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?

"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

 "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

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.

“It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken possession of their mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs every other consideration, and confounds and overrules all self-regards.  The impulse cannot in this case be resolved into a desire to remove the uneasiness of fear, for the only danger arises from the fear.  We have been told by a person, not at all given to exaggeration, that he once felt a strong propensity to throw himself into a cauldron of boiling lead, into which he was looking.  These are what Shakespear[e] calls 'the toys of desperation.'  People sometimes marry, and even fall in love on this principle -- that is, through mere apprehension, or what is called a fatality.  In like manner, we find instances of persons who are as it were naturally delighted with whatever is disagreeable, -- who catch all sorts of unbecoming tones and gestures, -- who always say what they should not, and what they do not mean to say, -- in whom intemperance of imagination and incontinence of tongue are a disease, and who are governed by an almost infallible instinct of absurdity …. Nothing can be more untrue, than that the whole course of our ideas, passions, and pursuits, is regulated by a regard to self-interest.  Our attachment to certain objects is much oftener in proportion to the strength of the impression they make on us, to their power of rivetting and fixing the attention, than to the gratification we derive from them.”  --  William Hazlitt (1778–1830), Mind and Motive