Philosophy 051-01

Introduction to Natural Law

February 11, 2002

 

1. Thomas Aquinas.  So, we now move from the ancient writers to the 13th century.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a neat treatise on ethics that covers all the topics we need, so I am not going to follow the text very closely, but give you an overview of the basic ideas, based not just on the reading.

• Thomas was deeply influenced by Aristotle as we will see.  Most of Aristotle’s writings were forgotten by people between the 3rd century B.C. and the middle ages.  Finally, in the middle ages, the Arabs were impressed by Greek doctors—they could cure wounds the Arabs couldn’t—and as a result wanted to learn what the Greeks learned.  Among other things, they eventually produced Arabic translations of Aristotle, and Arab philosophers worked in the Aristotelian tradition. 
• Around Thomas’s time, Aristotle’s philosophy was used in part to attack Christian doctrine.  For instance, Aristotle said that the world had always existed, while Christians believed that there was a time when the world was first created by God.  One of Thomas’s tasks was to take Aristotle’s philosophy and adapt it to Christian uses.  As a result, Thomas produced a unique philosophical system in many ways inspired by Aristotle—and to some extent by Platonism—but also distinctively new.

2. Natural Law ethics starts with the observation that many things in nature—and nature includes us—act for purposes, rather than merely at random.  This observation was already made by Aristotle—remember the discussion of the purposes of flute-players and my mention of the purposes of a hammer.  For an example in nature: The eyes of an animal act in order to give information to the brain, in order that the animal may be able to avoid danger, find food and find a mate, all in order that it might be able to reproduce and bring up its offspring.  As far as the animal is concerned, reproduction and bringing up the offspring may be the ultimate point or purpose of the whole business of the animal’s life.

• Something without purposes has no point.
• Fulfilling this purpose is something good.  Good for the thing that it is the purpose of.  It is good for the eyes to see—that is their point.  It is good for the animal to avoid danger.  It is good for the animal to reproduce.  A thing is perfected or fulfilled insofar as it fulfills its purpose.
• Thomas Aquinas himself is not going to stop with these kinds of natural purposes, because he will want to say that God created the animal with even further purposes in mind, e.g., to help human beings or to glorify himself.
• Each thing, according to Aquinas has a natural inclination to act to fulfill its purpose.  Thus, the eyes have a natural inclination to send information to the brain.  If the eyes are working properly they will do this.  Similarly, the animal has a natural inclination to reproduce. 
• Something is working properly if it fulfills its purposes.  So a part of the Thomistic system is the idea that things have purposes and these purposes can be used for telling whether something is working properly or not.  Imagine some gigantic contraption.  There are all kinds of cogwheels and other weird things there.  Some parts are moving around there but not much is accomplished beyond a lot of noise—certainly nothing is coming out.  Someone asks you: “Is this thing working or not?”  Well, a natural response is: “What is it supposed to do?  What is its purpose?”  If its purpose is to print newspapers, then it’s not working properly—because nothing is coming out of it.  But maybe its purpose is just to be an artistic installation.  Or maybe it’s designed for some weird other purpose.  But whatever the purpose of it is, the item is good at being what it is only if it fulfills its purpose.
• Purposes come in hierarchies.  The eyes of an animal are to give information to the brain.  The limbs are to move the animal around.  The teeth are to grind food, and grinding food is for eating.  All together, these purposes are ordered (a technical term, as in “in order to”) in order that the animal might survive and reproduce.  The point or value of each item in the hierarchy comes from the ones above it.  Thus, the point of teeth comes from grinding food;  but there would be no point to grinding food, and hence to teeth, if food didn’t help the animal.
• Thus, in any one organism there is a complicated hierarchical network of purposes.  This network is called the organism’s nature.  Whatever fits with this network of purposes is natural or working properly, and whatever does not is unnatural.  Thus, it’s natural for a human being to have eyesight but unnatural to be blind.
• It is of crucial importance to note that naturalness is not a statistical idea.  Imagine I cut a leg off of every sheep.  Would it be natural for sheep to have three legs then?  Surely it would be unnatural, because the lack of a leg frustrates the sheep’s purposes of survival and reproduction.
• If we write out a complete hierarchy of purposes, we will find that some purposes are not ordered to any further purpose.  These things are valuable in themselves.  Thus, if animals have no further purpose beyond reproduction, then reproduction is valuable in itself, for its own sake.  We can call these the basic goods.

3. Each natural purpose of a thing is a good that is achieved by the thing’s activity.  Purposes are directed at ends, and hence for St. Thomas, the good is what is naturally aimed at.

• Of course, not everything we aim for is in fact good.  Imagine a fellow who takes a bowl, pours some thumbtacks into it, adds sugar and milk, and proceeds to eat.  We ask him what he is doing and he says he needs more iron in his diet.  Presumably, the reason he wants iron in his diet is to get healthier.  Now, he won’t get healthier eating thumbtacks.  So what he aims at is a good, but it is not a good he is going to achieve by his action.

• Suppose I’m trying to figure out whether to stay up to study more or to spend the evening with an old friend who is in town.  If I study, I will learn more.  If I spend the time with the friend, I will promote our friendship.  Why do I want to learn more?  Maybe for the sake of learning.  Maybe learning is itself the basic good at issue.  But maybe I want to learn in order to get a job, so that I might have a family and children.  In that case, family life might be the basic good at issue.  Why do I want to promote the friendship?  There doesn’t have to be any reason beyond that.  Friendship by itself is worth having, a basic good.  So, if I study, I promote (in a direct way) the basic good of knowledge and maybe (in a remote way) the basic good of family life.  If I meet with my friend, I promote the basic good of friendship.  These things are basic goods because they are not good because of something further.
• Free will, according to Thomas, comes in when I think I see different (basic) goods, some of which are served by one option and others by another, and I must choose between them.  Should I play videogames or study?  One leads to the basic good of rest and the other to the basic good of knowledge…
• Our nature involves natural inclinations, which are inclinations to fulfillment of our purposes.  What I just said about choices shows that the good is involved in choices.  The will—namely, what I choose with— has the good as its natural purpose, and indeed a basic good.  Recall that when something is working properly, it has inclinations to follow out its purposes.  Thus, when we are working properly, we have an inclination to choose the good—this inclination we can call “love for the good”—and to avoid evil.
• This inclination is natural, namely one which fits the network of purposes in the human being.  Not to have such an inclination would be unnatural.
• We may also have unnatural inclinations.  Some people have an urge to mutilate themselves, for instance.

4. According to Thomas (I-II, 94, 2), this is the first of the first principles of practical reason: (1) “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.”  Everyone who reflects on how we choose realizes this.  This explains the function of our will.  It is something that does not need a proof from other principles: We just see it to be true when we reflect on what choice is and how it works.  It’s something Thomas says is self-evident.

• These principles are a part of what Thomas calls “natural law”. 
• But there are other natural inclinations in things, and other natural purposes.  First of all, Thomas says that everything that exists tries to keep itself in existence.  Certainly this is true of biological things.  (And even a stone, one might say, resists destruction to some extent.)  Continuing existence is a natural purpose of every thing that exists.  Thus, it is one of our natural purposes.  Our life is a basic good, something we naturally strive to preserve.  So, another first principle of “the natural law” is (2) “whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles.”  (II-II, 94, 2.)
• Note that one can’t realize that one’s own life is a basic good without realizing that the life of someone else is one as well.
• The “natural law” is whatever we can derive from the first principles of natural law.  It is something grounded in our human nature, meaning the natural purposes of human beings.  Thomas defines “law” as something ordained by reason for the common good.  Now, natural law is ordained by reason, because our reason recognizes that the basic purpose of the will is to seek the good, and our reason recognizes what the goods are.  Moreover, it is directed at the common good, because we recognize that what is good for us is not better than what is good for others just because it is good for us.  Our life is not more valuable than the life of others.
• So, everything has a tendency to preserving its existence.  In fact, existence is itself a good.  There is also in the human being a natural inclination that the human being shares with all other animals.  This is the inclination to reproduce and bring up offspring.  Thus natural law (3) deals with reproducing and bringing up offspring.  Reproduction is a basic good as is the education of offspring which makes the offspring good.  It is thus a good that is worthy of pursuit in general, though of course there might be concrete circumstances in which it is not to be pursued.
• Also, there is something that human beings do not have in common with animals.  This is the urge to understand.  We wonder about things.  We may wonder how this amazing world came to exist, and we read articles in magazines, books, etc. that we think may help us.  We would like to know if there was a Big Bang, for instance;  if evolution really happened;  if….  We want to understand all this.  We are curious about it.  We do not just want to know how this world came to be as it is because it will help us get ahead in our daily life.  Knowing whether there was a Big Bang isn’t going to help us get ahead. 
• The urge to understand things is also found in more humdrum settings.  We see some mechanical device and want to know how it works.  Maybe we want to know it because we’re engineers and want to make ones like it, but I think often we just want to know how it works, because it would be neat to know.  We have this inclination to understand things.  Understanding things is a basic good.
• Moreover, not all animals have an inclination to live in community.  We do.  Human beings are naturally political animals.  This is clear if we reflect on our purposes in life: they are not purely individual.  We would not be happy alone.  We recognize the value of friendship, for instance.  Living in society together is a basic good, and we have an inclination to it. 
• We recognize that we are parts of humanity, and that the natural purpose of a part is directed towards the good of the whole, that is, of everyone else.
• Thus: (4) “whatever pertains to this inclination [the specifically human inclination to understand and live together] belongs to the natural law;  for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination” (II-II, 94, 2).
• Everybody who understands what the good is and what offending others (say) is understands it is bad to offend others.  These first principles are self-evident to us, according to Thomas.
• This list of first principles may not be exhaustive.  There may be other basic goods.  Other moral principles are derived from these.  We’ll look at two specific cases later on.  The principles derived from these will be known as second principles.  For instance: Do not kill innocent people or Do not lie.

6. Thomas thinks the natural law is the same in all of us.  The reason for this is that the natural law is due to our nature, and our nature is what defines us as human beings.  All human beings have the very same nature.  However, we find ourselves in different circumstances, and how we promote various basic goods depends on the circumstances.  

• Moral commandments come in two sorts.  There are prohibitive ones.  These tend to apply always in all circumstances: Do not set out on your own to deliberately kill innocent people.  Do not artificially contracept.  These kinds of commandments prohibit an action that is directly opposed to a basic good.  The action sets out to directly destroy a basic good, to stop a process directed at a basic good: to kill or to thwart natural human reproduction, whereas both life and reproduction are basic goods.  What is directly opposed to a basic good is wrong.
• But there are also positive moral commandments: Do help preserve other people’s lives.  Do help the human race multiply.  These kinds of commandments apply in rather different ways in different circumstances.  For instance, not everyone is called to be a doctor, but some are called to preserve life through being soldiers defending a country, police officers protecting the public peace, etc.  And according to St. Thomas, not everyone is called to help the human race multiply by actually marrying and having children—a celibate parish priest will instead help the human race multiply by encouraging married couples in a life of virtue and by helping to educate the young.