Natural Law – Reflections On Theory & Practice

"Morality is problematic - in theory as well as in practice. Perhaps because morality is inescapable, however, philosophers and others now write and talk a great deal about its nature and source. These six publications bear witness to the extent of current interest and to the range of contemporary perspectives. Most are short and are either intended for a non-academic readership or are written in styles largely intelligible to such. Natural Law by the late Jacques Maritain, and Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, are linked by being in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. As the most philosophical of the books, these are likely to be found the most difficult. Maritain, who died in 1973, was a convert to Catholicism (this book collects material mostly from the early 1950s). Foot is an admirer of Aquinas and acknowledges a great intellectual debt to her former colleague Elizabeth Anscombe, a Catholic; but her own attitude to Christianity is ambiguous.This is Foot's long-awaited first book, published in her eightieth year. The core idea animating these two slim volumes is that an agent's good consists in the realisation of one's proper nature. This does not mean that one should do just 'what comes naturally', but that one should do what pertains to one's nature as a member of a species with certain powers, most importantly that of reason. In short, one should act according to rational animal nature. To ground morality in this way presupposes that we all share in a common human nature, and can extract duties from it. This is anathema to those who insist that values have nothing to do with facts; and it is likely to seem pre-Darwinian in suggesting that human nature has a specific purpose beyond mere adaptation. Foot effectively reasserts the Aristotelian view that each species has a rationally discernible fulfilment, whether it has arisen by accident or artifice. From this defence of natural value in general, she moves to the special case of human action and its relation to the end of human happiness. Such a notion as happiness, she confesses, is 'deeply problematic' because of the diversity of views about what constitutes human happiness; and because it is easy to slip into a utilitarian way of thinking in which the end justifies the means, even to the extent of permitting harm to be inflicted. Foot's response is to insist that the focus of moral evaluation is not states of affairs or outcomes but persons and their actions. How, though, may we know what befits human flourishing? Foot writes of natural goodness largely from the standpoint of actions. In one of his essays, 'On Knowledge through Connaturality', Maritain introduces a different (and now largely neglected) perspective: because virtue is embodied in the person, 'a virtuous man may possibly be utterly ignorant in moral philosophy, and know as well - probably better - everything about virtues. . . '. Maritain argues that similar knowledge is involved in aesthetic and mystical experience. William Sweet is to be congratulated for editing this collection, which also relates natural goodness to the issues of justice and rights, and for providing a helpful introduction. Gordon Graham's Evil and Christian Ethics and Terence Penelhum's Christian Ethics and Human Nature are avowedly religious in orientation. Human nature features again in both books. Both authors are Ang-lican and invoke Christian understandings while writing as professional philosophers. Penelhum keeps furthest from moral the-ology while Graham develops an argument designed to show that our experience of good and evil is best made sense of by Christianity. Graham is a lively writer, unhesitant in expressing challenging opinions: 'if Christianity is to have anything distinctive to say about morality. . . it must do so by connecting morality with Jesus as an agent of cosmic history rather than a teacher of precepts.' In other words, Jesus is not merely another 'moral teacher' but the Incarnation of God in human history, affording us a fuller understanding of our shared human nature. Simon Blackburn and Richard Ryder, however, believe that religious ethics is undermined by the falsity of its foundational premise, namely the existence of God, and that morality must now be pursued on a secular basis. In Painism, Ryder seeks to show that you can have morality without God. Blackburn, by contrast, in Being Good, attends enthusiastically to exposing the repugnance of biblical ethics, as he sees it, and to demonstrating that appeals to divine commands are worse than irrelevant. Following Plato, he argues that moral justification for an action can never in itself be provided by appeal to its being the will of God. Both Being Good and Painism are directed towards the general reader, and each is written from and addressed to post-religious sensibilities. Both favour an account of ethics as residing in sentiment, most particularly in compassion. Reason can determine appropriate evidence and maintain ethical consistency, but ultimately what we ought to do results from feelings we have (by nature) for ourselves and others. Both authors give attention to securing what Blackburn terms 'Freedom from the bad'; but whereas for him this is only a part of morality, 'too grey and neutral to excite our ambition and admiration', for Ryder it is the very essence of ethics: 'Pain (i.e. suffering) is the only evil' and the only moral objective 'is to reduce the pain of others'. Ryder would have us adopt 'painism' as the name of the true morality. Unfortunately he supports his proposal with some dubious arguments, such as that one cannot weigh relative amounts of pain between groups and individuals because 'each individual is the boundary of its own consciousness'. Certainly one cannot pool pains in some sea of collective agony, without discrimination or quantification. But that does not show that comparative assessments cannot be made. After all, 20 single pound coins put into a scale tip the balance against a single pound coin on the other side even though each coin is 'the boundary of its own weight'. Likewise, since frustration is a form of pain as Ryder understands this, we can construct cases in which it will be justified to inflict pain on one person in order to relieve the frustrations of another. Painism all too easily slides back to utilitarianism. It is hard to assess the state of popular sentiment concerning morality, though relativism seems to be the common currency: morality is then regarded as just a matter of variable convention, with 'live and let live' being the dominant maxim. 'Live and let live', however, tends to be offered as an absolute principle leading many philosophers to regard this kind of relativism as vulgar and self-refuting. I doubt that they can easily absolve themselves from any responsibility. After all, these ideas are common among those in positions where opinions are called for and attended to, and their main sources are popular academic presentations of moral subjectivism. What emerges from this survey is that ethical theory still needs to be practised; that any adequate theory must relate good and evil to human nature; and that utilitarianism has still not gone away. Morality remains problematic." John Haldane The Tablet 28th July 2001