Mondays are for questions from students.  This student hails from my own institution, the University of Texas.

Question:

Although the Declaration of Independence proclaims “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” American political thought seems to have severed its connections with those ideas.  How did the American tradition understand God, and how did that understanding justify natural rights?

Answer:

To say that we have natural rights is to say that we have certain rights because of the kind of being that we are.  What kind is that?  A human being is a person, an individual reality of a rational nature, “the most perfect thing in all nature.”  He can never be a mere part of something else, in the way that your arm is a mere part of your body.  That’s why, even though a human being can be subject to authority, he cannot simply be owned by the state, to be used as the state desires.  Not even God views us as mere tools, for though we were created by and for His love, and we owe Him our utter loyalty and obedience, the Creator made man in His image.

Fortunately, the American Founders were influenced by this robust tradition.  Unfortunately, they were also confused by various early modern thinkers who thought they were raising the stature of natural rights, but subtly distorted them.  Not even the best of them, the English thinker John Locke, realized that a man is a more excellent thing than a tool.  He argued that the reason you have rights against me is merely that you are God’s tool, not mine.  Take a close look at his Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 2, Section 6, and you will see what I mean.

This view – affirming natural rights, yet for confused and insufficient reasons -- was like a lovely, fresh red apple with a worm in it.  The apple can’t remain as it is; if you don’t do anything about the worm, it decays.  That is what has been happening, for the people of our day are deeply mixed up about rights.  At one extreme are legal positivists, who think that there aren’t any natural rights – that government creates rights and can take them away again.  At the other extreme are people who think that the autonomous self is utterly sovereign -- that anyone who wants something badly enough has a transcendent right to it, and the government has a duty to back him up.  Oddest of all, some people try to occupy both extremes at once.

The classical view that rights depend on the kind of being that we are could bring order to this chaos, but is widely rejected.  For example, the supporters of abortion -- whether they realize it or not – are logically committed to the view that either not all human beings are persons, or else personhood is a matter of degree.  Either way, we are headed for a caste system in which some people have greater rights than others and may privately decree death for them.  Infants.  The old.  The infirm.

The only way to save the apple is to get rid of the worm, and that, I think, is the task for our day.

Tomorrow:  Child and Chimp

St. Paul says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.  The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

St. Paul’s statement that he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law leads some to the mistaken conclusion that the rest of those commandments are unnecessary – that if only I do it lovingly, for example, I may commit adultery.

On the contrary, the commandment of love and the particular commandments are interdependent.  We learn from the commandment of love the point of the particular commandments and the spirit in which they should be practiced; but we learn from the particular commandments what genuine love actually requires.  Adultery is of such a nature that it cannot be committed lovingly; love is of such a nature that it loathes the very thought of adultery.

Tomorrow:  The Apple and the Worm

I suppose it is obvious that our rational inclinations include everything pertaining to seeking the truth, especially the most important truth, the truth about God.  As the eyes seek to see, as the lungs seek to breath, so the mind seeks to deliberate and attain knowledge.

Surprisingly, Thomas Aquinas suggests that the family of tendencies that belong to rationality has a second branch too:  Everything pertaining to “living in society,” for example, avoiding unnecessary offense.  Why doesn’t he group the inclination to live in society with the inclinations we share with animals?  Aren’t many animals naturally social?

The answer is that just because we are rational, human society is a radically different kind of thing than the “society” of cows.  For us, to be social is not just to belong to an association for finding food or avoiding predators, important as those things are, but to belong to a partnership in pursuit of the truth.  Seeking and knowing the truth is not a private endeavor; it is not the kind of thing that can be done apart from community.

This fact has far-reaching implications for the ordering of human society.  It’s too bad we don’t often think about them.

Sunday:  Getting the Point

As an acorn is targeted upon becoming an oak, so in other cases, for a being with a nature to seek its particular good is to aim at what perfects, fulfills, or completes it -- what it is made for, what it is ordered to, what fully actualizes its potentiality.  Not even an addict who craves heroin seeks destruction as such; he seeks some lesser good that he mistakes for his greatest good but that really destroys it.

So often, when people say they are seeking fulfillment, what they mean is merely “I am trying to get what I desire.”  They assume that this will be fulfilling, even when what they desire is destructive of their nature.  Our natural inclinations are not what we happen to crave, but what we are made to pursue, what the unfolding of our inbuilt potentialities requires.

When all goes well, our natural inclinations and our cravings correspond, yet the match can certainly fail.  Those who suffer physical or psychological disorders may subjectively long for things that are bad for them; so may the immature; so may those who are habituated to vice.  Just as a ball may roll up instead of down an inclined plane if some other force is acting on it, so a person may not desire what he is naturally inclined to desire -- but this in no way shows that he is not naturally inclined to desire it.

Tomorrow:  How You Are Different from a Cow

The original “Is and Ought" post

Not only is it possible to make inferences from is to ought, that is, from descriptive premises to evaluative conclusions -- but it is also possible to make inferences from ought to is.

An example of an inference from is to ought:

Pregnancy is not a disturbance of natural function, but is itself a natural function.  Hence it is wrong to view it as view it as a disease which can be "treated" by abortion.

An example of an inference from ought to is:

Lying is wrong.  This precept discloses to us that the social practice of conversation is ordered to the mutual discovery of truth -- to a cooperative endeavor to bring thought into alignment with how things really are.

Tomorrow:  Of Acorns and Men