A recent claim to reject the natural law for its uselessness and false claims to neutrality misunderstands the first-personal perspective of contemporary natural law. The second in a two-part series.
In yesterday’s Public Discourse essay, I argued that David Bentley Hart and Michael Potemra appear fundamentally to misunderstand the metaphysical and epistemological workings of contemporary natural-law theory—their objections engage straw men. In spite of those clarifications, Hart could still claim that natural law is (1) useless, failing to persuade anyone not already on board, and (2) dangerous, perpetuating a fraudulent claim of liberal neutrality and peacefulness.
The Performative Undeniability of Natural Law
As I explained yesterday, natural-law theorists do not hold that moral knowledge is innate, intuitive, or easy. Even self-evident principles require acts of understanding by the intellect. And these principles do not let us leap over the reasoning necessary for morally upright choices in concrete actions. Natural-law thinking still requires thinking that can go wrong or be misunderstood in any number of ways.
Perhaps, however, this clarification feeds the objection, for the harder and less obvious natural-law reasoning is, the less useful it might appear. Am I not derailing its supposed force, objectivity, and universality when I insist that natural law needs to be understood, grasped by insight into our reasons for action?
Well, it depends on how objectivity and universality are characterized. Ethics, as John Finnis suggests in Fundamentals of Ethics, is practical rather than theoretical, which is why it does not begin with physics or metaphysics but with our own activity of seeking purposes, satisfying desires, and pursuing objectives. We begin by doing, by engaging in practical reasoning and then reflexively understanding “the full human good by attending to the sort of good” that one is already seeking.
Read More at Public Discourse.
Read More at Public Discourse.
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