Transcription
Hello ethics students, it's time for us to explore another ethical theory, the natural law theory of morality. Remember the big question of ethics: what should I do? How should I live? And that question is going to be answered by the natural law theory by reference to our natural purpose. What I should do is fulfill the kind of being that I am. I should fulfill my natural purpose based on the nature that I have, the kind of thing that I am. That sets out certain goals or ends or objectives that I ought to achieve because of my characteristics, just what that nature is and what those characteristics are might vary depending on the particular natural law theory we're looking at in the account of human nature, but it's that part that's the the common thread, the idea that what I ought to do is fulfill my natural purpose.
To take the natural law theory back to some of its origins, it's helpful to think a little bit about the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, his views on ethics. So Aristotle, in addition to being a great philosopher, was a really incredible scientist. In the thousands of pages that we have of Aristotle's works, over 80% of them are just basic observational science. He wrote books on the parts of animals and the parts of plants, and he wrote books on the weather and meteorology and physics, all these different things. And based on those observations of nature, he thought he could learn something about the sort of life we ought to live. Any kind of reasons in this way: well, what's the good life? First, you have to figure out what life is and what kind of being I am and the kind of life I live. And once I know that, then I can say what's the good life for a human being.
And so he does this to see how it works. It is easier to think about another type of an animal, not the human animal, but some other kind, give us a little distance from ourselves. So take, for example, a horse. What would the good life for a horse look like? Well, first, you have to realize what a horse's life is. A horse is a mammal, so that means it has to engage in, you know, eating and drinking and breathing and movement and sexual reproduction and all the things that mammals do. The horse is also a particular kind of mammal. It's a social mammal, a highly social one. Most mammals are social, but horses are highly so. So in addition to living the basic biological life of a man, it lives a social life. And so the good life for the horse is going to be one where it can do all of those things well.
So in order to live its ordinary basic biological life well, it's gonna have to have enough food and water and shelter. Thus, to live comfortably, horses, you know, as well, they're built to run. They've got to have plenty of exercise. So the horse is going to need lots of space, lots of space to run. And as a social animal, it needs a herd. It's a herd animal. It has to have other horses to connect to, or at least other mammals to be part of a group in they can interact in the appropriate way. And so, just in very simplistic terms, thinking very simply, that's the good life for a horse. Aristotle would think a life with enough basic material resources, plenty of space, and a herd to be a part of. We don't need any grand ethical theorizing to figure that out. That's just looking at what a horse is and seeing what it needs to be what it is, its nature, fulfilling its nature.
Well, Aristotle thinks then we can do the same thing with humans. Humans, like horses, are animals, mammals, and have the same basic biological needs. So we need enough basic material resources. Humans are also social. We've got to have a caring community that we're a part of, or else we can't live well. But humans have another power, one that horses don't have, and that's the power of reason. And what it means to live well with reason is really central to Aristotle's account of ethics. The reason, he thinks, allows us to do two things. On the one hand, it allows us to obtain knowledge and then develop plans and schemes to achieve certain goals or ends based on what we know. So reason gives us that kind of calculating and understanding capability.
But reason also does another thing for us. Reason allows us to regulate our emotions. You know, like horses, we horses have emotions like we do. You know, we experience fear, horses experience fear, for example. Those are both emotions. But the difference is, in non-human animals, Aristotle would say those emotions lead to an immediate behavioral response. Fear initiates an action. There's no reflection or reason in that process. That helps us regulate that emotion, allows us to either, you know, act on it because we think it's appropriate, or throttle it back because we think that acting on it is not really appropriate in this context. It's that ability to use reason to make our emotions work well and do what they need to do for us that Aristotle sees is being really important. It's what Aristotle calls virtue. He thinks of virtue as is a balanced emotional disposition, this balanced character where we're not overwhelmed by any emotion and we're also not insensitive to any emotion.
Again, take fear, for example. If I'm overwhelmed by fear whenever something scary happens or I'm in a risky situation, then I'll never take any chances. I'll always be paralyzed and unable to act in the appropriate ways. If, however, I'm insensitive to fear and I'm not afraid of the things I should be, then I'm not going to be safe. I'm gonna encounter risky situations and constantly put my life at risk, and my life is going to end too soon to be a good life. So what I need is what Aristotle calls virtue. In this case, with respect to fear, that's courage. I need courage. I need a balanced response with respect to fear that allows me to be fearful, but at the same time to act appropriately and use my reason to activate that emotion in the right way.
And so there you have it. Aristotle thinks there's the good life for humans. Just like any other mammal, we need enough basic material resources, food, water, shelter. We also need to be part of a caring community since we're a social animal. We too need good socialization. And then we need knowledge of the good so that as we lay out our plans and our schemes and work towards them, we're working towards the right thing. And finally, we need virtue. We need a balanced emotional response to the world so that when something uncertain happens, we're reacting to the world, we react appropriately out of habit. That Aristotle thinks is the good life for humans. And being moral means fulfilling that purpose, living out that good life. And in that way, Aristotle is sort of the originator of the natural law tradition. It's all about fulfilling our natural purpose as a rational animal.
The issue with Aristotle's account of the good life and morality, though, the account of a good life is really compelling, seems like he gets things right for the most part in many respects. There's something that is missing here. If we're gonna have a complete and useful ethical theory, it has to be able to guide specific ethical dilemmas that confront us. But how's Aristotle gonna do that? What does that account of a good life tell us about, you know, say, whether or not abortion should be illegal or whether it's moral, or whether the death penalty is moral, or whether we should donate large sums of our wealth to help end world poverty or sacrifice for some greater good? Those those questions just aren't easily answered. And you can't really extrapolate from Aristotle's ethical theory and get there.
But later natural law theorists try to take Aristotle's insights and build on them in a way that resolves this weakness. Most importantly, the great medieval philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas is a Christian philosopher in the 13th century. He's trying to take the Christian theology that he knows so well and the Aristotelian philosophy that he sees as being the best thing available to him and trying to integrate them into a coherent whole. He thinks Aristotle gets the basic picture of human nature and the good life right, and it just needs to be meshed with his Christian theology. As he does so, he helps try and solve this weakness.
What St. Thomas does is he recognizes that human nature could best be split into three parts. We have a physical nature, physical being. We've got an animal nature, we're not just things, but we're animal things. We've also got a rational nature that's social and allows us to reason. Each of those natures, St. Thomas thinks, provides us with a drive, a kind of compulsion to act in certain ways. And each of those natures has its own distinct purpose and has a drive that compels us to act, and there's a purpose or an end that those acts are supposed to achieve.
So my physical being, the drive I have that you have that we share with all other physical beings, St. Thomas's is sort of like the survival instinct. He calls the drive to preserve being. All physical beings, they have an inbuilt natural force that pushes them to preserve their being, to go on, to survive. And the purpose of that is so that we will survive. It's to keep us alive. Why do I have this natural response when something threatening? You know, if all of a sudden something drops from the ceiling and falls by my head, as soon as I register it in my peripheral vision, I'm not gonna stop and think, what should I do? I'm naturally gonna move away because doing so is a part of my physical being to preserve itself, to preserve myself. That's there to help me survive. What we might call the survival instinct.
Our animal being, however, has a different purpose and has a different drive associated with it. The drive associated with our animal being is the sex drive, the drive to reproduce and care for our young. And the purpose of that isn't to keep me alive, isn't my own survival. On the contrary, you know, reproducing is risky. It puts me at risk, especially if I'm a woman and I might be a mother, right? Giving birth to children is a very dangerous thing. So it's not going to improve my own survival. But what it does is it helps propagate the species, helps keep humanity around. And so I've got two drives we've seen so far. The physical drive to preserve my own being, which is there for my own survival, that's the purpose or function it has. There's my animal being, the sex drive that compels me to care for my young and to reproduce, and the purpose of that is to propagate the species.
And then there's my rational being, the drive to, as St. Thomas says, know God and live in community. So, in other words, this is like human curiosity and this is the social instinct. That's what he's getting at here. The purpose of that, he thinks, is to allow us to be happy, that flourishing, that living well, the good life comes through knowledge and through community. That's what it's all about. So then we've got three drives and three ends or purposes they're supposed to serve. And what St. Thomas says is that our actions, the actions we should do, are the ones that come from a particular drive and further the end they're supposed to further. The actions we shouldn't do are actions that come from a particular drive and rather than achieving that purpose, they don't achieve it, or sometimes even thwart or disrupt that purpose. Those are the actions that are wrong.
So, for example, take suicide. Why might someone want to commit suicide? Well, the most common reason that you'll get from people who are suicidal is that they're suffering in some deep and important way, and their suffering is so bad that the only way to get to avoid that suffering, to get through it, is to commit suicide, to end their life. Well, which drive is that rooted in? To figure out if it's right or wrong, to trace it back to the drive. So let's root it. Let's trace it back. Why do I want to avoid suffering? Is that because of my survival instinct, my sex drive, or my curiosity and social drive? Well, clearly that has to do with my survival. The reason I want to avoid suffering is because things that cause me pain are oftentimes really dangerous and they just might kill me. So I try to avoid suffering. But in trying to avoid suffering, if I end up killing myself, I commit suicide. Can that further my own survival? Obviously not. So that's an act that, though it comes from this drive, it actually disrupts this end. And that's why St. Thomas would say suicide is always morally wrong. I'm the kind of being that ought to work towards my survival. I'm driven to do it. And if I take actions that go against it, I'm violating my own nature and doing something wrong.
And as you might have registered already, or start to see, this ethical perspective is really central to Roman Catholic moral thought and social teaching. This is exactly the reason why Roman Catholics think suicide of all forms is morally wrong and in all circumstances. Take another nice controversial Roman Catholic social position, the prohibition on artificial contraception. No, it's not acceptable to use artificial contraception. Roman Catholics think, you'll often hear them say it's that way because it's unnatural. But when they say unnatural, it you have to understand it in the way Aquinas does. They're not saying it's unnatural and that you can't find it in nature. Right? I mean, the substances you might use for contraception come from the natural world. What they mean is that what drives us to engage in activities in which we might want to use contraception is our sex drive, obviously. And the natural and the natural purpose of the sex drive and sexual activity is reproduction. But contraception very deliberately, you know, puts a barrier, it thwarts that purpose or that end. And so, just the just in the way suicide works, our natural end of survival, so to contraception thwarts our natural end of reproduction and propagating the species. So we shouldn't do it.
Another nice example, one that isn't a prohibition, but one that is a prescription, something we ought to do, comes from the third particular drive that we have, the rational social drive, curiosity and social instinct, that drive to live and know God and live in community with others. That's the reason why some of the people on the front lines in the immigration debate are Roman Catholic priests and nuns. Because think about it. When a person immigrates legally or illegally crosses a border, why are they trying to do it? Sometimes it's to save their life, and they might be applying for asylum because their life's a threat. But most of the time, it's just they want to live a better life. They want to go to a place where they can form new communities and live well and flourish and care for the young and do all these things. They're trying to live in community with others in a healthy way. Well, that comes from our social instinct. You know, should we put laws in place that really restrict that? Should we have heavily restrictive immigration laws that keep people who are trying to immigrate and form new communities from doing so? Well, if we put those laws in place for people in this situation, does that help them further the natural end of living well, of happiness, of flourishing? No, it doesn't. Again, it quite literally puts up a barrier in many cases that keeps them from being able to fulfill that purpose. They're just trying to live better lives. And if we keep them from doing that, we're keeping them from fulfilling their purposes, the kind of being they are. And that violates the natural law principles, which state that what we should be doing is fulfilling that natural purpose, not thwarting it, not inhibiting it.
Alright, so hopefully now you understand what the natural law morality is. You can see that it's pretty intuitive and pretty compelling. Other things to like about it besides it's this kind of intuitive nature is that if it's right, then problems and moral knowledge are easy to solve. How do we know what morality is all about? Well, let's just built right into our nature. We know morality is about survival. We know that it's about reproducing and caring for our young. And we know that it's about living in community with others and flourishing and achieving a good life. That's just easy. I mean, quite literally, you might call it common sense. That's the nice thing about natural law.
But there are some problems here as well. Probably the chief issue is that it's unclear how we should understand the principle. What principle or should we follow? Is it that I should always do something that furthers one of my natural ends, or that I should never do something that thwarts it? Because sometimes the same act might further one end, but thwart another, and then things get tricky trying to apply it. So we might either be really restrictive and say you can never do anything that thwarts a natural end. But if we do that, then we end up with a super, super restrictive morality. You know, that bans things like contraception. Contraceptive use that to many of us seems intuitively wrong. Or so if we don't want to, you know, if that seems too restrictive, we could have a more permissive view of natural law morality. We could say, okay, anything that furthers a natural end, that's morally acceptable. And so, like you can see the debate over this often times in debates about homosexual sexual activity. You know, in simple terms, over gay sex. Clearly, the Roman Catholic Church has a strong moral prohibition on gay sex. Says that homosexual sexual intercourse is immoral. Why? Driven by the sex drive, but it doesn't further the end of reproduction and caring for young. And so it's not natural in that sense. It's not purposeful in achieving the end that it should achieve. So if you have that restrictive view, it doesn't further an end, so strong, then you would say gay sex is immoral, shouldn't be done.
But then there's other people that come from the natural law tradition who say things like this. They say things like, well, but sex isn't just about reproduction. It's also about building strong relationships. I mean, that's how communities are built. The family, the central building block in community, comes from intimate relationships. And sexual activity helps build those relationships. And so it can help us flourish, right? Having committed same-sex, same-sex relationship, homosexual relationship in which we engage in sexual activity can strengthen the bonds that make us live well and flourish in community. On that view, same-sex intercourse would be okay because it furthers a natural end on that more permissive approach.
Well, what to do here, right? It's not clear which of those, the restrictive or the more permissive, is right. The restrictive seems way too restrictive. So maybe you want to say, oh, the more permissive approach is the way to go. But it's gonna allow things that are clearly immoral. So take, for example, forcible rape. Rape might produce the end of reproduction. It might happen. It's unlikely it does happen, but it does. And if anything that furthers a natural end is moral, then we would have to allow that rape was moral. Well, that can't be right. So it seems like we're caught in this kind of struggle with natural law. The more restrictive reading, the more traditional one, the one that St. Thomas would give us, seems too restrictive. Maybe there's maybe some intuitions there that it rubs up against in the wrong way. So maybe we'd want to try this permissive view, but that's clearly too permissive, and that can't quite get it right.
So what the natural law theory owes us is a clear kind of justification for how we're supposed to achieve this nature and the ways in which actions are made right or wrong. And they're probably gonna have to give us that more restrictive view that violates one of the ends that it's supposed to achieve wrong. But if we end up with such a restrictive account of ethics, then we might ask the motivation question. Well, if that's what morality is, why should I be moral? If morality is gonna be that restrictive and corrective, why would I, why should I even do it? Why not do something else that's gonna be more fulfilling for me as an individual? That's the question that natural law is an answer to. And that's why natural law tends to be most prominent in religious circles because religious believers can have an answer to that question based on the rewards of the divine.
But going back to its origins in Aristotle, Aristotle, without that religious context and that promise of reward, can't really give us a good answer there. And once we have tied our ethics back to the promise of divine reward, now that ethics looks not so much like ethics and more like just fulfilling our desires, back to the desire satisfaction theory, which is worrisome in its own right, as we see. So there's a quick overview of the natural law tradition, a couple of different accounts and its origins and how they relate and how it connects to really prominent ethical positions in our own society that you see coming especially out of the natural, the natural law tradition in the Roman Catholic Church. But there's some problems there too. And where we're left with natural law is that, you know, this just might be right, but we need some more pieces to be put into the puzzle to see why we should obey the natural law tradition and a clear justification for the level of restriction that we would put in place in thinking about our natural purposes. So keep thinking about that as we go forward. And then as we evaluate these ethical theories alongside one another, we can think about the natural law theory again. All right, I look forward to it. Until then, take care.