The Self-Impeaching Denial of Natural Law
Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader with the abbreviated name of wrf3 has illogically denied the existence of Natural Law in a fashion as to show he knows not what the term means. Attempts to explain the term to him have met with failure.
He imagines it to be an axiomatic system like geometry for deducing specific conclusions, rather than a set of moral intuitions by whose means the justice or otherwise of Positive Law (that is, law posited by men, manmade law) can be measured. Absent Natural (or nonmanmade) Law such Positive (or manmade) Laws as we see made by princes and parliaments and enforced by police or by custom cannot be criticized nor affirmed.
Basic on this misunderstanding, wrf3 puckishly offered that he would believe in Natural Law if he saw it in operation, for example, if Dr Andreassen would convince me of the moral probity of fornication, or I him of chastity.
What if we agree on some other point? Does this not prove the existence of Natural Law just as well (or just as poorly)?
Dr. Andreassen, quoting me, writes as follows:
Wright: Dr Andreassen, whether he knows it or not, or whether he admits it or not, relies for the moral authority of his own truncated moral code based on the same principles of the same list as do I, and as does every man.
Andreassen: I agree with you on this point. Because I am an inveterate nitpicker I will point out that some men are psychopaths or otherwise diseased, and therefore do not have the same moral intuitions; but this is easily fixed by amending “every man” to “every sane man”.
Wright: The difference is that he exaggerates certain principles out of their due proportion, such as the principle of liberty, or tolerating others out of charity, in order to eliminate principles of equal or greater authority, such as chastity or temperance.
Andreassen: Conversely, it seems to me that you are taking a means, chastity, and promoting it to an end in itself. Chastity was useful in the past as a way of avoiding various harms; now we have other means to the same end. If I may take an analogy from geometry, we have a certain proposition which it seems to me can be proved from ones that are already accepted; I therefore hold that it should be classified as a theorem, not as part of the axiomatic foundation of geometry. You, on the other hand, believe that the proofs are flawed, and the the proposition must be either accepted or rejected as an axiom, independent of other propositions. You are no doubt aware that geometry did have such a controversy for a long time, touching the Fifth Axiom; it was eventually shown that this proposition is in fact independent, and one must accept either Euclid’s version or one of its negations as an axiom.
My comment:
I note that wrf3 has said that he will believe Natural Law exists if Dr Andreassen and I come to agree on any point concerning sexual morality.
In the paragraph above, he and I have agreed, if not on the specific issue wrf3 mentioned, at least on the nature of the disagreement and the protocol for resolving it.
Despite knowing full well that his offer was not in earnest (because by its nature it could not be), I hereby call upon wrf3 to fulfill his offer, and admit Natural Law exists.
For, behold, Dr Andreassen and I have measured something, the nature of the problem, and he and I use the same yardstick. Perhaps we measure the matter differently, but if he and I agree on the yardstick, surely the yardstick exists?
I say above that the offer could not by its nature be serious for two reasons.
First, as an empirical test, checking to see whether two men having a dispute resolve the dispute by means of reference to a Natural Law does not prove the alleged Natural Law is not positive law. If Dr Andreassen and I had a dispute about the legality of a chess move, the mere fact by itself that we came to an agreement does not prove the laws of chess are non-manmade and non-arbitrary.
Likewise here, any agreement we reached might be reached because the disputants share common assumptions or cultural background or are both being controlled my mind control satellites. The empirical test for Natural Law proposed by wrf3 fatally fails to control its variables.
Second, the Natural Law is a metaphysical principle, and ergo is not open to proof nor disproof by empirical means.
Natural Law is not something we rational creatures observe in nature, it is something we rational creatures do in our thinking, and which by introspection we observe ourselves doing in our thinking, and by the testimony of other rational creatures we understand other rational creatures do in their thinking.
A metaphysical principle is an inescapable axiom. An axiom is called “inescapable” when even those who dispute it have no option but to make use of it. Metaphysical principles are the categories of thought without which any reasoning within a particular discipline is impossible.
A few examples should make this clear. In astronomy, one can erect a heliocentric mathematical model, which means that geocentrism is not an inescapable axiom; however, one cannot erect a nonmathematical mathematical model. Mathematics is an axiomatic assumption of astronomy. While a philosopher can contemplate, as a problem of epistemology, whether mathematical truth has a necessary or contingent relationship to astronomical truth, an astronomer cannot. He must assume that mathematics really can describe the real cosmos or else he cannot do astronomy at all.
Likewise, no one can study history who denies the category called “time” and the concept of “the past”; nor can one study aesthetic theory if one denies the concept “beauty”; nor epistemology if one denies the category “truth”; nor can one study the discipline of jurisprudence if one denies the concept of “positive law”.
Likewise, here, one cannot study ethics without the axiom of Natural Law. Ironically, one cannot even make the minimum ethical demands for honesty and integrity necessary to this or any other study without this axiom.
Let us define a Legal Positivist to mean one who maintains that Natural Law does not exist. All that a Legal Positivist can maintain is whether a manmade law coheres with other manmade laws. He might critique nor affirm certain manmade laws on the grounds of, say, economic efficiency or aesthetic appeal, but he cannot critique nor affirm manmade laws no matter how unjust, Draconian, illogical or cruel on the grounds of their unfairness, because without Natural Law, there is no ground to critique nor affirm manmade law. He can, of course, express a private opinion that he prefers some laws to others, but this preference is arbitrary, and he has stepped outside the discipline of ethics.
Ironically, this also includes the laws governing the ethics of behavior during debate and behavior within one’s own thoughts during introspective contemplation of philosophical problems, including the problem of whether Natural Law exists.
To say that man has a duty to be honest with himself when wrestling in his own thoughts with the problem of Natural Law is to affirm Natural Law exists: because obviously there is no statute nor caselaw which imposes such a duty in my jurisdiction, and if one exists in your jurisdiction, you may move to mine and hence remove yourself from any such obligation as this imposed by positive law.
To say that man has no duty to be honest with himself while wrestling in his own thoughts with the problem is to impeach his own conclusions, because absent such a duty, there is no assurance that he has been honest. Any opinion he voices about the Natural Law problem, or indeed any problem, becomes nothing more than an arbitrary personal preference, not the conclusion of a chain of reasoning.
Therefore the mere act of contemplating whether or not Natural Law exists, if one does it honestly, and if that honesty is not due to mere arbitrary inclination but due to a moral imperative, and if one happens not be in in a jurisdiction where some Positive Law imposes upon its subjects a positive duty of intellectual honesty, then one is oneself a testament to the existence of Natural Law.
The typical modern man, crippled by a modern education, will not be able to distinguish between motive, the psychological cause why one performs an act, and duty, the formal definition of the bounds of the act, what one ought to be doing. The entire concept of duty, like the concept of Natural Law, is invisible to modern men, and they speak rank nonsense about it, even while assuming it axiomatically in their every act that has an ethical dimension to it, or in every comment about such acts.
The reasons for this are psychological rather than philosophical. The Legal Positivist cannot articulate a coherent reason why he believes what he does, but his urgent desire to escape from shame and blame requires him as an article of faith and a mystery of the modern cult of whim-worship to assert the nonexistence even of moral principles he himself uses, and on which all his moral reasoning relies.
How men can maintain manifest paradoxes and jibberish in their views of the world without cracking a smile is yet another mystery of the modernist faith, called Doublethink.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
