The End of the Rule of Law

Thursday, 07-17-2014

A group of us were having breakfast together.  My friend, who runs a small business, was telling a story.

“So I asked my tax attorney, ‘Can  I do this?’

“He answered, ‘It depends on how aggressive you want me to be.’

“‘What do you mean, how aggressive I want you to be?’ I said.  ‘I just want to know the rule.’

“‘You don’t understand,’ he told me.  ‘There are so many rules that there is no rule.  It’s all judgment.’”

Another friend broke in.  “Where I come from, in Eastern Europe,” she said, “that’s how the Communists used to run things.  There were so many rules that anyone they wanted to put away could be accused of something."

She added, "Usually two or three things.”

The Intelligentsia’s Syllogism

Wednesday, 07-16-2014

“Man is descended from the apes; therefore we should sacrifice ourselves for our fellow man.”  -- attributed to Vladimir Soloviev

Why the Government Insists on the HHS Mandate

Tuesday, 07-15-2014

In his 1972 speech on “Conscience in Our Time,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger quotes a remark by Adolf Hitler:  "I liberate man from the coercion of a mind that has become an end in itself; from the dirty and degrading self-inflicted torments of a chimera called conscience and morality and from the demands of a freedom and personal autonomy to which only a very few can ever measure up."

The Cardinal explains, “The destruction of the conscience is the real prerequisite for totalitarian followers and totalitarian rule.  Where conscience prevails, there is a limit to the dominion of human command and human choice, something sacred that must remain inviolate and that in its ultimate sovereignty eludes all control, whether someone else’s or one’s own.  Only the unconditional character of conscience is diametrically opposed to tyranny; only the recognition that conscience is sacrosanct protects man from man’s inhumanity and from himself; only its rule guarantees freedom.”

Natural Law and Divine Command

Monday, 07-14-2014

Professor:

I’m a bit unclear on the difference between natural law theory and divine command theory.  After all, natural law thinkers do believe in authoritative divine commands.

Reply:

Your confusion is understandable, because some writers use the expression “divine command theory” for any theory which believes that there are such things as authoritative divine commands.  But that way of using the term is misleading.  In the proper sense, a divine command theory is a theory which believes that the authority of a divine command depends on the naked will of God, apart from His wisdom and goodness.  The classical natural law tradition rejects this view, because God’s will is not naked.  It cannot be separated from His wisdom and goodness.

We might approach your question through the Euthyphro dilemma:  Does God command what is good because it is good, or is it good just because He commands it?  The former answer denies God’s sovereignty:  It puts God in subjection to the Good.  The latter answer – which is the answer of divine command theorists -- rescues God's sovereignty, but at the cost of making the Good arbitrary.  Divine command theory embraces the latter answer.  The classical natural law tradition rejects both answers in favor of a third.

Each alternative draws most of its plausibility from the plain wrongness of the other.  But notice that they share a tacit premise:  They both assume that God and the Good are different things.  Classical natural lawyers deny this assumption.  God simply is the uncreated Good.  To turn the idea around and look at it from the other direction, if we inquire deeply enough into the Good, what we find is not a what, different from God, but a Who, God Himself in person.

Here is how this view of God connects with natural law theory.  What we call “nature” is an ensemble of finite, created goods which reflect God’s infinite, uncreated goodness.  The pattern by which He made and governs these created goods, as it is in His own mind, is traditionally called “eternal law.”  This raises a problem:  Finite, created beings like us don’t know this pattern in itself.  But there is a solution:  We can know it in its reflections.  One such reflection of eternal law is explicit, verbal revelation, traditionally called “divine law,” though this term is misleading, because all of these arrangements are divine in origin.  The other is the order of creation itself, as our created minds behold and participate in it.  And this is traditionally called “natural law.”

One old-fashioned way of speaking of these two reflections is the “book of scripture” and the “book of nature.”  Divine law, the book of scripture, conveys divine commands by putting them in words.  Natural law, the book of nature, conveys the commands of the same God by embodying them.

But this is not what is called “divine command theory,” because the divine commands derive their authority not from a will which says “Do it because I say so,” but from a will united with supreme wisdom and goodness.  Does this clear up the difference?

Tenderness Detached from the Source of Tenderness

Sunday, 07-13-2014

"In the absence of … faith … we govern by tenderness.  It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory.  When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."  --  Flannery O'Connor, introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

The Perfect Liberal

Saturday, 07-12-2014

 "We can't go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café.  I've no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can't be done."  --  Colonel Plum, in Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

What Is a Person?

Thursday, 07-10-2014

Professor:

In my graduate program in theology we studied Boethius.  I really dislike his definition of "person" as a rational being ("an individual substance of a rational nature").  God isn't rational either, in the sense that He or angels use logic.  Yet He is personal.  My friend’s son, who is severely disabled, isn't rational.  So why is he a person?  I know he is.  What is meant by the "metaphysics of the person" anyway?

Reply:

I think you are imagining a rational being as someone who sits around proving theorems.  Expunge that image from your imagination!  Rationality means being oriented toward truth as such; humans are rational because they want to know what reality means.  You probably also think Boethius’ definition is cold, because it says nothing about love.  But it does, because only rational beings love.  By putting us in connection with what is true and good and beautiful, rationality puts us in touch with the truth and good and beauty of the other person:  It makes it possible to say, “It is true and good and lovely that you exist!”

Brute animals don’t care about what is true as such.  A dog may be interested in where he can get some food, but he doesn’t ask “What does all this mean?”  A brute animal can love in the analogical sense of experiencing affection, but only a rational being can love in the true sense of entering into personal communion, willing all possible truth and goodness and beauty for the other, caring for the other because of what he really is rather than what he gets from him.

Of course God and the angels are rational.  God, a unity of three persons in one substance, simply is love; and the minds of God and the angels, like ours, are concerned with truth as such.  You point out that God and the angels don’t use logic to know things, but being rational is not the same thing.  Thomas Aquinas thought that rational minds of the angelic sort know certain kinds of things by direct insight without having to engage in that sort of inquiry.  And the mind of God doesn’t inquire into truth and meaning; it creates truth and meaning. 

Yes, your friend’s disabled son is a person!  He possesses the same essence you and I do:  He is, in his very essence, in the kind of reality that he has, a rational being, not a sub-rational being.  This does not mean that the rational powers that he possesses in potentiality will be actualized; something is impeding their development.  But whatever impedes them is an impediment – it is alien to what he is by nature.

Functionalists, like Peter Singer, can’t recognize the personhood of people like your friend’s son because they don’t believe in essences, and they don’t distinguish essences from impediments.  They think someone is a person only if he isperforming the rational functions.  In their view he has to be actually doing things like making plans, carrying them out, and communicating complex messages, or he isn’t a person.  So an unborn child, an infant, a toddler, a deaf-mute who has not learned sign language, and a person in a coma are not persons in their view.  To be consistent with their premises, they should also say we aren’t persons when we are asleep or knocked out.  And they should say that personhood is a matter of degree -- that people who are better at such things as making plans also possess greater degrees of personhood.

By contrast, essentialists, like us, and like Boethius, think someone is a person not because of what he can do but because of what kind of being he is.  Humans are beings of a natural kind that possesses rational powers in potentialityeven if these powers are impaired or remain undeveloped.  So all human beings are persons, and personhood is not a matter of degree.

To answer your final question:  Metaphysics asks “What is there?”  Of course geology also asks that question:  What kinds of rocks are there?  And grocery clerks ask it when they take inventory of their stock:  What kinds of items are on the shelves?  But metaphysics is different because it asks what sorts of beings there are in general.  For example, is matter all there is?  What are thoughts and meanings?  Are there essences?  Does God exist?  What kind of thing is beauty – is it a property of things, or is it only a feature of our perceptions?

The metaphysics of persons asks whether there are such beings as persons, and what kinds of beings they are.  An individual person is a complete individual reality, existing in itself, different from all other somethings, made for rationality, the ultimate possessor under God of all it is and does.  A person is not just a piece or part of something, it is not just an instance or process of something, it is not just a clump of different somethings.  Nor is it merely a thing to be owned, a thing to be used, or a thing of any sort at all.  It is not just a what, but a who.  All of that is implicit in Boethius’ definition.
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