Bonus link:  Second half of interview in World magazine

I will devote several Mondays to the exchange of letters which this interesting note began.

Question:

I am an Australian lawyer, a Ph.D. candidate in constitutional law, and a Protestant Christian with a great interest in natural law.  A lot of Protestants are quite resistant to laying down moral prescriptions outside of those contained in Scripture.  I am sympathetic to this perspective, but I am also sympathetic to the perspective that Scripture needs to be supplemented by natural law concerning issues that Scripture doesn’t address (for example, Scripture doesn’t say it is wrong to have a sex change operation).  Can you point me in the right direction?  I would value any guidance.

Reply:

You view Scripture as commanding some things, and natural law as commanding more things.  I would put it little differently:  Scripture the natural law for granted, so even the parts of natural law that it doesn’t state explicitly are presupposed.

Consider for example the prologue to the Ten Commandments, where God reminds the Hebrew people of their indebtedness to Him:  “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  You shall have no other gods before me ....’”  How is it that the people of Israel, before the proclamation of the law, already know the law of gratitude?  The answer is that the basics of natural law are already impressed upon the innermost design of the created moral intellect.  We know a part of God's will for us even before receiving it in words.

Or take the issue you mention, the wrong of so-called sex change operations.  True, Scripture doesn’t “say” that such operations are wrong, but it implies it with great and terrible authority.  “Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture” (Psalm 100:3).  If God is the Creator, then what business do we have monkeying with the order of His creation?  None whatsoever.  This natural law inference is legitimate even apart from revelation, because the reality of the Creator can be perceived even by unaided reason.  With the help of Scripture, it ought to be more obvious still.

Although I understand the importance to Protestants of the Reformation principle sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” I see no need for Protestants and Catholics to disagree about natural law.  For if Scripture itself points to natural law, then natural law reasoning is not opposed to the primacy of Scripture; it is necessary for understanding Scripture properly.

By the way -- the Reformers agreed!

Bonus link:  Second half of interview in World magazine

Transexual:  A person who identifies as a member of the other sex.

Transracial:  A person who identifies as a member of another race.

Transpresleyan:  A person who identifies as Elvis Presley.

Transsartorial:  A person of a large clothing size who identifies as a member of a smaller one.

Transknowledgeable:  An inexperienced person who identifies as a knowing what he is doing.

Transwealthy:  A passer of bad checks who identifies as having the money to cover them.

Transfelonious:  A person convicted of serious crimes who identifies as having a clean record.

Transgenerational:  A person old enough to know better who identifies as a person in his teens.

Bonus link:  Video of my talk at BYU

Other talk videos here

If Deniers of the Moral Basics Really Do Know What They Deny – So What?

Why is moral denial such a grave matter?  At the beginning of the series I mentioned one reason:  It vitiates moral conversation and degrades the practice of philosophy.  But there is another reason too. 

Consider the driver of an automobile.  Ordinarily, the threat of civil punishments like traffic fines and the deprivation of license discourage people from driving recklessly.  But they only have this effect up to a certain point of corruption in the will.  For consider someone who drives recklessly anyway.  After a certain number of punishments, his license is taken away.  After a certain number of punishments for driving without a license, his vehicle is in danger of impoundment.  The risk of losing his vehicle may excite a person like this to drive even faster and more recklessly than before, just to keep the policeman from catching him.  Paradoxically, the threatened penalty crosses the line from inhibiting violation to encouraging it.

I suggest that something like this happens with the penalties of conscience too.  You would think that the terror of having to live with oneself afterward would deter everyone from involvement in abortion.  But one who will not face conscience as a teacher must face it as an accuser, and in this way it urges him to yet further wrong.  Consider the woman who told her counselor "I couldn't be a good parent," amended her remark to "I don't deserve to have any children," and still later revealingly added "If it hadn't been for my last abortion, I don't think I'd be pregnant now."[19]  This hieroglyph is not hard to decipher.  When she says she could not be a good mother, what she means is that good mothers do not kill their children.  She keeps getting pregnant to replace the children she has killed; but she keeps having abortions to punish herself for having killed them.  With each abortion the cams of guilt make another revolution, setting her up to have another.  She can never stop until she admits what is going on.

What this shows is that if we do not authentically repent and carry out the movements of confession, reconciliation, atonement, and justification in good faith, we may actually be driven to plunge deeper into wrongdoing instead of backing off from it.  The example I have just given arise from trying to atone the wrong way, but the same dreadful dynamism operates when we confess, seek reconciliation, or try to justify ourselves the wrong way.  Confessing the wrong way becomes a strategy for recruiting to the Movement.  Reconciling the wrong way means that instead of giving up the wrongdoing that separates me from man and God, I demand that man and God approve of it.  Justifying myself the wrong way drives me toward new evils that it was no part of my original intention to excuse -- if in order to make abortion seem right I must commit myself to premises which also justify infanticide, then so be it!  In such ways, not only does moral conversation become dishonest, but the whole society may be thrust out of moral equilibrium.

Note

19.  This anecdote follows the same pattern as many others passed on to me by crisis pregnancy counselors.

Link to Part 13 of 14

Mondays are for answering letters.  This isn’t exactly a letter, but I think it's close enough; it’s a question I have been asked frequently, most recently when I was speaking about natural law at Acton Institute’s annual conference on the foundations of a free and virtuous society.

Question:

Is it possible to be a libertarian and still believe in natural law?

Reply:

It all depends on what you mean by libertarianism.  There are two kinds of libertarianism, corresponding to two different understandings of what liberty is and why we need it.

One kind of libertarianism holds that we need a rich palette of definite liberties so that we can perform our duties and obtain what is good for human beings.  For example, it maintains that because parents have a duty to educate their children, they also have a right to do so, and because human well-being depends on finding the truth about God, every person has a natural right to seek it.  This kind of libertarianism is perfectly compatible with natural law.  In fact, it’s based on it.

The other kind holds that we need indefinite liberties so that we can escape our duties and obtain what we merely happen to want.  For example, it maintains that we have a right to behave however we please in sexual matters, even to the detriment of families and children, and that if unwanted children are conceived, we have a right to kill them.  This kind of libertarianism is radically incompatible with natural law.

The name “fusionism” is sometimes used for an alliance between social conservatives and libertarians of the former kind, based on shared belief in natural law, shared respect for the proper functions of government, and shared mistrust of government which exceeds these functions.  I take it that this is where you stand.  So do I.

The challenge to fusionism is that today, the great majority of people who call themselves libertarians are libertarians of the latter kind, who may speak against all-powerful government, but who paradoxically end up embracing it.

Everyone admits that pain is educational:  Since I feel agony when I put my hand into the fire, I don’t do it again.  Curiously, we are much more reluctant to admit that there is such a thing as natural disgust, and disgust is educational too.  St. John Chrysostom makes this point exactly in his Homily on First Timothy:

“Food is called nourishment, to show that its design is not to injure the body, but to nourish it.  For this reason perhaps food passes into excrement, that we may not be lovers of luxury.  For if it were not so, if it were not useless and injurious to the body, we should not cease from devouring one another.  If the belly received as much as it pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see wars and battles innumerable.  Even now when part of our food passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless phlegm, we are nevertheless so addicted to luxury, that we spend perhaps whole estates on a meal.  What should we not do, if this were not the end of luxury?  …

“Some have strangely complained, wondering why God has ordained that we should bear a load of ordure with us.  But they themselves increase the load.  God designed thus to detach us from luxury, and to persuade us not to attach ourselves to worldly things.”

The passage was called to my attention by my friend Daniel Mattson, who blogs at Letters to Christopher.  I won’t say more about the passage here because I don’t want to encroach on Dan’s own insights about it, which he will be discussing in a book he is writing for Ignatius Press.