Natural law

26. Leroy, Why We Think What We Think (20 Dec 2024)

by kurto

Surveys the course of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present era, contending the modern concentration on epistemology has severed reason and faith, undercutting the discipline’s value for humanity. Science confronts questions it cannot answer while automatically rejecting answers which theology might supply. The wrong turn began with William of Ockham as well as Duns Scotus, each of whom undermined Thomistic reconciliation, and accelerated with the Enlightenment. Most moderns sought to make ‘more sense than God’, and to define freedom as escaping natural limits of God and nature. The author is less concerned with science’s claims to autonomy that skepticism’s role in abandoning man to uncaring, everchanging universe. In sketching this decline, the author does not address the Straussian view that human things too must be at the center of consideration. What is the arbiter of natural law and natural rights?

The Socratic method first turned philosophy from metaphysics to ethics and epistemology. Plato’s universals are a limit on freedom: humans can’t define certain topics, so the Good measures mankind. Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) is another reminder of man’s limited freedom. Skepticism foreshadowed relativism.

Augustine asserted God does not author evil but allows it via free will. A city is a community of rational people united by agreement of interests and passions for the most important things. Boethius, the first scholastic, distinguished reason from faith. Al-Ghazali’s attack on Avicenna closed Islam to science. Aquinas held reason could be trusted but not everything could be reasoned, the converse of the position that all knowledge is suspended until proven. Distinguishing between essence and existence, as Aristotle had done (and al Farabi resurfaced) with the concepts of actuality and potentiality, leads back to the first mover: what started the chain of events is pure existence. There are three common arguments for God’s existence: cosmological (first mover), teleological (the order of the universe suggests purpose), and ontological (the conception of the highest being). Aquinas rejected the latter as relying on essence to prove existence, since once can’t start from a definition.

Ockham: acts have no intrinsic moral qualities, but are dependent on intent (voluntarism). Will takes precedence over reason. Thus an act isn’t good because one is trying to do God’s will but good because God wills it; but one can’t know God’s will, so religion becomes faith alone. This conceptualism does the work of nominalism: universals are just names, there are no shared essences. Further, knowing purpose in an Aristotelian sense is impossible. Ockham’s denials gave rise to radical empiricism, wherein all is continent, nothing necessary, and there is no explaining God but only physical processes. Ockham’s conclusions were perverse. The church could not simultaneously eradicate error while being denied the ability to define the truth. Christianity was cut off from the ability to defend faith using reason; the Protestants were comfortable with this personalized justification.

After Bacon, science was no longer to understand nature for the sake of knowledge but for control, utility, and power. Hobbesian determinism asserted every event has a cause, and all valid explanations are mechanistic, given in terms of shape, size, motion, etc., but purpose is an unacceptable explanation. Descartes (again) turned the focus of philosophy to epistemology (i.e., how can we know?). Pascal’s views also confronted faith; his ‘wager’ is an orthodox Christian view of rationalism. Hume distinguished between impressions (empirical) and ideas (mental copies of impressions, the result of evaluating sense data), and concluded that to eliminate doubt about knowledge, only impressions could be admitted, resulting in radical doubt of ideas. Further, since it was impossible to define causation, as all that is valid is sensory, so it’s best to make educated guesses in favor of custom. Smith: morality develops from human sentiments: the ultimate standard of right and wrong is the standard of the impartial spectator (not the divine will).

Rousseau’s legislator replaces the messiah, as politics is the center of humanity, and he can solve problems by creating new kinds of men. Whereas Burke thought ancient legislators commenced from human nature. Kant: humans create reality by applying mental templates to objects we encounter, but we wouldn’t know the states of our minds were we not aware of permanent substances outside the mind. The existence of the world around us proves minds are working: rationalism (a priori template of the mind) and empiricism (the template translates sense data) results in transcendental idealism. Knowing the world beyond senses is transcendence, understanding the mind’s processes is idealism. Nietzsche’s understanding that weakened belief in Christianity led to disbelief is the culmination of Ockham-cum-Luther view that God can only be known by faith. From Ockham and Duns Scotus to Descartes to Hume and Kant, the emphasis was what we couldn’t know – doubt is the basis of epistemology – for the purpose of ‘freeing’ the individual.

Unlike the moderns, but equally in pursuit of individual liberation, the postmoderns rejected both reason and science. Husserl’s phenomenology focused not on the object in itself but on its perception. Preconceptions are to be ‘bracketed’ because our thoughts are intentional. The result reopens the Cartesian mind-body problem, so Husserl solves the solipsism by empathizing with others, which reveals the shared life-world. Heidegger disagrees, focusing on existence not knowledge, ontology not epistemology. Sartre: man has no essence prior to existence: the project of a lifetime is to determine one’s own essence. Derrida, following Saussure, uses binary opposition of terms (e.g., white-black) to turn every statement into its opposite, thus creating instability, not revealing it. Almost all of the things that matter most cannot be expressed by language, contrary to the view that language subsumes power. (Popper: we can’t prove ultimate truths but can show untruths. The open society embraces criticism in the spirit of intellectual excellence, but unlimited tolerance to the intolerant extinguishes criticism.)

Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) followed Aquinas in combining reason and the senses. ‘Action constitutes the specific moment when the person is revealed’; ‘the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible; the spiritual and the divine’. Alasdair McIntyre asserted a new dark age has arrived, for the moral life is already opposed by Westerners. Nietzsche’s call for ubermensch fails if Aristotle was right to emphasize ethics as natural and foundational. There are people as they are in nature, people as they could be, and the link is virtue.

11. Strauss, Natural Right and History (19 June 2022)

by kurto

The search for natural right, or the best way for man to live – the aim of political philosophy – has since Machiavelli been corrupted by abandoning nature as the source of right and by ‘political hedonism’, the ennoblement of benevolence.

All knowledge presupposes a horizon in which knowledge is possible, an articulated whole. All social visions of the whole, no matter how different, are the same in that reconciliation leads to knowledge and natural right. We are obliged to seek a standard of judging our ideas, as well as others, and also the competing needs within society. We cannot give a good account of human ends if they are merely desires or impulses. Natural right is the pursuit of understanding what man ought to do.
The quest to know first things is an endeavor to distinguish to naturally be (to be in truth) and to be by convention. Pre-philosophic thought considered the good life the ancestral. Nature was discovered when man understood the distribution of man-made and naturally occurring first things as observable. The discovery of nature established humanity’s capacity to determine its ends – its successes and failures – across history, society, morals, religion. It was a necessary condition for natural right.

But philosophy does not recognize nature as the standard, because philosophy answers to reason not to authority, whether natural (law of nature) or made by man.

To reject natural right is to say virtue, that which is praiseworthy, is positive or man made. Argument against natural right assumes all knowledge is inherent, that no moral effort is needed, only scientific effort. Separately, historicism attacks natural right because justice is seen as mutable. For historicism to be tenable, it must be made evident that there is no continuity in man’s nature, that there is no persistence in metaphysics. But history often concerns the same fundamental themes or problems. Historicism tries to exempt itself from its own critique – to judge of periods without itself being judged – and showing exceptions in a culture or in practice does not disprove historic norms.

Weber thought there could not be genuine knowledge of the ought (values), only the is (fact). The rejection of value judgements undermines objectivity: the historian cannot interpret the past on its own terms whenever past societies thought value judgements were possible. He contended only science or faith were legitimate grounds but left out human reason: philosophy was downgraded. His views abjured the stateman’s golden mean and encouraged political extremism: his approach to social. The secularization of understanding Providence culminates in the view that man’s ways are scrutable to sufficiently enlightened men, that they should be guided by the actual not what ought to be.

(Weber traced capitalism to a late or ‘corrupt’ Calvinism which had made peace with the world, which means Puritanism did not cause capitalism. This was to overestimate religion’s break with ancient theology [i.e., Roman-era Christianity], and underestimate the break with classical rationalism [Puritanism carrying modern views of Machiavelli, Bacon, etc.].)

Socrates’ turning to the study of human things was no rejection of the divine or the natural but a new way to understand all things, and especially human things, as not reducible to the divine or the natural. To discover the whole was no longer the study of roots but of constituent parts of sciences. Philosophy was to ascend from opinion to truth, via dialectic.

In Crito, Plato suggested duty to the city stems from a tacit social contract (which idea comes from Lucretius); but in the Republic, which addresses the best city, the philosopher is obliged to follow the city simply because the city is perfect. Government is not the same as community. The political problem consists of reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. For egalitarians, consent trumps wisdom, for natural right, wisdom tops consent. The city has to reconcile wisdom with consent, which implies potential for unwisdom.

In retrospect, the historian is to settle extreme actions which were just and those that were unjust or ill-judged. This points up the Aristotelian view of natural right drawn from everyday justice and the Machiavellian view premised on extreme cases of necessity. These may be described as idealism versus cynicism; whereas Thomist natural law is free of ambiguities implied in the spectrum between Aristotle (higher purpose) and Machiavelli (higher urgency), collapsed into a simpler view of the Decalogue. Modern natural law attempts to separate the moral principles from Thomist (Christian) theology, a return to the classics. For example, Montesquieu wanted latitude for statesmanship.

Hobbes was neither public spirited nor concerned with statesmanship: his view of natural law was scientific, accelerating Machiavelli’s turn to modernity. For the classics, the state of nature was life in a healthy civil society, for Hobbes, life antedating society. Death replaced telos, the state did not promote the virtuous life but safeguarded the individual’s natural right. Where Aristotle saw magnanimity and justice as paramount – serving others – Descartes simplified moral philosophy to morality, and Hobbes to justice, rules to be obeyed in order to create peace or at least self-preservation. Justice became fulfillment of the social contract, no longer standards independent of human will; the Decalogue was no longer intrinsically valid. Virtue is but peaceability; vice is vanity of an aggressive soul not a wicked one; the severe virtues of self-restraint lose standing. The privileging of benevolence is political hedonism. Reason of state – peace – replaces the search for the best regime. Later Nietzsche, declaring will to power to be reality, replaced the study of ends with the study of power. The right institutions guarantee social order and much else.

Locke thought that private consciences are private opinions. The desire for happiness is natural right, but no duty is entailed. Then, all social or government power commences with individual right. Hobbes emphasizes right to resist society or government more strongly than Locke. Property right is most characteristic of the latter: property is natural law, natural law defines limits of the state. The poor are enriched when others acquire property, generating benevolence. Madison followed Locke in expressing the first role of government as protecting different or unequal faculties in acquiring property. From this point, nature furnishes only materials, not the results – there are no natural forms or essences. Society was to be built on low but solid ground, taking its bearings from how man lives, not how he should live.
Rousseau, the forerunner of the second wave, returned to the classics but discarded reason in favor of passion, leading to Nietzsche. The Frenchman sought to defend both the city and its virtue and nature; there is a tension. Science is cosmopolitan and the fount of universal philosophy; theoretical science must control civic virtue. As Hobbes put natural right at the service of passion, Rousseau criticized him for locating the law of nature (prescribing duties) as subservient to reason. His duties are instead directly subject to passion: man is by nature good, his passions valid, he is perfectible and so malleable. Further freedom is ‘self legislation’, replacing virtue (restraint). Not virtue makes freedom but freedom makes virtue. By result, modern society must obfuscate the telos of political philosophy. Modern man claims privileged treatment based on sensitivity not wisdom, on compassion not virtue.

Burke: the practical consequence of siding with the ancients in the milieu of modern political events explains the Anglo-Irishman using modern language of natural right, albeit within a classical or Thomist framework. The demos’ claim to political is not a right – the right is good government, and good government not guaranteed by democracy. His remarks on the juncture of theory and practice, surpassing Aristotle, are his most important original contribution; he left no corpus of theory. In both the American and French revolutions, treating the right of sovereignty and the right of man, he questioned the wisdom of exercising legally valid but politically dubious claims. Burke thought history a habit not a precept; analogies are often misleading. In Sublime, he his disagrees with the classics that beauty is perfection of proportion, virtue, order. It is not intellectual but sensual or circumstantial. Likewise, constitutions are not made by a master legislator but must grow. He derides Rousseau’s historicism.

NB: In the Ethics, Aristotle wrote the only serious part of philosophy is political philosophy.
Socrates: universal doubt leads not to truth but into a void.

25. Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (17 December 2023)

by kurto

Burke and Tocqueville laid down a set of principles, based on Christian natural law and finding virtue in the husbanding of tradition and community, which together constitute a proper philosophy. Its challenge is finding goodness in an imperfect, materialist society.
In Aristotle, virtue ensures rightness of ends; prudence, or practical wisdom in given circumstances, rightness of means. In Augustine, understanding is the reward of faith. In Aquinas, society’s checking base appetites enables development of virtue. Natural law holds society promotes character: conservatives defend regimes which respect customs as promoting individual virtue. The true conservative mistrusts individual reason, finding in prejudice proofs over time which are applicable to current circumstance, finding in custom God’s purpose as well as the nature of man.
Burke and Tocqueville, whose views are elaborately explicated, could oppose common practice while supporting society as it was, defending that which exists without sacrificing commitment to virtue. Burke’s opposition to the abstract really targeted idealization, which not only omits true qualities but also inserts falsehoods, for not only simplifying human nature but also supposing hoped-for but unreal qualities. Idealization equally undermines existing authority posits false ends, the enforcement of which is tyranny. Government is not the teacher of virtue but its guardian, the keeper of tradition, manners, prejudice.
For Tocqueville, individual character and well-ordered liberty could not be imposed but were habitual; he commenced with the individual himself, one step earlier than Aristotle’s family. Liberty depends on social institutions not political character, for laws are the children of custom, which grow upward from the local. In America, local practice prevailed; in England, the laws were good because they were old. Localism and legalism interceded between the individual and the state. Whereas in France, centralization enervated custom. By doing for citizens what they ought to do for themselves, the state enfeebled its residents. Conversely, public service demonstrates independence – what, when how – from egalitarian diktat. Tocqueville sought to recall French rulers to the pursuit of virtue. Tyranny of the majority restricts worthy contributors to social and political life. Such societies will have little true diversity, few great writers and statesmen. The conservative may consider his own society superior, even if others are virtuous.
The conservative affection for the particularistic, up through the nation-state, is not the same as the republican’s requisite service to the state, for public service can take many forms. But Strauss thought Burke’s identifying tradition with wisdom was conflating the good with the existing. Strauss rejected God in arrangements: natural law and philosophy does not require a deity.
Oakeshott saw man’s ability to act properly outside norms as highly limited. Rules are an abstraction of the essential activity, which resists the cataloging of all possible experience. The less to be discussed, the sounder the social basis. Social achievement is taking next steps consistent with what’s already been done. The search for social perfection results in chaos of conflicting ideas which society can’t survive (i.e., the analogy of Babel). But custom itself is rightful, not the container of higher truth. Oakeshott called a artists and philosophers to promote Platonic lies, unrealistically in Frohnen’s view. He could not reconcile himself to the practical role of religion in rightful conduct. Kristol could not identify a pole other than compromised materialism; Kirk was so concerned with the nature of beliefs that he overlooked the sense of good character.
Best as comparative study, though having raised Strauss’ dispute with Burke, Frohnen ought to have studied the paradox of why the contemporary right looks to both Burke and Strauss.
Burke: ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations … the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent natures of the remedies.’ Speech of Economical reform
Tocqueville: ‘… It is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, gentlemen, but the inner spirit of the government. Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep then. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God’s name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.