Gay militants have been working on the assumption that the reason they suffer is that people disapprove of their behavior.  If only the law would endorse their desires, they would feel better.

Now the law endorses their desires.  The pity of it is that they won’t feel better.  When the elation of victory wears off, they will feel like they did before.

And so they will have to make even more extreme demands for approval.  It has already begun.  An article at Politico.com would have us believe that so-called gay marriages aren’t just equivalent to straight ones – they’re better, just because there is no difference of sex.

Society’s rejection of nature is not self-limiting; it has no point of moderation.  It can end only by self-destruction or change of heart.

Some weeks ago I absent-mindedly scheduled this student question and answer for today, without reflecting on the case schedule of the Supreme Court.  The timing has been fortuitous.

Question:

 Does natural law theory include an account of when one may disobey unjust human laws?  If so, when would it be permissible?

Reply:

Before I begin, let me emphasize that we’re talking about peaceful disobedience – not rioting.  The last time I was asked about civil disobedience in the classroom, my questioner was looking for a way to justify the rioting in Baltimore.  Classical natural law theory will never give you that, because it tries to bear witness not only to the evil of unjust law, but also to the necessity of rightly ordered peace.

Within the natural law tradition, the classical account of civil disobedience is due to Thomas Aquinas.  He holds that true laws -- just laws in accord with the natural law -- generate a conscientious duty to obey simply because they are laws -- ordinances of reason for the common good, made by public authority and promulgated to everyone.  However an unjust law is no law at all.  It does not have the nature of law, but of violence.

Before going further we need to distinguish between two different ways in which a human enactment can be unjust.  In the less serious case the enactment is contrary only to the temporal but not the supernatural common good.  This may happen in three different ways:

There is a defect in its end or purpose.  The enactment might not even be aimed at the common good.  For instance, lawmakers may have enacted a particular regulation just to give unjust advantages to their cronies.

There is a defect in its author.  The enactment might not be made with proper authority.  For instance, the courts might usurp the role of the legislature, the executive might defy the constitution, or the legislature might usurp the rightful duties of parents.

There is a defect in its form.  The enactment might violate the formal principle of justice, which is that each person should be given what he deserves.  For instance, the government might punish the innocent rather than the guilty, or it might systematically award civil service positions or entrance to public universities to the least rather than the best qualified people.

Suppose an enactment is contrary to the temporal common good, but does not demand of us any intrinsically evil deeds.  Remember that an unjust law is not a true law – it does not have the properties that make it suitable in itself to direct the acts of rational beings.  Now it would be absurd to say that we must obey a phony law because it is a law.  However, in some cases such an enactment may be obeyed not because it is a law, but simply to avoid harm to others.  For example, I might obey it to avoid causing disorder or confusion, or to avoid misleading persons of weak understanding who might be misled by my example.  Martin Luther King suggested an interesting amendment:  Rather than obeying an unjust enactment when disobeying would cause a confusing example, he suggested trying to find a way to disobey which would not cause a confusing example.

In the more serious case the law is unjust because it is contrary to the integrity of our relationship with God, who is our ultimate final good.  This happens when it does command intrinsically evil deeds.  For example, it may command murder, theft, dishonor to parents, or the profanation of holy institutions such as marriage, or express disobedience to divine command, acts which are by their very nature incapable of being directed to our ultimate final good.  In all such cases we must disobey.  Nothing whatsoever could justify obedience.

For more about this topic in the Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, turn in that book to Question 96, Article 4.  For still more in the free online Companion to the Commentary, turn in that book to “Conscientious Disobedience to Unjust Laws.”

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."  They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none that does good.  The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any that act wisely, that seek after God.  They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one.

If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah.  Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom!  Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!  When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.

-- Psalm 14:1-3; Isaiah 1:9-10, 15-17

Readers, I would be grateful if you would ask your libraries to

purchase the Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law

Are Universally Known Moral Laws Vacuous Generalities?

The difficulty with the view that when St. Thomas speaks of universally known moral rules he means only vacuous generalities is that he explicitly contradicts it.  For in a later section of the Summa, where he is explaining the relation between the natural law and the moral precepts of Old Testament law, he remarks, “there are certain things which the natural reason of every man, of its own accord and at once, judges to be done or not to be done: e.g. ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ and ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ‘Thou shalt not steal’: and these belong to the law of nature absolutely.”[3]  He makes much the same point in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he remarks that “in practical matters there are some principles naturally known as it were, indemonstrable principles and truths related to them, as evil is to be avoided, no one is to be unjustly injured, theft must not be committed and so on”.[4]  St. Thomas speaks here of first indemonstrable principles of practical reason in the plural – there are more than one.  He says that the things naturally known include not only such first indemonstrable principles, but also truths related to them – this probably means proximately derived from them -- such as “theft must not be committed.”  Although he is explaining a point in Aristotle about the meaning of the natural just, the illustration about theft is his own, not Aristotle’s.  The upshot is that yes, he does think we all know we must not steal.

Am I being hasty?  For someone might suggest that St. Thomas explicitly contradicts my own interpretation too.  In a later Article in the same Question, he writes that “Some precepts are more detailed, the reason of which even an uneducated man can easily grasp; and yet they need to be promulgated, because human judgment, in a few instances, happens to be led astray concerning them: these are the precepts of the decalogue.”[5]  If the possibility of being “led astray” concerning these precepts means that from time to time a person might be altogether ignorant of their truth, then St. Thomas is admitting that they are not the same for all as to knowledge.  And at first it seems that this conclusion must be right, for back in Question 94, Article 4, following the Dominican Fathers translation of the Summa, widely accepted as the gold standard, St. Thomas famously remarks that “theft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong among the Germans.”

This time the problem with the objector’s interpretation is that it seems to make St. Thomas contradict himself.  In dealing with a thinker of St. Thomas’s stature, we should always investigate whether an apparent inconsistency can be resolved.  This one can be, for there it is far from obvious that the expression “led astray” refers to moral ignorance, and as to that troubling passage about the Germans, the translation has slipped badly.  Read properly, St. Thomas is not in any way suggesting that the Germans were ignorant of the wrong of theft.

What do I mean by the proper reading?

Stay tuned.

Notes

3.  S.T., I-II, Q. 100, Art. 1.

4.  Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 5, Lecture 12, trans. C.J. Litzinger, O.P., rev. ed. (Notre Dame, Indiana: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), p. 325, emphasis added.

5.  S.T., I-II, Q. 100, Art. 11.

Link to Part 4 of 14

Question:

“If the content of natural law is inherent in man’s nature, and the means of knowing it is inherent man’s natural power of reasoning, then why is God so fundamental to natural law theory?”

Reply:

I’m cheating a little, because the second part of my answer recycles a post from last year, and both parts are cadged from one of my books.  But if you’d read everything I’ve ever written, you wouldn’t have asked, would you?

Let’s begin by setting up the background to your question.  The central claim of the classical natural law tradition can be expressed in just a few sentences.  Law may be defined as an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by legitimate public authority, and promulgated.  Nature may be conceived as an ensemble of things with particular natures, and a thing’s nature may be thought of as the design imparted to it by the Creator -- as a purpose impressed upon it by the divine art, so that it is directed to a determinate end.  The claim is that in exactly these senses, natural law is both (1) true law and (2) truly expressive of nature. 

Natural law is law because it has all that all true law has.  It not an arbitrary whim, but something reasonable; it serves not some special interest, but the universal good; its author has care of the universe, for He created and governs it; and it is not a secret rule, for He has so arranged this Creation that the basics of right and wrong are known to every human being. 

Natural law is natural because it is built into our deep structure, into the constitution of the human person.  It is built into the inclinations of the moral intellect, for we spontaneously recognize such things as the right of being grateful for good done to us, the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life, and the good of knowing the truth.  It is built into the rest of our inclinations, for example the way men and women complete and balance each other, and how they are drawn to each other as partners in turning the great wheel of posterity.  Finally it is sewn into the fabric of experience, for lives that go with the grain of the created universe tend to prosper, while lives that go against it suffer loss, usually even by their own reckoning of “loss.”

But this opens a larger question.  Why not just say “Follow the natural law because it is naturally good for you,” and leave it at that?  Why drag God into the picture?  One answer is that we don’t drag Him into the picture; He is in it already.  There wouldn’t be a nature without God; there wouldn’t be natural goods without God; there wouldn’t be anything without God.  The natural law depends on God in the same way that everything depends on God.

That answer is good so far as it goes, but it is incomplete.  It shows how natural law depends ontologically upon God, but it doesn’t show how it depends practically upon God.  Someone might suggest that for practical purposes, God can be ignored.  Even conceding that He made our nature, still, now that we have been made, we should seek what is naturally good for us, just because it is naturally good.  Yes, He commands it, the Objector says, but that is not the reason we obey.

Yet this suggestion too is incomplete.  It supposes that God is one thing, and good another.  What if God is our good? What if, in some sense, friendship with Him is our greatest good? That is exactly what the natural law tradition proposes.  But in that case, even if we do pursue the good “because it is good,” it isn’t redundant that He commands it.

Now "friendship with God" might mean either natural friendship with God, which lies in the concordance of wills, or supernatural friendship with God, which lies in union.  Supernatural friendship with God lies beyond anything we can reach by human power alone.  But even natural friendship with God would be a colossal good, if only it could be achieved.

Consider just the good and beauty of mortal friendship.  We enjoy it, yes.  But we also appreciate it, and this fact itself is a good; it reflects and thereby doubles the original enjoyment.  Did I say doubles?  Say rather triples, quadruples, quintuples, as the enjoyment of friendship reverberates in the strings of memory, gratitude, and delight.  If we never remember of our friends, have no gratitude for them, and are never moved to joy just because they are, we can scarcely be said to have experienced friendship at all.  We are diminished, impoverished, mutilated; something is wrong with us.

But if all that is true even in the case of goods like mortal friendship, then isn’t it still more true in the case of friendship with God?  If we cannot take joy in remembering Him, being grateful to Him, and delighting in the thought of Him, aren’t we missing the very note on which the chord of good is built?

We are missing it, and this fact alters and deepens the motive for obeying the natural law.  True, the natural law directs us to nothing but our good.  The Objector responds, “Then we should have done it anyway, even apart from God’s command.”  But is it possible that part of what makes it good for us lies in doing it just because He commands it?

What lover has not known the delight of doing something, just because the beloved asked?  What child has not begged Daddy to give him a job to do, just so he could do it for Daddy?  What trusted vassal did not plead of a truly noble lord, “Command me!” just in order to prove himself in loyal valor?  If in such ways, even the commands of mere men can be gifts and boons, then why not still more the commands of God?

Tomorrow:  The Same as to Knowledge,

Part 3 of 14