Posted on 01/10/2003 7:41:35 AM PST by Maximilian
One point which he should have made is the connection between St. Thomas' conception of ethics and natural law and his conception of metaphysics.
Thomas adopts Aristotle's fundamental principle that "the good is that at which all things aim" and shows its affinity to God's commandment to Israel "I have set before you life and death, good and evil, blessing and curse: choose you therefore life" and formulates his own first principle of the natural law: "that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided".
And St. Thomas defines good as "convertible with being" - that good actions are actions which enable man to "be" more fully. For St. Thomas only one being truly is in the fullest sense - God. So the natural law - doing good and avoiding evil - is to strive to imitate God in His being, His goodness. For St. Thomas there is no conflict between natural law and divine law - Christ became man in order to show us how natural law may most perfectly be fulfilled and He died to give us the grace to follow that perfection - so that we may have "life, and have it more abundantly".
Someone needs to create a libertarian list and ping them on this stuff...may knock some sense into them.
The term it uses for a libertarian (really governmentless) society is a "natural order". This natural order is predicated on the principle of subsidiarity rigorously understood and the natural law understanding of the family as the most basic unit of civil society.
St. Thomas' conception of liberty is superior, quite obviously, to Randian and utilitarian notions.
And also that each thing has its proper good, end or purpose. Fish have to swim and birds have to fly. It's as simple and commonsensical as that.
This is the sort of reasoning that George, Finnis, and Grisez reject. They agree with the Enlightenment rebuke that the old natural law theory commits the “naturalist fallacy,” which means trying to derive a moral conclusion from a factual premise—in Thomas’s case, “X fulfills nature, so X is good.” We must rather assert that although some truths are self-evident, they are self-evident for a different reason than St. Thomas thought. It isn’t because they are built into nature for the reasoning mind to reflect, but because they are built into the reasoning mind itself. Self-evidence lies not in the way the world is put together, but in the way the mind is put together.
This way leads to relativism.
Of course, making good on this claim requires an understanding of nature in which the properties of things are not “simple” but “dispositional”—which is a technical way of saying that you have to view each thing in the universe as though it were an arrow directed naturally to a goal. That’s what St. Thomas thought. The nature of a thing, he said, is “a purpose, implanted by the Divine Art, that it be moved to a determinate end.” And, regardless of philosophy, it’s the way we all naturally tend to think of things.
Good philosophy conforms with common sense and experience.
On the other hand, some believers say that since we have the Bible to tell us what to do, we don’t need a natural law. In fact, maybe there isn’t any. The Old Testament doesn’t even mention “nature.”
Not literally. But the idea is laid out explicitly in Deuteronomy:
Deuteronomy 301 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, "Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.
Good article.
In a world where your behavior affects your insurance premiums, everything you do would have an implicit cost/benefit analysis. Sitting around and snorting coke would no longer be a juvenile game of either being caught or not being caught. It eventually would become a matter of deciding whether to live permanently as an unemployable and uninsurable outcast or prosperously in polite society.
A truly free society would be a very unforgiving place for freaks, idlers, druggies and perverts.
It's a little bit frustrating that Budziszewski leads us on with his explanation of why the "new natural law" is vacuous, but then he stops short in order to maintain a position of objectivity (which is understandable).
And yet, this is the most important point of all. Classical Thomistic natural law is based on the REALITY OF CREATED NATURE. "New" natural law joins with modern philosophy in rejecting that fundamental basis. The school represented by George, Grisez and Finnis is considered "conservative" because they support natural law at all, and because they have been able (through the convoluted type of reasoning criticized by Budziszewski in the article) to reach some conservative conclusions. Yet in reality they are supporting the deconstruction of the realist epistemological approach that has been the only sane philosophy since Aristotle.
Hegel's dialectical method, as exemplified by Darwinism, is the only servicable foundation other than realism. This is where I believe there could be a fruitful union between Thomistic natural law and the school of intelligent design. Scholastic teleology fell out of favor because people stopped believing in creation. How could beings who evolved have been designed for a purpose? The "new" natural law philosophy will not accept classical thomism because they do not want to be grouped into the "flat earth society."
But "intelligent design" has demonstrated conclusively the fallacies of Darwinism and the reality of creation by an intelligent being. Therefore creation for a purpose as the classical foundation for natural law was always the correct and truly scientific basis for any realist philosophy.
Let's try.
Aristotle and St. Thomas began with a position of moderate realism from the principle of noncontradiction - the famous "one and the same thing cannot both be and not be in the same time in the same place and in the same manner". Using this axiom they investigated the reality around them and sought correspondences and structures which they then attempted to describe logically and consistently.
This method was more or less objective and self-correcting - sometimes one made mistakes or saw things only from their own vantage point to the neglect of important details, but the more one reflected and the more one looked, the clearer things would become.
The nominalists broke from this, famously, by saying that since the power of observation could be deceived the Thomistic project was inherently subjective and that it is impossible to accurately describe things in general terms.
Descartes accepted nominalist arguments but was unhappy with the nominalist conclusion, so he tried to find some basic datum that could be accurately observed without being deceived by man's fallible senses and he settled upon self-awareness - the famous "I think therefore I am". Just compare an article from St. Thomas' Summa to the first of Descartes Meditations and one can see a tremendous shift from Thomas' dry, impersonal analysis to Descartes highly personalized, novelistic (by comparison) study.
At this point Descartes is saying that the self-aware human person is the arbiter of reality.
Kant goes further by saying that all our sense data are not part of an objective reality, but are merely the way we perceive a reality which cannot ever truly know. Kant moves from considering reality from the vantage point of the subjective observer to that of simply considering the nature of perception, since we can never have contact with the thing-in-itself
Husserl then followed Kant by saying that the thing-in-itself (objective reality) should be abandoned forever and that the thing as it disclosed itself to the observer (i.e. as a phenomenon rather than object) was the important focus.
From there it was only another step to personalism - from how things present themselves to me to the level of how I present my own phenomenological perception of things to myself.
From hardheaded observation of reality to a reality filtered through my own feelings and emotions.
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