Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity – Dr. Robert P. George

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, thank you very much, Professor Schultz, for that very kind introduction. I also appreciate your reading out about tap dancing. I can keep that one a secret. I did come by my prowess playing banjo honestly, as some of you know. Banjos are issued to little boys at birth in West Virginia. Well, thank you so much, Pastor St. Paul, for inviting me to be with the group this afternoon. It's a real pleasure to be here. And Beverly, thank you for your work in getting me out here.

I know a little about these regions. Some of what I know I learned from my great friend, my best friend, Richard John Neuhaus. But some of what I know came by what philosophers call the via negativa, the method of knowing something by what it is not. And that came when I started to get to know some folks in Milwaukee. When I joined the board a few years ago of the Bradley Foundation, which is headquartered there, Milwaukee seemed to be its capital and homeland. And I met some new friends out there connected to the foundation. And I said, well, what brand of Lutheranism are you from? And my question was really meant to be, well, are you ELCA, or are you Missouri Synod? And one of these guys said, well, I'm Wisconsin. I said, oh, is that like Missouri? And he said, oh, no. They're the liberals. I knew right then I was in my kind of place.

Well, I've been given two presentations today. The first, as the professor kindly mentioned, is on the natural law and human dignity. Later, I'm going to be talking about marriage. It's a professorial habit and vice to be academic. But I actually want to be understood, and I fear that my formal lectures are too academic to be properly understood. So I want you to do something, which is to interrupt me if I'm saying something that's unclear. I do not want that. These topics are too important to be obscure about. I want to be just as clear as I possibly can be. So please feel free to check me and stop me and make me explain myself if I say anything that's obscure. Or, alternatively, if you'd rather wait until the end, just note down the thing that I've said that is hard to follow, that doesn't seem to make sense. It could be that I'm just wrong. And that's fine, but I don't want to be obscure. I don't mind being wrong. I do mind being obscure and barely making myself understood. And if you're not understanding, it's not your fault. It's that I'm not being clear about something, being too academic.

Okay, first question. If moral norms, including those prohibiting such evils as murder, rape, torture, enslavement, genocide, and the like, are what they purport to be, namely principles for actually guiding choices and action, if they are that, then there must be a point to abiding by them. They must have some rational basis. So what could provide such a point and basis?

I believe that at the foundation of our moral thinking is our understanding that some things are intelligibly worth doing, and some ends are worth pursuing, not merely as means to other objectives, but for their own sakes. There are some things we want, not simply because they enable us to get other things we like. There are some things we want just for their own sakes. There are some things we want our children to have just for their own sake. I mean, we might want our children to be smart and well educated and on the ball, sharp, so they get good jobs and make a good impression, and so forth and so on. But that's not the whole picture, is it?

When we ask ourselves why we want our kids to be smart, not dull witted, well informed, not ignorant, it's not just to get a good job or make a good impression. We understand that to be such a person, to be attentive, critical in one's thinking, judicious in one's judgment, sharp in one's analysis, not dull witted, ignorant, slow, we want that because we know that's part of what makes for a rich, full life, a fulfilled life. We want it for ourselves and for our children, not simply as a means to other ends, but for its own sake.

And intellectual knowledge or attentiveness of mind isn't the only such thing. Why do we want friends? Well, we want friends for instrumental reasons, to some extent. You know, because I'm Beverly's friend, I might get invited to all the great parties with the beautiful people, because she's so thick with them, and so forth. Because I'm the professor's friend, I might get a good job because I'd be so well connected. You can have instrumental benefits from friendship. But a friendship that was just instrumental wouldn't be much of a friendship, or wouldn't be a friendship at all. Now, why do we want friendship? For the sake of friendship. Fundamentally, we know that a life bereft of friends, where you're nobody's friend and nobody's your friend, is an impoverished one, no matter how rich you are, no matter how smart you are. To be Ebenezer Scrooge would not be to have a very good life, because friendship we grasp as intelligibly desirable, not only for extrinsic, instrumental purposes, but for its own sake.

We wouldn't want our children to have only instrumental friends, or to be only instrumental friends. What if you found that your adopted teenage son or daughter was simply using people, didn't really care much for having true relationships where one is willing the good of the other for the other's sake, but was just interested in friends because of what you can get? You'd want to sit down and have a talk with that kid about what it means to live a rich, decent life. You'd worry that the kid is really not living a full human life, or is headed in the wrong direction. So at the very foundation of our moral thinking is our grasp of intelligible goods that are intrinsic and not merely instrumental, so that it can make sense to act to promote or realize them, even when we expect no further benefit from doing so. In other words, they give us more than merely instrumental reasons for action.

When we grasp the point of performing a friendly act, for example, not for any ulterior reason, but just for the sake of the friendship itself, or when we grasp the point of studying abstract mathematics, or the sonnets and plays of Shakespeare, or the structure of distant galaxies, just for the sake of the knowledge, we understand the intrinsic value of such activities, which is to say the worth of friendship and knowledge, again just to take two of many possible examples, not merely as means to other ends, but as ends in themselves. Unlike money, for example, or insurance coverage, friendship, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, virtue itself, religious faith, these goods are, in principle, unlike money or insurance coverage, intrinsically valuable, valuable not merely because they facilitate or protect other goods.

The contrast with money and insurance coverage, I think, is useful. Think of somebody who wanted money really for the sake of the money, not for what they could buy with the money, or do with the money, or the status that came with money, but who just wants money for money's sake. You know, you'd probably arrange for the psychiatrist to see him. Who would want money as something other than an instrumental good? Same thing with somebody who bought the insurance coverage, not because they actually wanted protection, but just because they want to have insurance. That would make no sense. But look how wanting a friend just for friendship does make sense.

These things that are intelligible, providing more than merely instrumental reasons for virtually all subjects' actions, are so because they are constitutive aspects of our own and others' fulfillment as human persons. I'm introducing that word, not simply to introduce a fancy word, but to make the point that with respect to those ends and purposes that provide more than merely instrumental reasons, like the pursuit of intellectual knowledge, those appeal to our practical intellects precisely because they are fulfillments of ourselves. They constitute our flourishing. They're not simply means to our flourishing. What does it mean to flourish, to have a flourishing life? It's to be smart, to have friends, not to be friendless. What word describes people who are other than that, who are like Scrooge, people whose interest in others is other than as fellow human beings? They would be misanthropes, right? Those goods that keep us from being things like misanthropes and misers are constitutive aspects of our good and the good of other human persons.

Now, to say that these goods are capable of motivating human action is not to deny that feelings and emotions also motivate our actions. But my point is that certain intrinsically worthwhile ends and purposes, like friendship or knowledge, do not appeal merely to our emotions considered entirely apart from the activity of our minds, our intellects. They also appeal to our understanding, what Aristotle called our practical reason. Thus, a complete account of human action cannot leave out the motivating role of reasons provided by our grasp of intelligible human goods, whose intrinsic worth we grasp in intellective acts, what I and others in my sort of school of thought call basic human goods.

So we distinguish basic human goods, things that are foundational, irreducible, action motivating things, from instrumental goods like money and insurance coverage. Indeed, often it's the case that we desire something, something appeals to our feelings or emotions, as a result of our rational grasp of its inherent value, and but for that intellective act of grasping the value of the thing, we would have no desire for it. The desire is actually provoked by the intellective act of grasping the intelligible worth of the activity. So apart from our rational judgment that the thing is worth doing, that it provides a benefit and thus has an intelligible point, we would simply have no desire to do it.

Now, it is this truth that the brilliant but utterly, on this, wrong 18th century philosopher David Hume spectacularly missed in proclaiming that, and I quote him, some of you will remember one of the most famous passages in all of Hume, what Hume missed when he proclaimed that, quote, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and may pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them. Hume somehow talked himself into the view, which has become extremely influential, especially on secularists, since Hume is a kind of founding father of modern secularism, who talked himself into the idea that reason's role in our choosing and acting is purely and can only be purely instrumental, the ingenious servant, the slave of action, and that our ends are given by some rational motivating factors which are necessarily merely subjective, feelings, emotions, desires, what he summed up in a wonderful 18th century way as the passions. He neglects this.

But sometimes we have a passion for something, we want something, we desire it, it appeals to our emotions, precisely because of our judgment, our reasonable rational judgment, that something is worth having, because it's an intrinsic fulfillment of ourselves as human persons. For Hume, in other words, our raw desires specify our ultimate goals, things like survival, and the most reason can do is tell us how to achieve those goals. Eat this if you want to be healthy, refrain from eating that lest you be sick. But human deliberation and action are a great deal more complex and interesting than that purely instrumental account of our practical reasoning will allow, that reduction of reason to the role of emotion's ingenious servant. Our practical reason also makes possible judgments regarding which goals are intelligibly worth pursuing for their inherent benefits, and which, by implication, are merely instrumentally valuable, or not valuable at all.

If someone performs a friendly act just for the sake of friendship itself, and not solely for some ulterior motive, which would, after all, render it something other than a true act of friendship, we are not left baffled by it, scratching our heads, as we would be left baffled, for example, by someone who, for no reason beyond the act itself, spent his time repeatedly opening and closing a door, standing there opening and closing it for hours in a dumb way. Or somebody walking up and down a busy street informing complete strangers that he likes the flavor of artichokes. Again, you know, if you saw somebody doing that, you'd be calling for the guys in the white coats. Because that does not compute. It doesn't make sense. There's no reason, no intelligible point.

But how different for something like friendship. Indeed, we grasp the intelligible point of an act of friendship even if we regard, rightly, the particular act as one that is not strictly required as a matter of friendship, and indeed even if we judge the particular friendly act, though motivated by friendship, to be morally wrong, morally forbidden. Consider, for example, someone's telling a lie to protect the reputation of a friend who's done something disgraceful. Even if we make the moral judgment, which we should, that such an act ought not to be done, that it's morally wrong, we can still understand the point of it. It's intelligible. We might criticize the act on moral grounds. But we would not find it baffling the way we would find baffling the other guys, the hours of time opening and closing our door, or the guy who walks down the street telling strangers, hey, I like the taste of artichokes. We understand friendship as an irreducible aspect of our own and other people's well being and fulfillment.

But again, friendship and knowledge are merely two of many aspects of our well being as human persons. We human beings are complex creatures. We can flourish, or decline, in respect of many different aspects of our nature. For example, we are, of course, bodily creatures. We are organisms. And therefore we can flourish or decline in respect of our physical health. I know this all too well at the moment myself, actually, because of some back trouble I'm having. You can be healthy, robust, in good shape, strong, and you can see the point of doing stuff to get that way, going to the gym, stopping smoking, eating a better diet. Or you can be dilapidated and in poor health, sickly, and so on. You can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of this aspect of our nature, the biological.

But we're not merely biological. We are also rational, and again, we can flourish, or decline, fail to flourish, in respect of our intellectual life. We can be attentive, sharp, smart, judicious, sober in our thinking, or we can be inattentive, dull witted, injudicious, forgetting right away the last thing that somebody told us or that we read in the newspaper. And we can grasp the point of educating ourselves and informing ourselves, trying to sharpen our intellects. We can see the point of doing that, because we grasp that as something intelligibly worthwhile, something that enriches our lives, makes us better off, not in every way, but in one important dimension of our being.

But there's still more. In addition to being biological and rational, we are moral agents. And therefore we can flourish or decline in respect of our character. To take the extremes, it's possible to be like Mother Teresa, and it's possible to be like Joseph Stalin. They were both human beings, made out of the same material. And we can take action because we see the point of being a morally upright person, even if we're not one now. You know, we're not very good at the moral stuff. We can grasp the point of repentance, reform, rebuilding our character through virtuous acts. We understand that we can flourish or fail to flourish in respect of our moral worth. And so with our children, when we see a child going down the wrong path, we intervene, not simply because we don't want them to go to jail, and not simply because we don't want them to get a bad reputation, but because we don't want them to be bad people. We want them to be good people, because we think it's better for them to have a good character than to have a bad one.

And there's still more. Although we are individuals, we come packaged as individual organisms. Relationships with others, and a variety of forms of friendship and community, are not merely instrumental goods for us, but are intrinsic aspects of our flourishing, and not, as I say, merely means to the fuller or more efficient realization of individual goals. We see the point, we grasp the point, of having or being a good friend. And if we're not one, or if we're friendless, we can see the point of trying to do things that will enable us to have or be good friends. Sometimes it does take a little prompting. Here again, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol is a good one. What's his problem? His problem is he doesn't see the point of friendship. Everybody else can see it. He doesn't see it. Bah, humbug. He doesn't get it. His interest in other people is purely instrumental, what they can do for him. Now, he's not a cheat, nobody tells us he's a cheater. He's a sharp dealer, but not a cheater, not a liar. But he's in it for himself. He doesn't see the point of friendship beyond the instrumental. Even his one friendship, with old Marley, the only bit of friendship before the ghostly visitors came that had any remote semblance of being a real friendship, was basically an instrumental friendship. They joined together because they could make more money together than they could separately. But the ghostly visitors do come, and they clear away the impediments that prevented him from grasping the point of friendship, and enable him to become a richer human being, to live a richer life, once he could see what he was missing.

So we're complex critters. We can flourish or fail to flourish, decline, in many, many aspects of our personalities. So the human good, therefore, we must conclude, is variegated. There's not some single human good. There are many, many irreducible aspects of our well being. And that they're irreducible you can see simply by reflecting on this. No matter how healthy you are, if you're a morally bad person, if you have a weakness of character, then you're not going to have that rich a life. No matter how smart you are, if you're friendless, you're going to be missing something important. These things are not substitutable for each other. They're all fundamental and irreducible dimensions of ourselves, constituent aspects of our flourishing, and they can't be substituted one for another. Our integral flourishing requires our flourishing in respect of all of them.

Now, the variegated nature of human well being, human flourishing, and the fact that basic human goods can be instantiated in an unlimited number of persons in an unlimited number of ways, means, of course, that we have to make choices. Of course, many of our choices, including some serious and even tragic ones, are choices among morally acceptable options. Most of the choices we make every day are not choices between good and evil. They are choices between good things, or at least morally acceptable things, where a choice has to be made because you don't have the option of doing both. I couldn't be home with my family today and also here with you. There would be nothing immoral about being home with my family. There's certainly nothing, well, they may learn something, I make a little contribution to your day. But still, I had to choose. No moral norm narrows the possibilities to a single, unique, or correct option in all cases. But, as we know all too well, there are other cases where the choices are not between morally acceptable options, but between moral good and moral bad, where the moral norms do exclude some possible options, sometimes even narrowing them to one.

Now, how can that be? Well, among those who share the view that morality is in a deep sense about human flourishing, and you can see that I'm building up for you a basic account, at the risk of doing an account of human morality that roots it in the idea of human flourishing, among those who take this basic approach, there are two principal schools of thought. The first, known as utilitarianism, or more broadly as consequentialism, proposes that people ought always to adopt whichever option offers the best proportion of benefit to harm overall and in the long run. The founding father of the utilitarian tradition, Jeremy Bentham, famously formulated it in a less sophisticated way, but quite a colorful one, that we should choose the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Modern utilitarians, like my colleague at Princeton, Peter Singer, would not put it that way. They would put it more like the way I just put it a second ago, choose the option that overall in the long run promises to produce the best proportion of benefit to harm. Bentham conceived benefit and harm in hedonistic terms, as pleasure and pain. Contemporary utilitarians or consequentialists usually don't do that. Even Bentham's first great disciple, John Stuart Mill, his student, had problems with the Benthamite conception of value. He therefore introduced a refinement distinguishing the higher pleasures from the lower pleasures. But, of course, that immediately begins to compromise utilitarianism, because you can't decide whether, you know, going to the opera or going to a movie is a higher pleasure or a lower one simply by applying reason to the very complex. So you've already got something other than the utilitarian principle doing work in the analysis.

Now, of course, utilitarianism historically has been associated with secularism. Bentham was a full blown secularist, and with a rejection, in particular, of Christianity. Although these days there are self identified Christian consequentialists, including Christian theologians, who embrace some form or other of consequentialism, usually under a label called proportionalism. But it embraces the same basic principle for guiding action, which is that you should do the thing that will produce the net proportionate benefit to harm overall in the long run, where benefit and harm are not, for Christian thinkers, to be defined hedonistically, but rather in terms of values that are not reducible to pleasure. Things like love, but, you know, maximize love.

Now, I'm a very severe critic of this view, not only in its secular and historic manifestations, as with Bentham and even Mill, but I would say in particular with respect to contemporary Christian philosophy, especially in my own tradition, the Catholic tradition, where this has become quite a movement, so called proportionalist theology. I think it is utterly misguided. There are many problems with it. But the most fundamental is that it presupposes, quite implausibly in my view, that different realizations of basic human goods, available as options for choice, this human life, that friendship, this aspect of someone's knowledge, those aesthetic or religious experiences, can be aggregated or netted, and thus substituted, in such a way as to render workable this idea that there is a net best proportionate benefit to harm. I think when you understand the irreducibility of human goods, as distinct aspects of our flourishing as human persons, you realize that that commensurability, that kind of aggregation, is simply impossible.

The fundamental problem was, in a philosophical sense, the same for some Christian theologians today, especially on the Catholic side, I think. It was with the basic method of consequentialism, the assumption that there was this thing, the best proportion of benefit to harm overall in the long run. To say, for example, that friendship and knowledge are both good is not to say that friendship and knowledge are constituted by the same substance, the same goodness, manifested in different but fully replaceable ways, or to different degrees. They are rather two different things, reducible neither to each other, nor to some common factor or value.

Here's where Bentham actually had the advantage over his allegedly more sophisticated contemporary followers. With something like a hedonistic conception of value, he at least was in the ballpark of having something that could render all the different human goods commensurate. How much pleasure does it give? Friendship gives you pleasure, reading Shakespeare gives you pleasure, looking at paintings distinguished by their aesthetic quality gives you pleasure, and then we see how much each gives, and we find the maximum, and then we work the utilitarian calculus. Well, the more sophisticated followers abandon all that, because, you know, hedonism at the end of the day just does not correspond to our own apprehension of value. But once you have given that up, then the hope of commensurability that would make the utilitarian calculus workable just goes completely out the window.

To say that friendship and knowledge are basic human goods is merely to say that they have this and only this in common. Each, as an aspect of our well being and fulfillment, can provide us with a reason for action whose intelligibility as a reason is dependent neither on some further or deeper reason, nor on some sub rational motivating factor to which it is a means, backed up by a sub rational feeling, emotion, desire, something like that. Now, this point can be seen by reflecting on what is lost or foregone in choices between truly good but mutually exclusive options. I might stay at home with my family, or I might be able to be with you. The good of the option not chosen is simply not to be found in the option that is chosen. This is why regret is possible, even when we make good choices. It's not that my being here gives me everything I could have by being at home with my family, plus a little more, in terms of this idea of value. No. I regret the loss. I mean, I don't think it means I shouldn't be here, but I do regret that I'm not with my family. And that regret is intelligible. If the utilitarian presuppositions of commensurability were sound, then the, quote, best, unquote, option would contain all that is available in the other options, plus some more, and there would simply be nothing to regret.

Now, the alternative to utilitarianism, at least for those who believe that ethical thinking proceeds from a certain concern for human well being and fulfillment, is what is sometimes called, but it needn't have this label, historically it has been called natural law ethics. The problem here is that the idea of natural law has been embraced and criticized by so many people, meaning so many different things, that there's not a stable, well understood, shared meaning to the term. So I'm just going to try to explain myself, my own view, as clearly as I can. Absolutely nothing depends on the label. But it is historically what Aristotelian theories like mine, which have been quite central to the development of Christian ethics, have been called. That's historically what it's been.

Now, the first principle of this approach to moral judgment is that one ought to choose those options, and only those options, that are compatible with the human good considered integrally, that is, human well being, integrally conceived, an open hearted love of the goods of the human person, the well being, the flourishing of human persons, considered in all of its variegated dimensions, biological, rational, moral, social, and so on. The specification of this highly abstract master principle, as I just formulated it, it is very abstract, but its specifications, when we move from the abstract to the specific, are just all the familiar precepts that most people, even today, seek to live by, at least pay lip service to, and try to teach their children to respect. Such as the Golden Rule, that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which one finds not only in the words of Jesus, but one finds in all the great religious traditions, East and West, or at least most of them. That's one of the specifications.

Another is what's known as the Pauline principle, the principle that one should never do something in itself evil, even for the sake of good ends. In other words, the end doesn't justify the means. When you say to your kids, the end doesn't justify the means, you know, even if you hadn't thought to think of yourself as philosophical, what you are doing is essentially proposing to them a specification of the idea that you ought to will in a way that is consistent with human well being in every act. In other words, Kant's categorical imperative, stated most vividly in the maxim of one ought, and I quote, to treat humanity, whether in the person of yourself or others, always as an end, and never as a mere means. Again, a specification of the idea that morality is about rectitude in willing. And right willing, right reasoning, is willing consistently with the well being of all, with your own well being, willing the good and the good of others.

So that's what moral norms are, specifications of that idea. And sometimes they're purely general, like the Pauline principle and the categorical imperative, but they get much more specific, obviously, like thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, don't hit your sister. All those are specifications of that principle. You care about your kid hitting his sister, because the sister is a human being with dignity, and our respect for integral well being means we don't do that. Now, when applied to basic human goods, as opportunities for them arise, and the realization of them arises in the concrete circumstances of life, these precepts, moral norms, really do forbid or fully specify what our obligations are, in cases that we might not have chosen to put ourselves in, but that we find ourselves in.

The movement of thought from our grasp of the many dimensions of human well being and fulfillment, to the first principle of morality, to its specification in the moral norms, the great norms of conduct, is fundamentally and decisively the work of reason. Which is not to deny that revelation profoundly illuminates our understanding of the human good and its integral directedness, and therefore of moral principles. Nor is it the claim that the human good could be what it is, or moral norms could be what they are, absent some divine source for them. Just as I wouldn't want to claim that we could have anything that exists in the absence of the divine source of all being. But I'm going to get to the question of God later. I want first, just before doing that, to talk about the application of moral norms in the political context, why we have law, why we have political communities, how they have authority.

Now, human flourishing is impossible in the absence of a variety of forms of society. This is obviously true for instrumental reasons, inasmuch as so much that is good in human life is achieved only in collaboration with others, both at a time and through time. But the tradition of natural law thinking, unlike, for example, the tradition of thought established by Thomas Hobbes or Hume, also holds this to be true for intrinsic reasons. Marriage, for example, and other forms of friendship, are in themselves perfective of human beings, and contribute to well being in ways that would go unsatisfied if humans were to live solitary lives. Sociality, therefore, we should conclude, is a requirement, a self evident requirement, of practical reasoning. We should reach out to others. And it's in this sense that we can say that human beings are, as Aristotle said, naturally social, even naturally political. Aristotle says man is a political animal. He also says, by the way, and this is very rarely heard to be said, but if you look, he actually does say it, everyone's heard of Aristotle's line, man is a political animal, but he also says man is even more fundamentally a conjugal animal. Interesting, right? Even more fundamentally than political.

And as a consequence, but now I'm going over into the next lecture. Now, why is political society necessary? Why can't we live in some libertarian anarchistic utopia of isolated individuals? Well, drawing from the tradition's Aristotelian sources, some theorists have held that political society is itself a specific perfection of the human person, analogous to those perfections, those goods of knowledge, health, and so on, that it's the very nature of the human being to be in a political relationship with others. Human beings are thus by nature not merely social, but political. In its most extreme form, this view likens the political state to an organism, the parts of which are subordinate to the existence and value of the whole. This view may be found, for example, in the justification for capital punishment offered by Aristotle's greatest disciple and interpreter among the medieval thinkers, Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas, quote, every individual person is compared to the whole community as a part to the whole. Therefore, if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good. Aquinas here is simply conceiving human society, political society, as a whole.

A different view, also drawing on ancient as well as medieval sources, recognizes the inadequacy of even well intentioned social wholes for their own protection, preservation, and especially coordination. So not only can individuals not get along just by themselves, but even families can't get along just by themselves. Nor are pre political social groupings capable of meting out justice adequately, for example, or, finally, are they capable of providing for the welfare of those who might, through no fault of their own, be incapable of meeting their needs, of meeting their own needs. Other people need to help. These ways in which the individual and social groups are not self sufficient provide the key to the necessity of a move from non political to political forms of association. What in the tradition is sometimes described, although misleadingly, as complete community, communities that are fully self sufficient, in a way that the individual is not self sufficient, that individual families cannot be self sufficient.

These difficulties may be described as problems of justice and peace. The peace of the overlapping set of communities and social groups is threatened by, sometimes external, and sometimes internal, forms of violence, and by the lack of coordination among all of its members. If you didn't have some political authority, there would be chaos on the highways, because even well intentioned people, lacking any kind of traffic regulations, or even a decision about whether we're going to drive on the left or the right, would be crashing into each other, to say nothing of crimes. Justice for these groups and their individual members is also, of course, threatened, in this vale of tears, with fallen creatures like us, by violence and fraud within, and by the inability to punish fairly, by states of affairs in which the needs of some are simply not met. But the overlapping sets of social realities themselves are incapable of addressing these problems of justice and peace, because they don't have an overarching authority capable of providing definitive and binding solutions to these difficulties and needs.

Thus, as Aquinas rightly says, if it is natural that man live in society with his fellows, it is necessary that there be some power among men by which that group is governed. I don't agree with Aquinas on the idea that human society should be conceived as an organism. I think that's wrong. But I think he's absolutely right on this one. There's a need, in other words, for political authority, in order for communities to be enabled to pursue their own overall common good. Unanimity, in any kind of larger, complex society, cannot be the principle for making decisions, the mechanism for making decisions.

Now, this political authority may, obviously, be implemented more or less directly. But the tradition has offered numerous reflections on the appropriateness of the institution of positive law as an instrumentality essential to the fullness of human flourishing in society. This appropriateness is due to the law's public nature, its generality, its clarity, its regularity, its stability, its practicability, in short, to the variety of features that characterize a legal regime as in good shape, a regime in which the rule of law is maintained and respected. When we look around the world today, we often say, it's become really a truism, but it's a truism that continues to be true, that a lot of times the problem, the most fundamental problem, is not that they don't have good laws. It's that they don't have the rule of law. You're not even going to reach the question of good laws until you've got the rule of law. And where the rule of law does not exist, we see how impoverished people's lives are, how dangerous the situation is, how human goods are damaged, how far that community is from creating circumstances for the integral flourishing of members of the community.

Now, according to a familiar stereotype of the relationship between the natural law and human, positive law, the latter is derived straightforwardly from the former, and any gap between the demands of natural law and the positive law is enough to render the positive law unjust, and, according to a scholastic tag with Augustinian, Ciceronian, and Platonic roots, an unjust law is not a law. So there's this famous slogan in Latin. Where's Pastor Schmidt? He disappeared. He was telling me he had four years of Latin, so he could translate that for us. But my little rough translation is, an unjust law is not a law.

Now, on at least two counts, the stereotype is in error. First, we need to distinguish between positive law, which is derived from natural law sources in a kind of straightforward way, as a conclusion from a premise, and we can distinguish that from the sense in which law is sometimes derived instead by a specification or determination of generalities. We can go straightforwardly from killing is morally wrong to killing needs to be illegal. But we can't go straightforwardly from human health and safety is a good thing to we should drive on the left rather than the right, or the right rather than the left. In the latter case, all we can do is authoritatively choose, for the sake of the common good, between completely morally acceptable options, by selecting one. But we can't leave that decision just to the individual. We can't say, well, look, there's no moral obligation as to whether somebody would drive on the left or drive on the right, because people want to avoid injuring themselves. Why endanger, or use, another human being, despite its being perfectly morally okay, prior to the institution of traffic laws, to drive on the left or on the right? For the sake of peace and justice, for the sake of health and safety, human health and safety, for the sake of human well being, some authority has got to decide this one or that one, and I can't make the decision by figuring out which one is morally right and morally wrong, the way you can decide to make murder illegal, because you bring out that murder is morally wrong. So we should fully acknowledge the ways in which choice and decision enter into legal processes, where what must be done is left in one way or another undetermined by reason itself.

Second, while the idea of natural law, and every natural law theory, brings with it the availability of critique of existing legal, political, cultural, and moral arrangements, most natural law theorists recognize that the way in which unjust law may be said to be not law is highly qualified. Now, my point here is one of the great advantages of natural law thinking, one highlighted, actually, by Dr. Martin Luther King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he specifically invokes the idea of natural law, and appeals to the authority of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas as supporters. One of the great advantages is it proposes a higher law by reference to which the existing law can be judged to be just or unjust. It would be an entirely different thing if there were no standard by which the human law could be judged to be just or unjust, right? A lot of people say, well, gee, I really don't believe in natural law, that's a kind of misstatement, a crazy idea, an unequal law. Well, if you really want to hold that there is no higher law, that there is no natural law, that all we've got is the human law, and it can't be subjected to criticism by reference to any standard beyond it, I don't think most people, most liberals, would want to say that.

So, even if you doubt that a legally valid law is in some sense a law, even if it is unjust, nor is the question of whether a legally valid but morally deficient law should be obeyed or not, always, or even often, a simple one. Unjust laws lack moral authority, and in this sense are not fully law. That was King's teaching, and the teaching of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and has historically been a teaching that many, many persons endorse. And yet there may still be good reasons for conscientious citizens to obey even unjust laws. For example, where the injustice is not grave, and where violating the law, or doing so openly, would bring the law as a whole into disrepute. Arguably better in that case to go ahead and absorb the injustice. Of course, it would always be wrong to obey a law that required one to do injustice. But one might be required to obey an unjust law where one's failure to obey that law would shift the burden of injustice unfairly onto other people, who couldn't get away with disobeying the law as well as one could oneself.

It's worth noting further that the variety of ways law can be deficient is pretty broad. In addition to those laws that require or authorize what is impermissible, or forbid what is required, laws are deficient when the motives of their makers are not oriented to the common good, when the lawmakers acted outside or beyond their own constitutional authority, which I've argued in many places the Supreme Court of the United States does all the time, and when the burdens and benefits occasioned by the law are apportioned unfairly.

Okay. Now to turn to the God question. Now, in his treatise on law, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, and I speak of Aquinas, sir, because he's such a major figure in the natural law tradition, who influenced everyone who came later, Aquinas identifies the relationship between the natural law and the eternal law, the overall plan of God, as one of participation. The best English translation is participation, and I think that captures it well. God governs all creation in accordance with his divine wisdom, everything, in the moral domain, in the physical domain, the whole domain. Aquinas defines the eternal law as nothing else than the type of divine wisdom that directs all actions and movements.

Now, this eternal law governs the acts of most of creation by its being imprinted on them. This imprint is to be found in the natural inclination of things toward their natural ends, an inclination which is not supported by choice, or moral deliberation. You know, the earth revolves around the sun, without anybody, certainly without the earth itself, or the sun, doing any choosing. Things are just ordered in a certain way, in the eternal plan of God. It's not chosen. There's no act of choice toward the movement of the earth around the sun. And this is the case with natural laws, such as those of physics, and so on. By contrast, the rational creature is subject to divine providence, the eternal rule, in a more excellent way, a rational creature being the human being. And insofar as it partakes, the human being partakes of a share of providence, or to put it in the biblical language, insofar as men, women, human beings, are made in the image and likeness of God.

Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that God has five fingers on each of his appendages? Well, obviously not. So what could it mean? I think it means that God, because of God's gift, because of the sharing of the divine life, has made human beings rational and free. Unlike broccoli, or even dolphins, or planets, human beings are able to cause things that are not themselves caused, to be uncaused causes. Human beings share that God like power. Of course, that doesn't mean we're God. God wasn't caused. We are caused, we're not God. But among our powers, unlike broccoli, and essential to our dignity, God decides to share with us these powers, these literally awesome powers, of reason and freedom. It's a sharing, a participation, in God's own activity. So it's Aquinas putting this together. As Aquinas says, the brute animals God leads to their natural purposes, their natural ends, by instinct. Human beings, not merely by instinct, though we've got instinct, but by practical reason, by giving us a power that God himself has, the intelligence that in the Greek is called nous.

Yes, ma'am?

[Question] Would the Missouri Synod understanding of man, since the fall, not having free will, unlike the Roman Catholic position, create a different definition?

Yeah, it would. If we go back to the debate between Luther and Erasmus over free will, I think this becomes a real issue. Then I think the issue becomes, what do we mean by free will, and what do we mean by the denial of free will?

[Question] Are there limitations based on age? For example, Aristotle talking about the ages of a human being, and how between birth and seven, you're essentially like an animal, the light switch is on or off, me hungry, me not hungry, no ability to be responsible, like a dolphin. We can't say, well, you ate the fish, you murderer. And then, I think, also, are there levels of participation in this? If, for example, the person's rational faculty were on the other end of the scale, a car accident, dotage and old age. How does that happen?

Of course, this is a classic question, and in the Christian tradition, and in the broader philosophical tradition basically shaped by Aristotle, the answer has been that what matters for the dignity of the human being is that human beings are possessors of a rational nature, a rational nature, that is, that they come into existence with the radical capacities for reason, deliberation, judgment. Now, radical means at the root, the root capacity for reason and judgment. Those are not immediately exercisable in the embryonic and fetal and early infant stages, on into childhood. They're not immediately exercisable. They exist the way my knowledge, my capacity to speak Finnish, exists. It's there in radical form, in root form, but it's not yet immediately or actually exercisable, as in the case of the Finnish language, which I may never learn. I suspect that from your smile. Let me finish. And we have that nature. We are distinguishable from brute animals by virtue of those radical capacities. We are what we are, even when we lose the radical, I'm sorry, when we lose the immediately exercisable capacity, through a car accident, dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and so forth. And, of course, that also is true in the case of a congenitally, cognitively, severely disabled person, who never exercised, and never needed, those capacities, and doesn't do it now, and never will.

So, in my argument with my colleague Peter Singer, whom I mentioned earlier, the great utilitarian, he argues that what makes a person a bearer of worth, what I would call dignity, what you would call worth, is the immediately exercisable capacities themselves, which is why he thinks we're justified not only in abortion, even though, being absolutely straightforward, they admit it's the killing of a human being, and he criticizes those on his side who would deny it. He says, of course it is, what do you think, a horse? Of course it's a human being. But it's not, yet, a person. It's a pre personal human being, right. And he justifies euthanasia, right, because a person who's suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's disease is a post personal human being. It's a human being who once was a person, but is no longer a person. Or he justifies the killing of the severely and congenitally disabled, and these are moral justifications, that it could be morally justified to kill someone who is just a burden because he's cognitively disabled from the start and is never going to exercise these capacities. So he doesn't count in the moral equation, at least doesn't count the way a person does.

But I insist, and I think Singer would agree with me on the fact of the matter, that even the early embryo is the possessor of a rational nature, that's the kind of being it is, even the cognitively disabled person. And here's how we would prove it. If I caused a horse to talk in English, or do physics, or what have you, I wouldn't simply be perfecting the horse as what the horse is, right? I wouldn't be fulfilling its natural capacities, its innate radical capacities. I'd be turning it into a really weird thing, a talking horse. Whatever it would be, it wouldn't be a horse anymore. It would be changing from one thing into another. But if by some cure or some new technology or pharmaceutical therapy, I could overcome severe retardation in a child who's afflicted by a great cognitive disability, I wouldn't be changing him from one kind of entity into another, one kind of thing into another. I wouldn't be changing his nature. I would be fulfilling him or perfecting him. And he needs to be respected as the kind of creature he is, with the nature that he has. And that, it seems to me, is the fundamental thing about our dignity, and why we need to respect that dignity, and respect it equally, that we don't favor Albert Einstein over the mentally disabled child. Even though we realize that in secondary respects, non fundamental respects, of course they're not equal. The child is not equal to Einstein in brilliance, or to Michael Jordan in athletic prowess, or whatever. There are lots of inequalities. But in fundamental equality, in virtue of our rational nature, these creatures, to put it in biblical terms, are made in the image and likeness of God, or to put it in philosophical terms, are agents fitted out, or creatures fitted out to be agents, for reason and freedom. There we are equal.

Yeah?

[Question] How would you answer the materialists who would say, you know, this whole talk of humans having a nature different from the animals is just an illusion? This capacity isn't a matter of essence. It's a matter of degree. You can teach certain animals to do things, but their capacity is so much lower than the humans. It really is just a matter of degree and of difference in that.

The great thing, I think, is they're going to lose just on the science. Now, the more fundamental point, because, I mean, you get ancestral chances, these separated species, but there is no chimp that actually exercises liberty, exercises deliberation and judgment, or choice, and you're just not going to be able to find one. There's a real break there of kind, not of degree, and there's just no way around that. It could be that we might discover a creature, like ET. Remember, if ET existed, that would be a non human creature with dignity and worth. There could be, in principle, rational creatures that aren't human. We believe in such beings, right? We believe in angels. Angels are rational creatures that are not humans. They have a rational nature, but not a human nature. It's a mistake for us to think that what gives us dignity is our being human. No, what gives us dignity is our being rational creatures, possessors of a rational nature. God, well, maybe the energy of life is God. But we're not, there's no reason in principle we have to be alone in that.

Yes, sir?

[Question] How basic is the idea of believing in a creator God? I'm sorry, I'm being, believing in a creator God, to all this natural law? Whether God exists or does not exist, how critical is that?

Oh, okay, yeah. You know what, I'm going to try to answer that extemporaneously, though it's what I was about to read, but let me try it. To me, we do not need to postulate that there is a creator God in order to understand the intelligible point of friendship or knowledge. My atheist friends have no trouble getting the intelligibility of visiting a friend in a hospital, or telling a lie to protect the reputation of a friend. And my atheist friends know how to distinguish the intelligibility of those things from that of a man who goes down the street telling people, I like the flavor of artichokes. You don't need to suppose that there is a God in advance for that. Nor do you need to suppose the existence of God in order to reason to the moral norms that are specifications of the integral directedness of the human good, once one has gotten hold of the idea of human goods as intelligible reasons for action, non instrumental, intelligible reasons for action. So I don't think you need to postulate God in order to get all that.

I think it works the other way around. As with any aspect of being, as with anything in reality, no satisfactory justification of how such a thing could be, I think, is possible in terms of purely material and efficient causes. That's why I think we have no choice, intellectually, but to move to the idea of spiritual realities, final causes, that are not reducible to the material. Now, can we get from there, on purely philosophical grounds, to the idea of God as personal, of ethical monotheism? I have an elaborate argument that I've persuaded myself of, that we actually can. I think we can reason our way all the way to ethical monotheism. Now, that's not going to tell us much about God. Most of what we know about God we have by special revelation, by God's revealing himself in scripture, and above all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But I think we can actually get to the idea of a supervening intelligence, a creative intelligence, a rational and free intelligence, and as such, a personal God. To say it's a personal God is simply to say that that supervening ultimate causality is rational, free, and enters into relationships with others, including with us. So I think you can get there, but it's still, it is the God of the philosophers. Were it not for God's self revelation in scripture, and ultimately in Christ, we would know very little.

Plato. Many of you, I'm sure, have read Plato's dialogues. You'll notice that he talks interchangeably, it seems, about gods, plural, polytheism, and God. Who's noticed that? You've noticed this? Do you ever wonder about it? I did. I was trying to figure out, why does he do this? Then I started to look at it more, and it became a kind of a passion. And if you look, test this when you get home, when you look at it, where his references to God are merely, or to divinity are merely, passing, ceremonial, he speaks of the gods. Whenever the concept of divinity is doing any analytical work, he speaks of God, singular. That guy got really near to the idea of ethical monotheism, with no access, as far as we know, to Hebrew revelation, the idea of a personal, divine intelligence, and a personal God. Still, of course, there are a lot of things that, despite that insight, Plato doesn't know, because he doesn't have the prophets, he doesn't have the gospels, he doesn't have the business. So that's the way I look at the God question fundamentally.

Was there another? More hands up? Thank you.

[Question] Doctor, I do have one question. In the beginning, when you were talking about maybe what I would call certain virtues, or what kind of a thing is it, a friendship, a friendship, and the importance of, you know, pursuing reason and morality for their intrinsic value, it seems, I'm having trouble understanding, as a Christian who knows my catechism, I'm afraid I break it down more than that. I think, for example, when you're talking about the value of art, I'm thinking about the virtue of beauty, which is closer to God. When you talk about friendship, I'm thinking about two aspects of how we were made to be loving people. God is love, and how he makes us able to love in the Christian way, the Christian definition. And even, well, I can't say, because we say, in our Lutheran tradition, that unless something comes from the love of God, is motivated, made by the love of God, it has no value. And so I'm kind of breaking it down to our motivation and who we are as defined by our Lord as something he gives us through the Holy Spirit. And then we are able truly to love, and truly to be social beings, where we care about our neighbors, and truly to value what is right and what is beautiful, you know, the way he made it and intends for us to do. And so to talk about friendship and all of that without God is very hard for me to grasp.

Okay. Yeah, I got it. I don't have any problem with the content of what you just said. Because my own view is that, faith is a separate lecture, but I'll give you a little of it, faith profoundly illuminates the human good in all of its dimensions. Yes. And it enables us to realize in a more excellent way, as they call it, a more perfective way, to realize all the aspects of well being and fulfillment for ourselves and for others, and to do that in a way that is morally upright, that's in line with the requirements of our own good. Still, I don't think you want to say, what you and I have just agreed on, well, you yourself didn't want to say it, I want to say, requires us to suppose that those who lack Christian faith can have nothing of the reality of friendship, or the appreciation of beauty. I mean, I look at Plato, and I say, amazing. Or I look at some of the work of the great artists of antiquity, the great architectural achievements. Sometimes they owe it to God. But those are realities. The goods that are realized there are real. Now, are they partial? Absolutely. Would they be profoundly illuminated by Christian faith? In fact, we can appreciate them, I think, more in view of Christian faith than they could themselves. I think I can appreciate Plato more, from my perspective of Christian faith, than Plato's own disciples in the academy were able to do, not by any virtue of mine, but by the gift of faith. You know, with God, all the better to be of faith. So I think we need to keep it all kind of balanced. We can't treat it as either or. Either we affirm that faith gives us the richness of understanding that you were talking about, or, you know, if we affirm that, then we can't believe that anybody who doesn't have faith can't have anything.

Thank you.

Yes, absolutely.

[Question] Going back to the intrinsic versus instrumental, if someone is making an argument that says something like morals are just a social construct, is that then only thinking of morality as instrumental?

Yeah, punch him in the nose and see if they make that. Usually, what that is is simply a way of trying to explain away the authority of reason in our lives. Now, that reason does have a sort of authority. When I say two and two make seven, trying to defy the authority of reason, I make a fool of myself. It does not correspond to reality. If I try to deny the principle of non contradiction, or even worse, if I in practice deny the principle of non contradiction, if in my own thinking, reasoning, and arguing, I act in a way that defies the idea that something cannot both hold and not hold in the same respect at the same time, again I'm making a fool of myself, because reason does have authority. It's something we grasp on a very basic level, that reason has a certain authority. Once we say that, once we recognize that for the reality it is, we've just got to dismiss the idea that morality or intelligibility is just a social construct. And, of course, if it's not a social construct, we wouldn't expect exactly what we get, which is some depth to the authority of reason, across cultures and across time. Often paid lip service to, often violated, but what do people do? Even monsters like Hitler and Nero, what do they do? They don't sort of openly say, I defy reason, because reason is just a social construct. They make some bizarre claim that what they're doing is reasonable and right, right? What do they do? They cook up, here's that word, rationalizations. Why is it called rationalizations? Because it's an attempt to mimic rationality. Yeah. So, you know, I hope we're past this '70s, '80s thing about invalidating being, socially deconstructing intelligibility and reasoning, so that they're just social constructs. But one thing that idea is always immediately vulnerable to is the force of argument, an argument to show the self referential inconsistency of the claim being made with the actual making of it. So here you've got somebody who's trying to tell you that intelligibility is a social construct, well relying, of course, on the idea that intelligibility is not just a constructive condition.

One more question, for sure.

[Question] Just to answer part of my question, but just to help clarify how to answer, is that I built the argument for the people who are pure materialists, everything's a social construct. And I will say, well, your idea of friendship being intrinsic, you know, that's a nice thought, but let's face reality. When I visit my friend in the hospital, I do it because, A, it makes me feel good, and B, I would like someone to visit me. So it's everything, finally. What you call love is finally, in the end, all instrumental. Let's face it, we're selfish creatures. How do you answer that one?

Well, first of all, I'd be surprised, as pastors, whether you actually run into that much as a real life pastoral problem. What it is is intellectual gaming, life. Because nobody lives their life that way. But believe it or not, I've got an old friend, you guys have probably heard his name, Richard Dawkins. When I was in Oxford, when I was in graduate school, he was, then, a young don, and I got some teaching there fairly early, so I got elevated to the senior common room, so I hung around with him a bit, and got to know him pretty well. Anyway, I noticed that he's been saying the following, saying, look, when I go through my day, and I do my work, and I interact with people, you know, and I talk to my kids, and I do stuff, I not only act, I actually believe that I'm doing it freely, that I make free choices. Nobody could but live that way. It's only when I reflect on what I have been doing from a detached perspective that I conclude that actually I'm simply the product, everything I do is the product of material and efficient causes. There is not even anything like consciousness as anything more than a material reality. So the first thing I would point out is that people don't actually live that way. Fortunately, the problems are not that bad. Even people who are doing bad stuff, someone who's committed adultery, if he comes in and tells you a story to justify his adultery, that has something to do with, you know, there is no reality beyond the merely material, blah, blah, blah, that's not why he's committing adultery. So I think you've got to deal with whatever the real problem is, and not this intellectual game.

Now, if we are going to do the intellectual game, but, you know, I'm up to it, I love it. I think it's fun. I enjoy it. I think where we have to go is the kind of the force of arguments that I was talking about with Bentham here, and we want to look at all the presuppositions that are being made by the guy who claims that the only realities are material realities. At the end of the day, it's a kind of a long argument. I can give you some sources, if you're interested, in my own writings and the writings of others that are on this, you know, where we're playing this game. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the problem that you see immediately when you think of the philosophical school called logical positivism. Do you remember logical positivism? They had a real run in the 19 teens and 20s and 30s. It was associated with a movement centered in Austria. It was a major school of philosophy. And it was a materialist school of philosophy. The basic principle of logical positivism is that in order to be meaningful at all, not merely true or false, a proposition has to be empirically verifiable or falsifiable, that only empirically verifiable propositions could be true, or even meaningful, that a non empirically verifiable proposition couldn't even be false. It would just be meaningless. And these guys got a good ride on that idea. I don't know why it took so long, but eventually somebody figured out this, and asked them a question. This proposition that things are only meaningful, or only, forgive me, is it prepared to be verified? Is that meaningful? Is it verifiable?