This letter is a follow-up from the doctoral student who wrote last Monday.  I’ve paraphrased a little just for brevity.

Question:

Thanks for your response -- that helped.  Let me ask one of my remaining questions.

You’ve stressed that although the Ten Commandments are a good summary of natural law, they are the kind of summary in which the part stands for the whole -- each commandment stands for a whole category of rights and wrongs.  For example, although they mention only the worst kind of lying, bearing false witness, this is a placeholder for lying in general, and although they mention only the worst kind of sexual impurity, adultery, this is a placeholder for sexual impurity in general. 

Here is my question:  Is there anything in natural law that doesn’t fall under one of these ten categories?  Or would you say that natural law includes exactly the ten kinds of thing that the Decalogue addresses, albeit in a more capacious way?

Reply:

I would say the latter.  To put it another way, the Ten Commandments are a complete summary of natural duty.

There is a slight complication here, because these Ten have traditionally been enumerated in two different ways.  If we enumerate them the way Thomas Aquinas did, then the first three commandments put man in proper order in his relations to God.  Fidelity, owed God in deeds, is represented by the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me.”  Reverence, owed Him in words, is represented by the second, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”  And service, owed Him in thoughts, is represented by the third, “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

The rest of the commandments put man in proper order in his relations with his neighbors, who live with him under God.  First come particular duties, the payment of debts:  These are represented by the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.”   Next come general duties, that is, the duties to refrain from harming others by deed, word, or thought.  But these need to be subdivided.

The broadest category is the prohibition of harm by deed.  Harm by deed concerning another’s existence is represented by the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”; concerning the propagation of offspring, by the sixth commandment, “Neither shall you commit adultery”; and concerning another’s possessions, by the seventh commandment, “Neither shall you steal.”

The next category is prohibition of harm by word, represented by the eighth commandment, “Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.”

Finally comes the prohibition of harm by thought, whether through the lust of the flesh, represented by the ninth commandment, “Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife,” or through the lust of the eyes, represented by the tenth commandment, “and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

It seems that the natural law covers these same ten categories – fidelity, reverence, and service to God; and to our neighbors, the payment of debts, avoiding harm by deeds concerning life, procreation, and property, avoiding harm by word, and avoiding harm by though through the lust of either the flesh or the eyes.  I discuss these at greater length in my online Companion to the Commentary, which is the free online supplement to my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

I can’t think of anything that the ten categories overlook.  However, we must take care not to construe them too narrowly.  For example, someone might say that the wrong of transhumanism – of trying to change human nature, say by rewiring our brains, or by blending the genomes of humans and animals -- doesn’t fall under any of the ten categories.  But I would say it falls clearly under the duty of reverence in deeds to God, the Creator.

Why do you write so much about sexuality?  Do you have an obsessive mind?

I write about sexuality because I can’t think of anything more fundamental to the ordering of society than the ordering of the family.  If you don’t understand what sexuality has to do with the ordering of the family, there’s the problem.

You also write a lot about abortion.  Isn’t it just one issue among many?

Do the numbers:  That is like saying that one four Stalinist reigns of terror, five Holocausts, forty-one Hiroshimas, or seventy-six American civil wars would be just one issue among many.  The fact that we can view it that way shows how blunt and coarsened our perceptions have become.  Abortion is the great moral issue of our century.

Why do you write about “transhumanism”?  Most people haven’t even heard of it.

No, but they will.  As abortion is the great moral issue of the century now passing, what it is to be human will be the great moral issue of the next.  The fog comes on little cat feet.  When you hear people talk about “human enhancement” and “controlling human evolution,” watch out.

And God -- why do you write so much about Him?  Can’t we be good without God?

How has that been working?

Be serious.

I am being serious.  You don’t suppose the experiment has been successful, do you?

But why can’t we?

We cannot be good without God, first, because He Himself is our highest good, and we were made to be in friendship with Him; second, because even the lower goods end in spume and vexation unless we seek Him first; and third, because our thoughts, desires, and passions are still in disorder because of the first time we tried to do without Him.

Why do you write so much about coercion of conscience?  Isn’t this the land of the free?

It used to be.  The problem may be stated simply.  People who uphold a faith that views man as the image of God, and conscience as His gift, have a reason to respect people who deny what they believe (even if, historically, they sometimes haven’t).  But people who hold a secular creed that regards man as a hastily made-over ape, and conscience as an obstacle to their political programs, have no reason at all to respect people who deny what they believe.  The view that religion should be suppressed by the government is already becoming respectable in academic and other totalitarian circles.

Why do you write so much about boring things like how we are losing our republic?

Because it bores people that we are losing our republic.

What?

Think about it.

Why do you write so much against liberalism?  Doesn’t that make you seem partisan?

I can’t help that.  Conservatism, of course, may be good or bad; it depends on what you are trying to conserve.  But liberalism in our day has become evil.  Where once it may have meant responsible liberty, now it means irresponsible coercion.  Where once it may have meant helping the poor, now it means destroying their families and making them permanent clients of the state.  Though even now it claims to speak for plain people, in fact it holds plain people in contempt.

What Is to Be Done?

If Thomas Aquinas is in thinking that the most general moral principles are the same for all as to knowledge, then whenever one does deny them, he knows better.  This fact makes it crucial to distinguish between honest objections and smokescreens.  Honest objections are brought by persons who are in real perplexity and want to get out of it; smokescreens by persons who are in fictitious perplexity, and in whom the essential ordering of the human being toward knowing the truth is at war with the accidental motive not to know it.

The hypothesis that those who deny general moral principles are self-deceived makes many people who take philosophy seriously deeply uncomfortable, for it seems to them to spell an end to philosophy.  After all, even if the statement “You are self-deceived” is true, it does not refute the proposition, “There are no true moral universals.”  So what do you do with someone who is in denial?  And how do you make sure that you yourself are not in denial?  It sounds like a problem not for a philosopher but for a psychological therapist.   Unfortunately, therapists are even more helpless here than the rest of us.  In the first place, a therapist can treat a person only if the person recognizes that he has a problem and submits himself for treatment.  The persons we are talking about don’t; no one says “Help me, doctor, I’m a selective relativist.”

Curiously, such persons often do say “Help me, doctor, my life has no meaning,” but although they complain of meaningless in general, when it comes to meaningless in morals they are more likely to boast than to complain.  Besides, the theories of psychological therapy prevalent in our day tend to be just as deeply immersed in non-judgmentalism and the rejection of moral universals as the rest of the culture is, if not even more.  So I think the ball is in our court.

If it is really true that the obstacles that prevent intelligent persons from recognizing true moral universals lie not mainly in the realm of the intellect, but mainly in the realm of the will, how can such persons be reached?  Perhaps by a mode of conversation that addresses not just their intellects but also their wills; say, by conversational moves that somehow help them to become aware that they are, in fact, in denial.  But does that kind of conversation even belong to philosophy?

It certainly belongs to the teaching of philosophy.  A student said to me once, “Morality is all relative anyway.  How do we even know that murder is wrong?”  Once upon a time I would have tried to convince him that murder is wrong, but one cannot convince someone of something he already knows.  So I asked, “Are you at this moment in real doubt about murder being wrong for everyone?"  After a long pause, he said "No, I guess I’m not.”  I replied, “Then you aren’t really perplexed about whether morality is relative after all; you only thought you were.  Can you suggest something you are perplexed about?"

On another occasion, I remarked to a student, “Did you realize that you’ve just taken an incoherent position?  You say truth can’t be known, all the while supposing that you know it can’t.”  “I guess I am being incoherent,” he replied.  After thinking for a moment, he added, “But that’s all right, because the universe is incoherent, and I don't need to have meaning in my life.”  I thought he knew better than that.  So I said, “I don't believe you.  You know as well as I do that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep-set in every mind.  So the real question is this:  What it is that is so important to you that you are willing to give up even meaning and coherency to have it?"

Link to Part 14 of 14

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.