The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Natural Law

MORAL KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICABLE IN THEORY, LARGELY INCOMMUNICABLE IN PRACTICE
If a truth is capable of being rationally demonstrated, then it follows that this truth should theoretically enjoy common assent. So Simon: “Philosophical certainty is of a demonstrative nature and, consequently, enjoys unlimited communicability in principle.” In practice, however, moral truths—such as those belonging to natural law—are difficult to rationally communicate:

We often feel certain about right or wrong in a moral essence without being able to show clearly why it is right or wrong. Even in matters which admit of rational clarity, it often happens that available explanations are not airtight, and that there is a striking contrast between the firmness of our certainty and the vagueness of our explanation. Our intuitive acquaintance with the laws of the moral order is way ahead of our ability to connect moral essences with the first principles of morality, in other words, to show why an act is right or is wrong.

As a result, we cannot expect to reconstruct via rational argumentation the kind of consensus that once existed on the strength of inclination:

It can happen at any time in the history of a particular community that an issue on which sufficient agreement (an amount of agreement having about the same effects as consensus) had, so far, been ensured by affective communion no longer can be satisfactorily treated by such spontaneous methods, and demands to be treated by methods of rational communication. With regard to this particular issue, this particular society is in transition from the pre-Socratic to the Socratic age. Such transitions always have the character of crises, and they inevitably involve considerable destructions. One may not even be entitled to hope that the amount of agreement to be obtained in the future by methods of rational communication will ever equal the amount of agreement that was obtained in the past, spontaneously and silently, by affective communion.

Some good can be accomplished in attempting rational persuasion, provided we are under “no illusion about the possibility of bringing about demonstrative knowledge in a great number of minds.” But overly lofty hopes in the power of natural law argumentation are liable to end with a backlash against natural law:

For a number of years we have been witnessing a tendency, in teachers and preachers, to assume that natural law decides, with the universality proper to the necessity of essences, incomparably more issues than it is actually able to decide. There is a tendency to treat in terms of natural law questions which call for treatment in terms of prudence. It should be clear that any concession to this tendency is bound promptly to cause disappointment and skepticism.

Russell Hittinger powerfully recapitulates this point in his introduction to The Tradition of Natural Law:

In our time and culture, natural law is invoked as a response to the breakdown of tradition, to moral relativism and nihilism, to various species of utilitarianism, and to legal positivism. It is expected to be an all-purpose antidote to the estrangements of modernity. Called upon to remediate more than reasonably can be expected, natural law is liable to descend to ideology…. A society that perceives itself to have only the weapon of natural law to address the enemies of right reason is, no doubt, a society that will have trouble taking that measure.

Hence the general impotence of natural law in our society, notwithstanding sustained advocacy from contemporary proponents.

CONCLUSION
Yves R. Simon’s theory of natural law is but one among many. Yet its explanatory power for our current moment recommends Simon for wider attention than he has heretofore enjoyed.

The most obvious counterarguments to the perspective on natural law presented above are no arguments at all. Demanding an alternative approach to public engagement may be reasonable, but it also deflects from the need to answer for natural law argumentation’s own apparent weakness. I will not offer any such alternative here, as I have already done so at length elsewhere.

Neither is there any force to the charge that absent natural law argumentation, “there can be no political persuasion, only religious conversion.” Perhaps, and what of it? None other than John Witherspoon—the Witherspoon Institute’s eponymous inspiration—held that “the natural law was not a universal moral sense cultivating sociability in all citizens. A virtuous society requires regenerate Christians.”