The Natural Law is What We Naturally Know

R&L: The concept of natural law underpins the analysis in your latest book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide. What is the natural law?

Budziszewski: Our subject is called natural law because it has the qualities of all law. Law has rightly been defined as an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by the one who has care of the community, and promulgated. Consider the natural law against murder. It is not an arbitrary whim, but a rule that the mind can grasp as right. It serves not some special interest, but the universal good. Its author has care of the universe, for he (God) created it. And it is not a secret rule, for God has so arranged his creation that every rational being knows about it.

Our subject is called natural law because it is built into the design of human nature and woven into the fabric of the normal human mind. Another reason for calling it natural is that we rightly take it to be about what really is—a rule like the prohibition of murder reflects not a mere illusion or projection, but genuine knowledge. It expresses the actual moral character of a certain kind of act.

Budziszewski: Mainly because we have been endowed by God with conscience. I am referring to “deep conscience,” which used to be called synderesis—the interior witness to the foundational principles of morality. We must distinguish it from “surface conscience,” which used to be called conscientia—what we derive from the foundational principles, whether correctly or incorrectly, whether by means honest or dishonest. Deep conscience can be suppressed and denied, but it can never be erased. Surface conscience, unfortunately, can be erased and distorted in numerous ways—one of several reasons why moral education and discipline remain necessary.

In fact there are at least four ways in which we know the natural law. Deep conscience, the First Witness, is the one primarily responsible for “what we can’t not know.” The others concern “what we can’t help learning.” The Second Witness is our recognition of the designedness of things in general, which not only draws our attention to the Designer, but also assures us that the other witnesses are not meaningful. The Third Witness is the particulars of our own design—-for example, the interdependence and complementarity of the sexes. The Fourth Witness is the natural consequences of our behavior. All four work together.

R&L: What are the promises and perils of advancing a natural-law argument in the context of public policy disputes?

Budziszewski: The natural-law tradition maintains that the foundational principles of morality are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge”—-in other words, they are not only right for everyone, but at some level known to everyone. If this is true, then the task of debate about morality is not so much teaching people what they have no clue about, but bringing to the surface the latent moral knowledge or suppressed moral knowledge that they have already. There is an art to this; people often have strong motives not to allow that knowledge to come to the surface, and they may feel defensive. One has to get past evasions and self-deceptions, and it is more difficult to do this in the public square than in private conversation. Even so, certain basic moral knowledge is “down there,” and our public statements can make contact with it. When this is done well, the defensiveness of the listeners is disarmed, and they reflect, “Of course. I never thought of that before, but somehow I knew it all along.”

R&L: Do you agree that large sections of the evangelical Protestant community have rejected natural-law ethics? If so, why do you think they have rejected it?

Budziszewski: Evangelicals ought to believe in the natural law. Many are coming to realize this. However, some say that the only place to find moral truth is in the word of God, and that natural-law tradition denies this. They argue that the natural-law tradition puts much too much confidence in the capacity of fallen man to know the moral truth. They worry that the first people to use the expression “natural law” were the Stoics, who were pagans. Finally, they suspect that the God of natural law is not the God of the Bible, but the God of Deism—a distant Creator who designed the universe, wound it up, set it running, then went away. The answer to the first objection is that the Bible itself testifies to the reality of the natural law; though it does not use the term natural law, it alludes to all four of the Witnesses. The answer to the second objection is also biblical. The Apostle Paul did not blame the pagans for not having the truth about God and his moral requirements, but for suppressing and neglecting it. In the Proverbs, the main complaint about “fools” is not that they lack knowledge but that they despise it. As to the third objection, it is true that the first philosophers to use the term natural law were pagans, but the biblical testimony to its reality came earlier still. Besides, if God has made some things plain to all human beings through the Four Witnesses, should we not have expected some pagan thinkers to have admitted some of them? As to the fourth objection, the God of natural law is not different from the God of scripture—it is an incomplete picture of the same one. Nature proclaims its Creator; scripture tells us who he is. Nature shows us the results of his deeds in creation; scripture tells us the results of his deeds in history. Nature manifests to us his moral requirements; scripture tells us what to do about the fact that we do not measure up to them.

R&L: What theological concerns do you have, if any, with respect to an ethic that ostensibly relies quite heavily on reason as its foundation?

Budziszewski: I wish you had not put it that way! Too many people think that acknowledging the claims of reason means denying the claims of revelation. I do not see it that way at all. Think of the matter like this. God has made some things known to all human beings; these are general revelation. He has also made additional things known to the community of faith; these are special revelation. Natural law is about general revelation, not special revelation. However, a Christian natural-law thinker will make use of special revelation to illuminate general revelation—and will use God-given reasoning powers to understand them both.

R&L: What should business executives know about natural law? How does or should the natural law affect the day-to-day routine of the average business executive?

Budziszewski: Natural law is moral reality. It affects the day-to-day routine of the average business executive the same way that it affects everyone else. Like others, then, business executives need to know that if they say “I am doing the best I can, but everything is shades of gray,” they are lying to themselves. Most of the time the right thing to do is quite plain. Like others, they also need to face up to the fact that some moral rules hold without exception. Figuring out a way to outwit or outrun the usual bad consequences does not make a basic wrong right.

R&L: What do you consider to be the top threats to engaging in ethical business practices?

Budziszewski: The moment lying is accepted instead of condemned, it has to be required. Once it comes to be viewed as just another way to win, then in refusing to lie for the party, the company, or the cause, a person is not doing his or her job. Dishonoring truth is perversely regarded as a kind of duty.

R&L: Are these threats more significant than the threats facing past generations? Why or why not?

Budziszewski: Yes, I think so. We are passing through an eerie phase of history in which the things that everyone really knows are treated as unheard-of doctrines, a time in which the elements of common decency are themselves attacked as indecent. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. Although our civilization has passed through quite a few troughs of immorality, never before has vice held the high moral ground.

R&L: What role, if any, does natural law play in determining the substance of the laws that govern a particular society? What happens if natural law is banished from the legal process?

Budziszewski: Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you will not be able to do it. The law requiring taxes is based on the moral idea that people should be made to pay for the benefits that they receive. The law punishing violations of contract is based on the moral idea that people should keep their promises. The law punishing murder is based on the moral ideas that innocent blood should not be shed, that private individuals should not take the law into their own hands, and that individuals should be held responsible for their deeds. If we refuse to allow discussion of morality when making laws, laws will still be based on moral ideas, but they will be more likely to be based on false ones.

Budziszewski: Natural law and natural rights work together. I have a duty not to murder you; you have a right to your life. I have a duty not to steal from you; you have a right to use the property that results from the productive use of your gifts. If we all have a duty to seek God, then we must all have the liberty to seek him.

The correlation of liberties and duties may seem nothing more than common sense, but that is what natural law is: Common moral sense, cleansed of evasions, elevated and brought into systematic order. Unfortunately, the contemporary way of thinking about liberty denies common moral sense. For example in 1992, when the United States Supreme Court declared that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” it was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such so-called liberty has infinite breadth but zero depth. A right is a power to make a moral claim upon me. If I could “define” your claims into nonexistence—as the Court said I could “define” the unborn child’s—that power would be destroyed, and true liberty would be destroyed along with it.

R&L: You begin What We Can’t Not Know with an explicit statement that your point of view is Christian. Why do you explicitly alert the reader to this?

Budziszewski: I am writing not only for Christians, but also for Jews, and not only for Jews, but for all sorts of theists and would-be theists. Why then do I explicitly declare that my point of view is Christian? Because it is; I do it for honesty. Even when we speak about the things shared by all, we do so from within traditions that are not shared by all. This fact does not mean that we cannot talk together; it would be more accurate to say that recognizing it is a prerequisite for talking together. So in remarking that the book is Christian I do not mean to exclude non-Christians from the discussion, but to invite them in.

A conceit of contemporary liberal thought is that we have no business raising our voices in the public square unless we abstract ourselves from our traditions, suspend judgment about whether there is a God, and adopt a posture of neutrality among competing ideas of what is good for human beings. This is a facade—a concealed authoritarianism. Neutralism is a method of ramming a particular moral judgment into law without having to go to the trouble of justifying it, all by pretending that it is not a moral judgment.

R&L: Is being Christian a necessary prerequisite to accepting the natural-law argument? Can a secularist ever truly understand the natural law?

Budziszewski: As I remarked earlier, the foundational principles of the natural law are not only right for all, but at some level known to all. This means that non-Christians know them too—even atheists. It does not follow from this that belief in God has nothing to do with the matter. The atheist has a conscience; atheists know as well as theists do that they ought not steal, ought not murder, and so on. The problem is that they cling to a worldview that cannot make sense of this conscience. If there is no moral Lawgiver, how can there be a moral Law? Worse yet, if it is really true that humans are the result of a meaningless and purposeless process that did not have them in mind, then how can our conscience be a Witness at all? It is just an accident; we might just as well have turned out like the guppies, which eat their young. For this and other reasons, I do not think we can be good without God.

R&L: In What We Can’t Not Know, you allude to the fact that you did not always subscribe to the natural law or believe in Christianity. What happened to change your mind?

Budziszewski: That is correct; I denied Christianity, denied God, denied even the distinction between good and evil. What happened to me was what the Gospel of John calls the conviction of sin. I began to experience horror about myself: Not a feeling of guilt or shame or inadequacy—just an overpowering true intuition that my condition was objectively evil. I could not have told why my condition was horrible; I only perceived that it was. It was as though a man were to notice one afternoon that the sky had always been blue, though for years he had considered it red. Augustine argued that although evil is real, it is derivative; the concept of a “pure” evil makes no sense, because the only way to get a bad thing is to take a good thing and ruin it. I had always considered this a neat piece of reasoning with a defective premise. Yes, granted the horrible, there had to exist a wonderful of which the horrible was the perversion—but I did not grant the horrible. Now all that had changed. I had to grant the horrible, because it was right behind my eyes. But as Augustine had perceived, if there was evil then there must also be good. In letting this thought through, my mental censors blundered. I began to realize, not only that my errors had been total, but that they had not been honest errors at all, merely self-deceptions. Anything might be true, even the claims of Jesus Christ, which I had rejected some ten or twelve years earlier. A period of intense reading and searching followed. I cannot recall a moment at which I began to believe, but there came a moment of realization that I had believed for some time, without noticing.

"Look, you are attacking a straw man of your own construction. St. Paul taught that one's "inner self" was fallen and had to be formed by God working through His church, body mind and soul. That's just what Christian natural law theorists believe."

I'm puzzled by your statement here. From what I've read natural law theorists believe that in every person there exist some sort of God instilled moral law. What you're saying, if I'm interpreting your above statement correctly, that although man is fallen God instills natural law in man through the church. Is this correct? These seem to be different definitions in how natural law exist.

From what I've read natural law theorists believe that in every person there exist some sort of God instilled moral law. What you're saying, if I'm interpreting your above statement correctly, that although man is fallen God instills natural law in man through the church. Is this correct?

Let me clarify even further: I agree that there is a moral law, or at least the first principles of moral law which are accessible to every person who uses reason rightly. I do not think that this means every person will reason rightly.

I do not take the fallen nature of mankind to be such that it precludes individual innate knowledge of some first moral principles. In my understanding, The Fall precludes mankind's access to salvific grace in such a way that only God can restore that access.

I don't see how the Fall precludes man's access to all moral knowledge--though I will grant that the Fall significantly clouds his reasoning. Because of his clouded understanding, each man needs to check his reasoning against the reasoning of those wiser than himself and against the wisdom of the church.

Man using his God-given intellect can grasp the first principles of logic and of math. Why then not the first principles of morals?

"Because of his clouded understanding, each man needs to check his reasoning against the reasoning of those wiser than himself and against the wisdom of the church. Man using his God-given intellect can grasp the first principles of logic and of math. Why then not the first principles of morals?

I believe this is exactly what those opposed to natural law would argue with you on. How does a man "checking" his reasoning determine who is "wiser than himself"? If man is corrupted how do you determine who has greater understanding? What do you base your evaluation on in a corrupted state?

In your example of logic and math, these are not something that comes natural to all people. Why should we think the first principles of morals? While math is more rigid (although some people cannot grasp math), logical thought could rightly go down different paths. The conclusion Socrates came to might not be the same conclusion Plato came to. Whose right? Those who disagree with natural law would say that your argument proves that natural law is nothing more than ethics taught and developed in a child, just like logic and math.

I shouldn't be so hasty to just completely dismiss natural law. However, this to me, logically speaking, is an unprovable hypothesis. ;O)

How does a man "checking" his reasoning determine who is "wiser than himself"? If man is corrupted how do you determine who has greater understanding? What do you base your evaluation on in a corrupted state?

Well the qualities of wisdom necessary for thinking rightly are evident in a man's ability to rule, especially to rule himself. Indeed, if a man does not rule himself, but is ruled by lust or gluttony or hatred, we may safely say that he is not wise--for vices like those impair one's ability to rule. The author of the book of Wisdom links knowledge of wisdom with both the virtue of love and other, more disciplinary virtues of rulership. Speaking in the voice of King Solomon, he writes:

Resplendent and unfading is Wisdom, and she is readily perceived by those who love her, and found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of men's desire; he who watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed, for he shall find her sitting by his gate. For taking thought of her is the perfection of prudence, and he who for her sake keeps vigil shall quickly be free from care; Because she makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her, and graciously appears to them in the ways, and meets them with all solicitude. For the first step toward discipline is a very earnest desire for her; then, care for discipline is love of her; love means the keeping of her laws; To observe her laws is the basis for incorruptibility; and incorruptibility makes one close to God; thus the desire for Wisdom leads up to a kingdom. If, then, you find pleasure in throne and scepter, you princes of the peoples, honor Wisdom, that you may reign as kings forever.
-Wisdom 6:12-21

We even get a nice listing of four virtues in Wisdom 8:7 "Or if one loves justice, the fruits of her works are virtues; For she teaches moderation and prudence, justice and fortitude, and nothing in life is more useful for men than these."

This means a couple of things: you can actually rule out quite a few people as fools, or at least take note of their imperfect virtue and compensate accordingly. Second, natural law theory is best presented within the context of an ethics of virtue. Third, since no governments or persons can entirely lack these virtues mentioned here and survive as free states and free men, we've found a few more first principles of moral reasoning that are "common to all" and transcend time and culture. Hence I've proven, hopefully to your satisfaction, the existence of a few more principles of natural law.

However, this to me, logically speaking, is an unprovable hypothesis. ;O)

What do you mean by proof? I get the feeling you're trying to hold me to a standard of mathematical certainty, where I have to answer questions like "But what if we're brains in vats fooled by mad scientists and deceitful demons?" when all I'm going for is a standard of moral certitude, namely beyond reasonable doubt. Can you reasonably doubt that moderation is a prerequisite for good moral reasoning? I think you can't, any more than one could reasonably doubt that temperance is a prerequisite for good government of oneself and of one's society.

"actually thought about adding the formation of conscience to my post and should have.( "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".) Thanks for your insight."

I think a misunderstanding of natural law leads to the present error where people think "they know right and wrong" because their conscience tells them so, they mistake feel-good emotionalism for justification. I think there is certainly some basic understanding of right and wrong written on the human heart - others here have mentioned murder or theft as universally prohibited behaviors but to examine just those two examples I think we find it's not so clear cut.

I don't think I'd get any argument here if I were to call abortion murder, however do to so in many contexts is to invite argument. Somewhere between 40% and 50% of Americans and large majorities in other countries do not see abortion as a case of the prohibition against murder. Many cultures have engaged in human sacrifice and we continue to today to argue the merits of capital punishment, so obviously it's not as clear cut as some think.

I don't think I'd get any argument here if I called confiscatory tax rates theft, but since we have them and in fact ours are some of the lowest in the Western world, obviously a majority or at least a large plurality in ours and those countries disagree.

So how do we determine the finer points of morality?

For the Catholic the answer is simple - the unchanging, infallible teachings of Holy Mother Church. She brings us to life in Baptism, strengthens us in Confirmation, picks us up when we fall in Confession and Penance, nourishes us in the Eurcharist and prepares us for our own death in annointing of the sick.

Along the way, like any good parent she teaches us right from wrong and enjoins us to choose the right.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.