As an evangelical who is extremely sympathetic to natural law theorizing, I have been fascinated by the recent discussion that Joe Knippenberg mentioned earlier today. However, I’ve been surprised that while many have hinted at it, no one has directly asked the obvious question: Why aren’t natural law arguments more persuasive?
We evangelicals are nothing if not pragmatic. If we were able to recognize the utility and effectiveness of such arguments, we’d likely to be much more open to natural law theory. But conclusions based on natural law don’t seem to be all that useful in compelling those who are unconvinced. Indeed, not only do that not seem to change the minds of non-believers, they often fail to sway believers. For instance, nominal Catholics, a group that should (at least theoretically) give them a fair hearing, don’t seem to take such arguments all that seriously. Why is that?
We evangelicals, of course, have our own explanation for such arguments are inefficacious. As Al Mohler said after an interview with Robert George:
At the end of the day Professor Robert P. George really does believe that the natural law can in itself form the basis of a compelling moral argument for such an issue such as sexual restraint. I have to come at this from a position that is more informed by Romans chapter one. When I believe that what we are told there is that humanity is dead set to suppress the truth in unrighteousness and that there is no law written within the heart nor within the role of nature that will keep them from doing what they are determined to do except by the regenerating power of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a restraining grace and for that I am very thankful and I do not deny the reality of the natural law. I do not deny the fact that that is a part of the restraining grace, but at the end of the day, I am not very hopeful that a society hell bent on moral revolution is going to be held in check by our arguments by the moral law, the natural law. I’m thankful, however, that Robert P. George is making those arguments. I’m thankful that he’s making them better than just about anyone else is making them. And as an evangelical, we have every reason to use natural law arguments, we just don’t believe that in the end they’re going to be enough. That’s where we have to come back with the final issue always being the gospel. And the challenges we’re talking about today are the challenges that point to the absolute necessity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s where we begin and that’s where we end.
As much as I’d like to agree with Dr. George, I have to side with Dr. Mohler: Evangelicals have every reason to use natural law arguments, we just don’t believe that in the end they’re going to be enough.
Of course, that is not to deny their importance or to say that they should be used. I believe that natural law arguments can be valuable even when they are never fully persuasive.
Nevertheless, many natural lawyers do intend for such argument to persuade both believers and non-believers. How do they account for the relative ineffectualness of such arguments? Why don’t more people find them to be persuasive?
I’m sure this questions has been considered by natural law advocates, so I’d love to have them weigh in on this question.
March 28th, 2011 | 11:08 am
Joe,
Thanks for bringing this question out more pointedly. This is precisely what I was attempting to get at with my rather cryptic remark: ‘…the particularly Protestant emphasis on the voluntarism of the anthropological problem, that even though we know what is good we willingly choose not to do it, when sinners “suppress the truth by their wickedness,” warrants greater emphasis.’
The problem is that we aren’t just rational animals. We have broken wills, unrestrained passions, and the dynamic interplay between intellect and will short-circuits the efficacy of rational argumentation.
March 28th, 2011 | 11:53 am
The problem of the natural law arguments are that they rest on connections that are not readily seen and are used against things people really want to do. It does not matter what the argument it, it is useless when no one is interested in listening to it.
March 28th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
Maybe the idea that humans cannot possibly restrain themselves – kinda common among Western religions – has a self-fulfilling aspect to it?
Lots of highly secular places in Europe seem to be doing pretty well with ‘natural law’ arguments…
March 28th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
I think the real problem with natural law arguments, in my experience, is that they aren’t phrased in ways that involve faith that natural law actually exists. When they are, they are quite persuasuve.
Most people arguing from the natural law create propositions that they claim are supported by the natural law and argue to their listeners that the claims are truths to which everyone has access. What they fail to appreciate is the importance of stressing how to access the natural law when making arguments based on it.
I’ve found that arguments that the natural law says X never get me anywhere. But incisive questions about what someone really believes to be true, followed up on in a friendly way, almost always results in the person’s agreeing with me on far more than they thought they did. That is natural law to work.
Obviously, on some points we are all blinded by ideology, which prevents us from being open to what the natural law has to say; the conversations I’m describing above are no different. But that does not mean they are inneffective, even if someone does not realize that they really believe what the natural law holds to be true until much later.
My point, I guess, is just that I find arguments from natural law to be far more effective when they are approached in a questioning way with trust that the person has access to the natural law, even if they are ignoring it.
March 28th, 2011 | 12:50 pm
So man’s fallenness keeps him from assenting to natural law arguments, but not ones based on Al Mohler’s particular reading of scripture?
March 28th, 2011 | 12:50 pm
I think Chuck’s about summed it up. As Jonathan Swift said, “Man is not animal rationale but animal rationis capax.”
March 28th, 2011 | 1:00 pm
Forgive me if someone else made this point. I’ve been trying to stay abreast of the discussion but admittedly haven’t read all of it.
First, natural law very often occurs in the discussion of marriage and sexuality, with same sex marriage and homosexuality being the central focus. The natural law theory that argues against homosexual relations also equally makes “unnatural” birth control, even used between married couples. This “reductio” may scare off some evangelicals from natural law arguments.
Likewise, if we take away the relentless focus on sperm potentially fertilizing egg as the natural “end” of any and every sexual act, natural law reasoning can be used to justify homosexuality itself.
Consider Andrew Sullivan’s natural law case FOR homosexual marriages:
But all these arguments are arguments for the centrality of heterosexual sexual acts in nature, not their exclusiveness. It is surely possible to concur with these sentiments, even to laud their beauty and truth, while also conceding that it is nevertheless also true that nature seems to have provided a spontaneous and mysterious contrast that could conceivably be understood to complement — even dramatize — the central male-female order. In many species and almost all human cultures, there are some who seem to find their destiny in a similar but different sexual and emotional union. They do this not by subverting their own nature, or indeed human nature, but by fulfilling it in a way that doesn’t deny heterosexual primacy, but rather honors it by its rare and distinct otherness. As albinos remind us of the brilliance of color; as redheads offer a startling contrast to the blandness of their peers; as genius teaches us, by contrast, the virtue of moderation; as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form the beauty of the fully functioning human body; so the homosexual person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm, a variation that does not eclipse the theme, but resonates with it. Extinguishing — or prohibiting — homosexuality is, from this point of view, not a virtuous necessity, but the real crime against nature, a refusal to accept the pied beauty of God’s creation, a denial of the way in which the other need not threaten, but may actually give depth and contrast to the self.
This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church’s recent grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the spirit of natural law as the Church’s current position. It is more consonant with what actually occurs in nature; seeks an end to every form of natural life; and upholds the dignity of each human person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church’s current stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long.
March 28th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
I would contend that the reason why natural law arguments are generally so ineffective is that it is very often not enough to agree that “natual law” exists. That gets you exactly nowhere. Your problems are just beginning.
Even those wh agree that natural law exists find that it has been nearly impossible to agree what the content of that natural law is. “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
Once the difficulty of discening natural law becomes apparent, then the specific natural law you are invoking becomes a matter that is subject to mediation through some process very subejct to human failings-chiefly self interest. Of course, every other source of law is subject to this same failing, but it means “natural law” is not more persuasive than any other source of law.
Natural law has historically been invoked to support slavery, the divine right of kings, prohibit interst and regulate other matters that we now reject. Onviously, discerning natural law by looking “through the glass darkly” led to mistaken results in the past. Ther is no reason to assume that today, we are any better at ascertaining natural law than our ancestors were. This limits natural law’s practical effectiveness as a form of persuasion.
March 28th, 2011 | 1:35 pm
People disagree on political matters. Thus, political arguments don’t work. Al Mohler and I disagree on the role tradition ought to play in the development of Christian theology. Let’s now chuck theological arguments. While we’re at it, why don’t we dispense with arguments in law, philosophy, stamp collecting, international diplomacy, and the culinary arts, since in each of these some large segment of really smart people are unconvinced by arguments that another large segment of really smart people find convincing.
Slavery was wrong, as Joe points out. But it’s wrongness is grounded in precisely what? That human beings are by nature property? But now we have a natural law argument.
March 28th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
Firstly, as suggested by the quote from Andrew Sullivan (quoted by Jon Rowe), there is the equivocation of “natural”. Most people assume it means “biological” or “part of the natural order,” when in fact in Thomas Aquinas it means more like “inherent to proper human functioning,” or, “that which leads humans to their proper end.” For those who are not persuaded by Aristotelian teleological reasoning about moral ends, it bears no weight. If a believer like myself is not persuaded by it, how much less the multitude of unreflective unbelievers?
Secondly, the reason that natural law reasoning is not more persuasive is such reasoning does not *prove* the moral order, it *assumes* that moral order. Thomas Aquinas was living in a taken-for-granted Christian world, a world in which the moral order was as “natural” as the rising as the sun. The moral ends of humanity seemed given, always and already present in human functioning. But Aquinas overlooked the fact that that moral order was only present because of the transformative power of the Christian revelation.
Now that the power of the revelation is ebbing out of our common cultural and moral discourse, so is the taken-for-granted power of the “natural” end of humanity,.
For example, natural law would hold that infanticide is wrong, since the second of the “natural order of inclination” is propagation of the species. Any act that violates that order is “immoral.” But based on a purely rational analysis of that order, how do we reach that conclusion? Suppose someone says: we are in a state of near starvation, so to allow my first child to flourish, my second child must be exposed. What in the order of natural inclinations tells us it is wrong?
Certainly Christianity has taught western civilization that it is wrong. And indeed that is the answer: Natural law takes the moral “unpacking” of Christian revelation (which shows the Christian what acts are lawful and unlawful), and assumes it was already present in natural, unregenerate human reasoning.
Infanticide is wrong, not because we know of it through reason (the Greeks or Romans knew no such thing), but because the morality of Christianity shows it to be wrong.
March 28th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
Francis J. Beckwith While we’re at it, why don’t we dispense with arguments in law, philosophy, stamp collecting, international diplomacy, and the culinary arts, since in each of these some large segment of really smart people are unconvinced by arguments that another large segment of really smart people find convincing.
I don’t think anyone is saying that we should dispense with such arguments (I’m certainly not). The issue is not whether they should be discarded but why they are not more persuasive. One of the main selling points of natural law arguments (as I’ve always understood it) is that they are accessible to everyone and, hence, generally superior to other types of faith-based arguments.
However, if people have to buy into the theory before they take the arguments seriously then it seems that natural law isn’t all that different from, say, arguments from scripture.
March 28th, 2011 | 2:05 pm
Undoubtedly some of the problems with natural law stem from the confusion that Jon Rowe points out in Andrew Sullivan’s feeble attempt to mimic such argumentation. Too often, people who hear the phrase “natural law”, associate it with an argument “what actually occurs in nature.” Thus, Mr. Sullivan believes that starting with what “many species and almost all human cultures” do is the key to making an argument of natural law. Philosophers (professional and arm-chair, alike) can readily see the difference, but the man on the street is unlikely to differentiate these without assistance.
Perhaps a good starting point would be to find a term less laden with divergent and confusable meanings than “natural.”
March 28th, 2011 | 2:43 pm
dwl — I couldn’t disagree more. Natural law argumentation does not assume the existence of a moral order. It only assumes the existence of a functioning human being who has not so numbed themselves to natural law — generally through immersion in ideology — that they can somehow not know “what we can’t not know.”
And Joe — your response to Beckwith illustrates exactly what I was trying — very ineffectively — to get at above. When natural law arguments are presented the same way as arguments from scripture are presented, they have the effect that arguments from scripture have — they convince might convince those who already believe in scripture/natural law, but they don’t convince disbelievers of anything new. But if we argue by appealing to natural law — to what natural law tells us the listener cannot really deny, when it comes down to it — it is far more effective than either.
Jay Budzizewski (sp?) does this better than almost anyone I’ve read/seen, and he is really the one that convinced me that natural law had practical implications for how effectively we argue. Before reading him, I basically asked the same question you did — what good is a natural law that no one who needs it apparently has access?
March 28th, 2011 | 2:45 pm
“Perhaps a good starting point would be to find a term less laden with divergent and confusable meanings than ‘natural.’”
Well I agree with this. Saying “homosexuality is unnatural,” unless connected to a very specific theory, is about as meaningful in a normative sense as saying “clothes are unnatural.”
March 28th, 2011 | 3:14 pm
I agree with TimC that most people have no clue what is meant by Natural Law, and when they hear the phrase they immediately think of something in nature, or of Mother Nature in a black robe sitting behind a bench, or some other ridiculous notion.
Years ago, when I first read Mere Christianity, the section on the Natural Law (I think Lewis called it the “moral law” or something like that) made perfect sense to me. I think if more people argued for Natural Law the way Lewis did, their arguments would fare a little better (not much, but maybe a little.)
March 28th, 2011 | 3:17 pm
“Slavery was wrong, as Joe points out. That human beings are by nature property? But now we have a natural law argument.”
But I didn’t say slavery was wrong. I said that natrual law arguments were employed to argue that slavery was justified–and those were demostrably faulty.
There are a number of non natural law arguments why slavery should be prohibited. I’ll suggest two: Slavery leads to frequent slave rebellions and civil wars and is economically unsound.
But the point is that invoking natural law to support specifc conduct has been wrong so often in the past that any claim today that we know the specifc content of natural law is open to question and doubt. It is not a statement that natural law does not exist, only a statement that we should be very wary of relying solely upon natural law.
“However, if people have to buy into the theory before they take the arguments seriously then it seems that natural law isn’t all that different from, say, arguments from scripture.”
That’s true. I also suggest that you get to that result in any event, even if you agree that there is a natural law, because of the difficulty in determining what the precise content of the natural law is.
So to answer the original question, natural law arguments are not more persuasive because, first, not everybody agrees there is such a thing as natural law, and, second, for those who do agree that there is such a thing, the contours of the natural law to be applied to specific situations are not cleary ascertainable by mere humans.
March 28th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
[...] Joe Carter is asking today, Why isn’t the Natural Law more persuasive? Why don’t more people submit to the argumentations about morality made by advocates of Natural Law, if it really is a Natural Law? Carter is engaging in a debate begun recently by Matthew Lee Anderson, and continued at First Things, about Evangelicals responding to Natural Law theories of morality. That is, can morality ultimately be derived from reason, or is revelation the sole, sound source of moral information and obligation? [...]
March 28th, 2011 | 4:41 pm
To Chris:
My position is the so-called “weak moral law” position: there is a universal moral law, but we cannot know its specific content apart from actual revelation, specific religious and spiritual manifestations, which then concretely create the moral order.
I also suspect you misunderstand what I mean by “assume” a moral order. I think you mean “logically”; whereas I mean “existentially”. I do not think the moral order logically self-evident, either as interpreted by Aquinas or Kant. The moral order must be created first, before the “law,” as a expression of a natural teleology, can be recognized. Any theory of “natural law” *existentially* assumes the moral order. The order exists prior to the consciousness of the natural law–*that* it is “lawful”; the natural law is only *known* because the community existing in accordance with that law exists. In other words: The only way we can *know* of a moral order is that there is preexisting *community* that is already living out such an order.
In the case of Aquinas: he *thought* there was a natural law, because his community was already living under its strictures. It *looked* “natural”: an organic expression of the spiritual life of the community. But in actual fact, it was the outworking of the moral transformation of the community living under revealed authority.
March 28th, 2011 | 4:50 pm
A quick further P.S. to my most recent comment:
Aquinas’ philosophy of “natural law” created the appearance of rationality. That is because philosophy claims to be able to say what is, to express the order of being.
Again, the “being” of Aquinas’ natural law was real: the Catholic Church. But he conflated the specific moral life of the Catholic church with the universal order (the “eternal law”, the whole community of the universe as ordered by divine reason).
March 28th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
First, natural law very often occurs in the discussion of marriage and sexuality, with same sex marriage and homosexuality being the central focus. The natural law theory that argues against homosexual relations also equally makes “unnatural” birth control, even used between married couples. This “reductio” may scare off some evangelicals from natural law arguments.
To me the part that is missing is the recognition that we live in a secular society.
People are right to be wary of others trying to establish the “one right way” to have sex.
But most (not all, but most) gay marriage arguments are not an argument against allowing gay people to exist, or live whatever way they’d like. Most gay marriage arguments are over categorization. The gays are the ones who have turned this into a zero-sum game, by insisting it is not enough to have their union recognized as a union; they must have control over the definition of marriage, so as to reclassify what is and is not family – taking the definition away from biology and giving the unilateral power to define what is and is not a family to the state.
So what is needed is not only “natural law” but also correct targeting. The point should not be to argue that gays should or should not be gay, or live a certain way.
The argument should more correctly target the real debate, which is that one religion – universalism – wants to establish their particular and unnatural views of what sex and marriage is for and what a family is, as the official state-sanctioned and state-enforced ideology/required belief.
What they propose has huge ramifications. For one thing, we would be overriding the “child’s best interest” standard in custody debates.
For another, we would be weakening the power of a biological family to be a cohesive unit, or to enforce norms of obligations, etc, in ways most people don’t even yet comprehend, because changing the way we perceive reality by changing our definitions of things, and changing how we categorize things, is a largely invisible process.
Which is the real point – to speed the transfer of power away from families as the primary institution to care for and nurture members, to the government as the primary institution that will care for and nurture members. Look at Europe to see what it looks like, when families become nothing more than people whom you share space with “for as long as everyone finds it agreeable to do so”, while the state is the real primary social unit, and the government is both the provider of all nurture and comfort, and the voice telling individuals what is acceptable vs. what is unthinkable.
It’s ironic because if we were actually allowed to have the whole gay marriage debate (instead of one side being reduced to “you just hate gays!!!11!1!) we would be speaking of how gay marriage will contribute to a reduction of freedoms, not an expansion of them.
March 28th, 2011 | 5:48 pm
Natural law requires metaphysics. After Descartes, Hume, and Kant, metaphysics was a pile of smoldering rubble whose name got slapped over the New Age books at Barnes & Noble. To recover natural law, we have to recover metaphysics first.
Natural Law also has a PR problem: some of the most vocal proponents of “natural law” are advocates of so-called “new natural law,” which explicitly eschews metaphysics. Those who think they reject natural law need to be sure they’re rejecting the genuine article.
March 28th, 2011 | 8:17 pm
Joe writes: “The issue is not whether they should be discarded but why they are not more persuasive. One of the main selling points of natural law arguments (as I’ve always understood it) is that they are accessible to everyone and, hence, generally superior to other types of faith-based arguments.”
They aren’t superior. They are inferior, since in theology the argument from authority is the strongest argument (HT: Thomas Aquinas).
But the question of superior or inferior argument is not the same as persuasion. The latter is the result of effective rhetoric, which may be the result of an inferior argument. In the two areas in which Natural Law thinking has been employed by Christians–homosexuality and abortion–it is in the latter that has been relatively effective. In the former, less so. But that has nothing to do with the quality of the argument. It has to do with the background beliefs that people bring to the argument. So, for example, if I realize that embracing a NL argument against homosexuality will result in loss of social standing, i.e., I will be called a bigot and I may lose my job and receive hate email, it is going to be difficult to persuade me even with the best argument ever.
This is not to say, of course, that all NL arguments are good argument. What I am saying is that “persuasion” is not an adequate test of an argument’s strength. It may, of course, tell us something about how easy it is to change people’s minds, or keep them silent, by bullying and name-calling. Take it from me, it is no fun to be at the receiving end of insults that cannot reasonably attributed to a fair-minded assessment of NL arguments. Ask Ken Howell.
March 28th, 2011 | 9:00 pm
My impression is that one of the main reasons natural law arguments have been unpersuasive (especially in English-language publications) is because natural law folks often use Latin and Greek technical philosophical terms rather than plain English. Words like “unitive” or “complementarity” may make sense to someone steeped in Aquinas, but the average bear says, “Huh?” Paul makes natural law arguments in his epistles, but he always wrote in a robust common Greek, not the elevated (and technical) Greek of the time, though he knew how to do it (his defense in Athens). In becoming all things to all men, he was willing to dump both Jewish and Greek technical language to make his appeal. Many of the new natural law philosophers could benefit from his example and what my 10th grade English teacher told me: all the memorable quotes in the English language are in Anglo-Saxon. Until they translate their arguments into Anglo-Saxon they will convince polysyllabic people but precious few others.
March 28th, 2011 | 10:09 pm
In general it’s difficult to persuade anyone by arguments when the topics at hand are moral topics.
But natural law theory wasn’t designed in order to be a generator of persuasive arguments (in traditional natural law theory, going all the way back to Aquinas, it’s easy to find comments suggesting that natural law reasoning will inevitably be very difficult as soon as we get away from very, very general issues) but instead to be an accurate account of practical reasoning and the understanding required for it. If it is an accurate account of this, it can then serve as a framework and foundation for improved moral argument; but, in general, no one will recognize the improvement without first seeing how it is an accurate account of human reason.
And how many people, really, can be expected already to have that view? From a quarter to half the students in my classes each term explicitly affirm moral relativism (regardless of what their religious views are); it would be odd to expect any of them to find natural law arguments the least bit persuasive.
March 28th, 2011 | 10:26 pm
To FrH:
“To recover natural law, we have to recover metaphysics first.”
I agree, but question whether metaphysics *is* recoverable.
March 28th, 2011 | 10:59 pm
C. S. Lewis wrote about the ‘tao’ in the Abolition of Man and in the appendix collected a list of moral laws common to most religions. He believed in natural law and isn’t he a master persuader and successful arguer?
March 29th, 2011 | 2:09 am
The starting point of this discussion seems a bit odd to me. Rather than ask how persuasive Natural Law moral arguments are, shouldn’t our first concern be with whether or not they are sound? Persuasion is, as Dr. Beckwith notes, a question of rhetoric. The question of soundness addresses whether or not such arguments can give an account of the moral life that is intelligible and consonant with human flourishing.
The Natural Law arguments that I’ve seen employed in discussions of marriage recently proceed by showing that sexual behavior that lacks an intrinsic orientation toward procreation also lacks an intrinsic connection to the universally understood goods of marriage: union, bonding, family life. I don’t see why it is necessary to “buy in” to any abstract conceptions of moral order or God’s Law in order to be convinced by such argumentation. On the contrary, these arguments strike me as very narrowly focused in biology, a simple acknowledgment that our actions seek intelligible goals, and a recognition that certain moral goods (family, etc) are desirable and conducive to human flourishing.
In short, I don’t see a lot of the ideological baggage that some of the earlier comments identify in Natural Law arguments. And I think they do give a quite intelligible account of moral goods and moral actions, which in itself is persuasive.
The question in my mind is: why would anyone not use such arguments? What is the alternative? There seems to be an implicit understanding (at least for Mohler) that “faith-based” arguments could take the place of Natural Law reasoning. I am skeptical of this – even for Christians. How persuasive is an account of the moral life that does not offer an intelligible account of the connection between human action and human flourishing? Can arguments from religious authority accomplish this task without reference to reason?
C.S. Lewis does argue for the existence of universal moral norms that are accessible to reason in “The Abolition of Man” as well as in “Mere Christianity.” However, his concern seems to be mostly with establishing that the “Tao” does exist; he is somewhat silent on its actual moral content. Natural Law arguments would attempt to elucidate this content. Lewis’ appendix at the end of “Abolition” strikes me as a variety of the argument from authority rather than an attempt to offer a true Natural Law account of the Tao.
March 29th, 2011 | 2:31 am
Following up on Brandon’s comment, here’s a gem from Anscombe’s “Contraception and Chastity”:
Any type of wrong action is “against the natural law”: stealing is, framing someone is, oppressing people is. “Natural law” is simply a way of speaking about the whole of morality, used by Catholic thinkers because they believe the general precepts of morality are laws promulgated by God our Creator in the enlightened human understanding when it is thinking in general terms about what are good and what are bad actions. That is to say, the discoveries of reflection and reasoning when we think straight about these things are God’s legislation to us (whether we realize this or not).
Calling something a “natural law argument” seems rather bizarre to me. As Brandon says, Aquinas talks about natural law as he is describing the relationship of God’s Providence and governing reason over His creation, and how that is played out in human nature. He does not, however, suggest that we can all just read the precepts of natural law out of the book of nature or our own hearts, except for the most universal ones. So any good use of reason with respect to what is good is a natural law argument, and it becomes no more persuasive by affixing the label “NATURAL LAW ARGUMENT” to it.
Now of course it is true that our hearts are corrupt and sinful. It is also true that modern moral philosophies go astray in various ways, and that developing and propounding the idea of natural law is important in those contexts. There are many intellectual stumbling blocks out there, and removing them is right and good. But as one of the commenters noted, the ‘New Natural Law’ approach severs its arguments from substantive natural-philosophical principles, and hence you’re left with (so far as I can tell) the mere idea that there are basic human goods, which then put constraints on and give guidance to action. (I don’t find that promising as an argumentative strategy or as an interpretation of Aquinas, but anyway…)
But again, the arguments don’t become more persuasive just by calling them ‘Natural Law Arguments’ – even if one’s interlocutors accept the way one is organizing the argument, it still comes down to receptivity to the good. And that doesn’t come about through arguments, primarily, still less from the addition of a descriptive label to arguments. People have to see, in human lives around them, these goods being developed and achieved. They have to recognize that something in human nature is being developed and fulfilled when people live in certain ways.
March 29th, 2011 | 9:04 am
Blake –
The “defense of marriage amendments” in Michigan and Virginia specifically banned same-sex civil unions as well as same-sex marriages.
March 29th, 2011 | 11:08 am
Might I suggest that people who believe in the authority of Romans 1 are predisposed to find ‘natural law’ arguments unpersuasive?
March 29th, 2011 | 11:38 am
Lewis’ concept of the Tao, although insightful, is flawed in several ways.
Firstly, although his historical summary was good for state of comparative religious scholarship at the time, is historically unsophisticated. He went to a major encyclopedia of the time, and simply pulled out summaries of ethical teachings.
It is a “flat earth” view (so to speak) in which all the religions are similar, and it is just a matter of seeing how their moral assertions are alike. It doesn’t take account of differing cultural or spiritual contexts.
Secondly, his concept of “Tao” is simply a placeholder for some common moral vision he thinks all religions have in common. (I do not blame him, since he is very forthright about it.) He assumes what he must prove–that all moral statements are expressions of a single, unitary system, and conflates the Tao with Hebrew morality, Christian ethics, Aristotle, Thomas, and Kant.
A contemporary argument from “the Tao” would require a more historically sophisticated approach.
March 29th, 2011 | 11:43 am
To Ray Ingles:
Actually, for me the process was the reverse:
Once I began to realize that “natural law” arguments were unpersuasive, I went back to Romans 1, and saw what I should have seen all the time.
March 29th, 2011 | 5:26 pm
Blake –
The gays are the ones who have turned this into a zero-sum game…
The “defense of marriage amendments” in Michigan and Virginia specifically banned same-sex civil unions as well as same-sex marriages.
Gays have yet to demonstrate a compelling case why they need “legal recognition”.
So far there is not a single right they have listed that is not available to them already, except two:
1. the right to demand people view their relationship according to Universalist-humanist religious views (which is the real point, to replace religious freedom with a pro-Universalist religious atmosphere)
2. the right to “pass for procreative”
Please alert me when someone provides an argument that stands up, as to why Universalist-humanist religious views should be preferenced over every other type of religious view.
March 29th, 2011 | 10:25 pm
For the record, I find natural law arguments very persuasive. I was in favor of gay relationships until I encountered them. They showed me how those relationships are actually against reason and the human good.
Just sayin’…
March 30th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
Y’know, Blake, I find I don’t feel like running over that again. You didn’t really respond the last time.
March 30th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
of course natural law “assumes” a moral order. it has to. no honest person has ever doubted the existence of a moral order…. reality — which includes ourselves — is a certain way, and we can only work with and respond to reality.
there are certain principles that serve as starting points for all meaningful thought. these starting principles are, by rational intuition, self-evident. doubting these starting principles simply destroys meaningful thought.
March 30th, 2011 | 6:06 pm
The following schema is in the category of “what thinkest thou thereof?” and concerns more the dialectic than the substance of “right reason.”
(1) the right to life :: the internality of procreation to marriage (marriage being, as an institution, procreation-presupposing);
(2) the self-directed rational-animal organism :: the intrinsic capacity to procreate.
#1 is the key proposition or basic assertion of pro-lifers and traditional marriage defenders, respectively. #2 is the criterion of applicability (who or what is included in #1).
#2 follows automatically from #1 in the case of SSM, but not in the case of abortion, where it has to be argued for (and never quite seems to get beyond rational disputation.) This seems to suggest that same-sex marriage will be constitutionally (whether or not morally) more controversial than Roe v. Wade.
March 31st, 2011 | 2:45 pm
The quote by Andrew Sullivan in Jon Rowe’s comment is very interesting but does not help justify same-sex marriage. Rather than focusing on the portentous predilections of Andrew Sullivan, I would like to offer a version of a natural law argument against SSM. I’ve changed my mind about procreation being a necessary condition of marriage (as I had maintained on other FT threads), but not much follows from that as a practical matter.
Theoretically (as was pointed out to me by an Oxford philosopher), humans could come into existence by spontaneous generation, as Aristotle believed insects do, and yet presumably exchange vows, live together, have children, etc. So it would seem to be untrue to say that logically there can be no institution of marriage apart from procreation.
Even so, there is no *need* for an institution of marriage apart from procreation, meaning a naturalistic and socio-anthropological need. This, I would insist, is what it really means to say that marriage presupposes procreation. Marriage doesn’t *logically* presuppose procreation but phenomenologically it does. (“The things themselves,” in phenomenological parlance, point to the actual world we live in and the way things are in that world, whether or not they logically must be that way.) Now, it seems to me that this has important consequences for public decision-making.
What it tells us is that while SSM may not be an irrational evolution of marriage or a conceptual absurdity–it is not a mere category mistake–judicial decisions that give civil recognition to SSM undeniably are unreasonable (and perhaps downright irrational). Statutes upholding traditional marriage cannot justifiably be struck down as irrational or arbitrary or prejudicial. The statutes cannot be any of those things as long as traditional marriage has a naturalistic and non-theological basis, which it clearly does (and if the intrinsic capacity to procreate is the standard of marriage inclusiveness).
Thus, the only politically legitimate way to introduce SSM is via legislation or referenda. And at that level, opposition to SSM is not inherently irrational or prejudicial. People can vote their values, and it is hardly nonsensical to regard homosexuality as not being the equal of heterosexuality either culturally or morally.
I think of this argument as being broadly in the natural law tradition. And there’s nothing abstract or vague about it. Evangelicals who are ordinarily suspicious of natural law can happily embrace this kind of argument, even when they are intensely suspicious of the “new natural law” argument that unfortunately dominates the conservative side of the SSM debate.
April 1st, 2011 | 6:20 am
So it would seem to be untrue to say that logically there can be no institution of marriage apart from procreation.
Except for one thing.
The institution of marriage grants certain benefits. Let us call them “procreative benefits”, because they are benefits that are specifically aimed toward the needs of procreating couples.
Is it a neutral or harmless act to grant benefits to people outside of the group intended?
When you grant a license that establishes certain legal rights, the holder of that license by definition now possesses those rights.
In other words, granting a driver’s license to a blind man might sound nice, in that blind men need ID’s as well as any other man. But you can’t grant someone a driver’s license without also granting them the right to drive.
This is the point everyone seems to miss about marriage. You do not need to procreate to have a good marriage. However, you do need to be eligible for the procreative benefits.
If we grant a marriage license to a childless couple, they’re not in the same situation as if we granted a marriage license to a gay couple. A childless couple is perfectly within their rights to choose not to use rights or benefits that they are entitled to. That is not the same as but is in fact the mirror opposite of what gays want to do, which involves claiming – or wanting to use – rights or benefits that you are not entitled to.
If gays had the right to marry, it would ethically have to be a “stripped down” version, containing only the rights they are eligible for – a state ID as opposed to a driver’s license.
The problem is, if you do that, the question arises, why does the state need to recognize a relationship like this, anyway?
Marriage is about more than just procreation. But the state’s interest in recognizing and regulating relationships isn’t.
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