The Law of Nature — parable of the poor sport

“Now, it seems to me you’re equivocating on what “Natural Law” means. On the one hand, you say that “Natural Law” is how men behave. If “Natural Law” were purely descriptive then I’d have no problem with this aspect of its use. But “Natural Law” is also used in a prescriptive manner and it is with this usage that there’s a problem.”

No, not at all. I did not use ‘natural law’ to mean a description of how men act. That is the discipline properly called history. I used ‘natural law’ to mean the moral order.

This is the way CS Lewis and writers in the West since the times of the Greeks has used the phrase. It does not refer to an empirical description of anything that can be perceived by the senses.

Let me ask you this. You yourself are aware of a moral order of some sort in the universe, because without such an awareness, you could not disapprove of illogical thinking or self deception or shoddy thinking. In other words, if there is no duty to be reasonable, to be fair, or to be honest, then there is no way you could disapprove OR EVEN IMAGINE DISAPPROVING of someone who was deceiving himself in his thinking. To chide someone for a breach of duty implies a belief that the duty exists.

Your argument, such as it is, is merely a verbal confusion. You are treating the word ‘nature’ to mean ‘empirical nature.’ But I direct your attention to your own loyalty to the duty to be honest, the duty not to deceive oneself. This duty has no mass, nor length, nor duration, nor candlepower, nor temperature, nor moles of substance, nor current. Hence it is not a physical thing. It is not perceived by the senses nor discovered any possible combination of sense impressions by induction nor deduction. Whence comes it?

The reason why I cannot answer your question is that I do not accept the unspoken premise that the word ‘nature’ is confined to material and empirical reality. Were that so, there could be no discussion of morality.

You mention in passing a test or rule to see if something is a moral imperative: you say that you and I both agree on it. But we are not legislators of the nature of reality. Morality is not a game like Chess.

If you and I sit down at the Chessboard we can agree that no one will be allowed to castle for this game, or that the bishops will start adjacent to the rooks, and knights adjacent to the King and Queen. We would be playing a variation of Chess, or Displacement Chess, but the rules would be binding on the two of us for the duration of the game, since that is what we agreed.

But suppose I found myself in a bad tactical position, and in order to improve my position, I castled my king. You could make two complaints against me: first, you could say that I had broken the rules of the variation of Chess to which we had agreed. Second, you could say that I had broken my word.

The first complaint, perhaps, I could answer like Hobbes, and say that the rules of Chess are arbitrary, and that I have as much authority to change them as any sovereign. But what of the second complaint? That men ought not to break their word is a moral primary known to all men above the age of reason. It is intuitive and undeniable knowledge. Even those who argue against it tacitly acknowledge it.

It is not, indeed it cannot be, an arbitrary rule enacted by the two of us binding on us only for so long we give our word to obey it, for if it were such a rule, no rules could ever bind anyone, since no one could be trusted to keep his word, including that particular form of keeping one’s word involved in agreeing to obey a rule during a game called sportsmanship.

If so, you and I, merely by tacitly agreeing to have an honest conversation on the topic we presently discuss, are ourselves evidence that a moral order, called ‘the natural law’, exists; and our knowledge of its existence is metaphysical rather than physical.

For this reason, your minor premise that the physical and empirical world must display a end goal in order for there to be a moral order in the world of ideas and ideals is a premise whose sense I do not see.