I have difficulties with the theory of natural law, and this puts me at odds with my Church’s official teachings. In an effort to make the “religious submission of mind and will” that Vatican II commands (Lumen Gentium 25), I am writing my understanding of the natural law for others to critique. My assumption regarding the religious submission of “mind and will” is that my will must direct my mind to be convinced of the intellectual compulsion of the rationality of the Church’s teaching, if possible. I leave open room for not being convinced of the Church’s teaching with respect to a non-definitive doctrine while nonetheless submitting my will. In this respect, some aspects which I will discuss below are more pressing for me, as they have been dogmatically defined by Vatican I. I begin with these considerations on authority to give an indication of the kind of aid I seek – the aid of argument, not assertion. (I am, however, also open to arguments that I have misunderstood the nature of religious submission or of authority, as well.)
It will be helpful if I outline my understanding of natural law first. Natural law takes a basically Aristotelian approach to morality: human beings, like all things, have a proper function and their purpose is to fulfill that function. For humans, the habits which fulfill this function are virtues, the habits which do not are vices. Happiness consists in the life of virtue. Basically, you should be virtuous because it will make you happy. But Christian natural law goes beyond Aristotle, making for a stronger obligation in the moral “should.” Created by God to be the kinds of things they are, human beings have an obligation to live according to their function insofar as they have an obligation to obey God. We might list these components in this way:
(1) God exists.
(2) God has created human beings to have a specific function.
(3) God desires for human beings to live according to this function.
(4) Human beings owe obedience to God.
(5) Human beings can identify the details of their specific function.
In order for natural law to serve as the basis for public conversation and argument in the way the Church says it should, we must add that the factuality of each of these components can be determined by reason unaided by revelation. If natural reason can determine only that the Prime Mover exists, for example, it can discern (1), but not (2), (3), or (4). Without (3) or (4), natural law can at best be a suggestion for good living: live this way and you’ll be happy according to God’s will. If natural law is to be a conceptual tool which unearths moral and civic obligations, we must have all 5 components accessible to natural reason.
My problem is that, as far as I can tell, only (5) seems to be available to natural reason. As a Christian, I of course believe in (1) – (4), but I believe it on the basis of God’s self-revelation in Christ. I am actually willing to go a bit further and say that revelation (and its authentic interpretation by the Church) tells me that (1) is in principle open to reason (Romans 1 hints at something like the cosmological argument and Vatican I’s first canon on revelation appears to have defined the same basic principle). My difficulty is that no argument of which I am aware seems convincing on any of these points. It may well be that I either do not understand these arguments or am missing their logical flow. I may even be misunderstanding the structure of natural law in the first place. In either case, I thought that perhaps some people smarter than me could help clear things up, in order that I might better live out my religious submission of intellect and will.
2 comments:
I have no time for your intellectual issues, Spencer! Besides. Technically, I don't have to care about the issue anyway. :)
I defer this one to my superiors. And actually, I might be interested in what they have to say.
(But if you want to talk about moral topics really worth discussing... The new Kenna album is up for release next week! I hope you're planning to be a good man and support him!) :)
I guess an argument about the nature of religious authority from me wouldn't get very far, so I'll stick to talking about natural law. And that only briefly, for now.
I confess a near complete ignorance on more recent natural law like the one incorporated into Vatican I, but the medieval understanding at least doesn't seem to require knowledge of the five points to mention. Thomas frames the natural law as stemming from the first principle of practical reason, seek good and avoid evil, in the same way that speculative reasoning stems from its first principle, the law of noncontradiction. Without needing to understand all the reasons why it's the case, Thomas just thinks this first principle is self-evident to natural reason. And likewise many others of the medievals simply identified the natural law with the golden rule, which they supposed was universally evident. This is prior to the issue of the content of the natural law, which we should also get into, but that may be a helpful starting point.
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