalid in terms of whether it reflects universal natural laws of mankind. Cicero wrote: “True law is right reason is agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting. It summons to duty by its commands and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.” Aquinas believed that what is morally and what is legally right ought to be the same thing. Blackstone argued the same. Thus they are both followers of what is known as the overlap thesis, most famously expressed by Augustine, who wrote that “an unjust law is not really a law at all”. They are also called conceptual naturalists.
Other scholars, conceptual non-naturalists, argue against this and suggest that what is morally right and wrong has little to do with the law, which reflects pragmatism and short-term particular political ends and is justified either by democratic mandate or the power of the government to enforce it. The utilitarian John Austin wrote: “Now, to say that human laws which conflict with the divine law are not binding, that is to say, are not laws, is to talk stark nonsense. The most pernicious laws, and therefore those which are most opposed to the will of God, have been and are continually enforced as laws by judicial tribunals”(1995). Brian Bix (1999) has argued against Austin and others who reject the overlap thesis by saying that Austin’s criticism implies that we may as well accept that any law that can be enforced by a court is just – something which even Austin would dispute, as would most sensible people.
John Finnis (1980) and Brian Bix (1996) attempted to show that this is a non-dispute, however, by pointing out the difference between claiming that a law has no status in theory and arguing that it does not exist in practice.
Neo-naturalism
John Finnis is a neo-naturalist or founder/follower of new natural law and sees himself developing the conceptual naturalism of Aquinas and Blackstone. He sees both of them as providing an argument which would enable people to see that following the law is morally right and that the law has the moral authority to coerce people (i.e. use prison and even death as a punishment). Ronald Dworkin agrees on this point. Finnis claims that a law can be legally valid, even if unjust, but that there can be no moral justification for enforcing an unjust law.
Finnis’ neo-naturalism is both an ethical theory and a theory of jurisprudence. Human beings share a common nature and purpose, which are fulfilled by the pursuit of common basic goods. The function of moral and civil rules is to enable the pursuit of basic goods and thus contribute to the flourishing of the human race. “The conceptual point of law is to facilitate the common good by providing authoritative rules that solve the coordination problems that arise in connection with the common pursuit of these basic goods.”
Recent developments
In recent decades there has been a move to simplify natural moral law and to make it more applicable to everyday life. Proportionalists such as Bernard Hoose have suggested that natural moral law is not just lists of absolute "thou shalt not"s but a system of guidelines which individuals must navigate for themselves.
For example, we know that disobeying a parent is wrong, it generally goes against the primary precept of pedagogy, however in some circumstances it may be right to disobey the order ‘don’t run inside’, such as when there has been an accident and an ambulance is needed. It may sometimes be right to do a wrong thing.
Take another example: within natural law it is generally wrong to have an abortion; it goes directly against the primary precept of life for the unborn child and may undermine other primary precepts as well. However, when a woman has an ectopic pregnancy there is no hope that the child will be born. The developing embryo will cause the fallopian tube to rupture, probably killing the woman and at least making her infertile. Lasering the embryo will kill it but will save the mother and allow her to have children in the normal way in the future. Surely it should be for the individual to decide that, given the circumstances, it would be right to do a wrong thing? However there are those who argue that as the side-effect of the abortion is known and certain, it is wrong to see the principle of double effect as any justification for the operation.
Ignorance, self-delusion, short-termism
Aquinas argued that people don’t usually choose to do something in the knowledge that it is wrong. Rather, they pursue an apparent good rather than a real good. That is to say that they rationalise their choice so that they think they are doing the right thing, even though they are not. For example, Hitler was persuaded that Jews were not really human beings and were evil, and rationalised the murder of six million people. He thought his actions supported the good of creating a better Germany, one in which more people would be fulfilled more of the time. Unpalatable as it may seem to say it, most Nazis would have been horrified at the suggestion that they were engaged in cold-blooded mass-murder on grounds of irrational prejudice. They believed they were pursuing an apparent good. They were horribly mistaken in their reasoning of course, but there was reasoning.
If you lie, you may well do it to save someone’s feelings, avoid an unnecessarily awkward situation or gain some advantage which you don’t think will really hurt anybody. You are pursuing an apparent good of short-term personal happiness, not the real good of contributing to a better, more truthful world. This is just the point which Immanuel Kant made in the eighteenth century. While he rejected Aristotelian natural law approaches to ethics, seeing them as overly prescriptive in their understanding of human nature and in the very specific and authoritarian guidance they give to individuals, Kant approached ethics in a naturalistic way.
