New Natural Law and Natural Teleology

The natural law tradition is rooted in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and others and plays a central and foundation role in the history of Western civilization, in particular, in its conception of ethics, law, and politics. It has played that role simply because it is both profound and correct. Therefore, the task of interpreting and defending that tradition is vitally important.

In our contemporary setting, there are two competing conceptions of that tradition: the Aristotelian-Thomist program and the New Natural Law. The creators of the New Natural Law paradigm deserve credit for rehabilitating the concept of natural law in the academy of the 1960s and 70s, but in doing so they compromised with modern philosophy (especially, Descartes, Hume, and Kant), introducing a dualistic model of intentionality, and the Humean is/ought gap, resulting in a strict separation of practical from theoretical truth. These compromises render the New Natural Law paradigm an indefensible position. If these errors are not corrected, the contemporary revival of natural law is in danger.

There are I think six interconnected issues in contention between New Natural Law and Aristotelian-Thomist Natural Law..

1. The New Natural Law is committed to a short list of basic human goods—seven in number: life (including health and bodily integrity), knowledge and appreciation of beauty, skillful performance in work and play, friendship/sociability, marriage (including procreation/family), integrity/authenticity (or practical reasonableness), and religion (knowledge of and harmony with God).  By ‘basic human goods’, we mean things that are “objectively” good and worthy of choice for every human being, independent of whether that human being actually desires or prefers them. A basic good is one that is valuable for its own sake, and not merely instrumentally good. By calling them ‘human goods’, we mean things at which human beings can aim and realize through their actions. So, in this sense, preserving another species or an ecosystem would count as a ‘human good.’
   
   I would defend a somewhat longer list than the seven allowed by the NNL, including such things as political justice, responsibility in work, truthfulness in speech, and participation in wholesome traditions. As we’ll see, the shortness of the NNL list is a result of other erroneous commitments.

• The NNL is committed to a strict, exceptionless deontological rule, which I will label the No-Sacrifice rule: namely, that it is never morally permissible to deprive intentionally anyone of any basic good. This applies both to depriving others of a basic good and to depriving oneself of one, and this rule holds no matter how much of a gain in other basic goods has to be foregone in order to conform to this extremely strict rule.

• The New Natural Law is committed to what I will call the strong doctrine of incommensurability of the basic goods, meaning that reason never gives us grounds for preferring more of one basic good at the expense of another. I will offer below a distinction between a strong and weak doctrine of incommensurability, and why I am willing to concede the weak doctrine but not the strong one.

• Fourthly, and I think most fundamentally, NNL is committed to a strict separation of practical and theoretical knowledge. According to the NNL, all our practical knowledge is grounded by our grasping from an irreducibly first-person, agentive perspective, certain first principles of action (including, especially, our grasp of the seven basic goods). In contrast, I will argue that the two modes of knowledge should be distinguished but not separated. In particular, theoretical knowledge about the teleology of human nature can contribute to our practical knowledge of human goods.

• Fifthly, defenders of the NNL are committed to a semantic and metaphysical distinction between practical and theoretical truths. Not only are practical and theoretical modes of knowledge separate and uncombinable (according to NNL), but their objects form disjoint domains of fact. If I know something practically, I cannot know the same thing theoretically, and of course vice versa. I will contend, in contrast, that all practical truths can be known theoretically as well.

• In order to make the No-Sacrifice Rule plausible, NNL theorists adopt a very narrow conception of what an agent does intentionally—I will call this the Mental Blackboard model. In contrast, I will defend a much broader conception, the Power Activation model.

Of course, there is a great deal about which NNL and I agree. We agree that human beings are hylomorphic compounds of soul and body. That is, we agree that we human beings are not wholly immaterial things that merely interact with a human body. Instead, the human soul is the form by which the body is a living human being. This soul or form imposes a nature upon the resulting human being: human nature, something metaphysically fundamental that is common to all human beings.

We agree in the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge, and we agree that there are first principles of practical knowledge, principles that necessarily play the primary role in grounding our practical knowledge. We agree that there are basic human goods: indeed, that there is an irreducible plurality of such goods. We agree in not trying to reduce human happiness to a single good, not even to the beatific vision.

In addition, New Natural Lawyers and I agree that there is such a thing as natural teleology (by natural teleology, I mean a teleology that isn’t a product of human intention). As I survey the NNL literature, I think that teleology plays an essential role in at least five places.

First, NN Lawyers and I agree that zygotes are human persons, and this is because zygotes are naturally ordered to the end of developing into adult human beings, endowed with reason. Zygotes share a form of the same kind as that of other human beings, with the intrinsic potentiality of intellectual understanding and free will.

Second, the basic good of marriage involves a reference to the natural functioning of the reproductive organs. The marital act is by definition an act natural ordered to human reproduction, an act in which the genitalia combine to act as a teleologically ordered whole.

Third, as a consequence of the second point, NN Lawyers agree that there is a binary distinction between human males and females. Any such distinction must make reference to a teleological difference, since there are no morphological or genetic markers that perfectly track the distinction/

Fourth, the basic human good of life and health is essentially teleological in character. One is healthy when one’s organs and tissues perform their natural functions in relation to each other..

Fifthly, and most importantly, the very idea of basic human goods implies a kind of teleology, a teleology of the human will. The human will is a faculty that is supposed to choose what is good as such. Something has gone wrong if it does not do so, and this is true even if the will is maximizing the desires, preferences, and prior commitments of the person in question. Whether we like it or not, our wills are naturally ordered to the end of choosing well, and that’s a kind of final causation or teleology.

The fact that both NN Lawyers and traditional Aristotelians are committed to natural teleology raises a host of interesting problems, both in metaphysics and philosophy of nature. When Grisez, Finnis, and Boyle began developing the NNL in the 1960s, teleology was under something of a cloud of suspicion. Many philosophers, following thinkers like Carl Hempel, took teleology in nature to be a scientifically obsolete notion. That has changed dramatically in the last sixty years, to the point that belief in natural teleology is now a perfectly respectable opinion, even among philosophers of a naturalistic bent. [7 min. 40 sec]

I take it that NN Lawyers will welcome the kind of work that I, William Simpson, and others at this conference been engaged in over the last fifteen years, arguing that we can find a place for teleology through a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of nature. I’d recommend our edited volume, Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, William’s Hylomorphism volume in the Cambridge Elements series, and my own book on Aquinas’s philosophy of nature for more details. The alternatives to this neo-Aristotelian project should be unattractive to anyone favorably disposed to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, be it reductionism, dualism, or idealism.

A Neo-Aristotelian approach embraces exactly the kind of ontological and causal pluralism that is needed to give human agency its proper place in the world, without falling into the immaterialism or dualism about the human persons that both NN Lawyers and I would reject.

We in this neo-Aristotelian movement have recently argued that the quantum revolution in physics in particular creates the opportunity of providing an adequate account of the place of human agents in nature. This is not primarily because of the indeterminism of the theory, but because of two additional features of the new physics introduced in the first half of the 20^th century: its holism, and its resurrection of the Aristotelian distinction between actuality and potentiality (as noted by Werner Heisenberg). The resurrection of potentiality or powers in the philosophy of nature has been a remarkable feature of much contemporary analytic philosophy. To be of use in a theory of human agency, we need to recognize the existence of fundamental causal powers at the level of biology and human psychology. The hylomorphism of the Aristotelian tradition that I mentioned earlier, is crucial here. It allows for composite, middle-sized objects (like human beings and other organisms) to be unified and animated by a form, that acts upon the matter, conferring a variety of causal powers and potentialities to the resulting entity.        

In future posts, I will sketch a theory of the teleological constitution of the human being, which make clear why the NNL is wrong to deny the “derivability” of value from the metaphysics of human nature.