Last week (1/1/08 Speaking Softly and Rationally), I highlighted Pope Benedict’s past three messages for the World Day of Peace, January 1st. I noted that each of these messages—employing the figure of a human “moral grammar”—constituted a contemporary apologia for human reason, and specifically for belief in a universal natural moral law.

This week I want to explore some of the many reasons why such appeals—Benedict’s not least among them—have long fallen on deaf ears in the world of policymaking, jurisprudence and academia.

Our contemporary era is characterized by a generalized skepticism or perhaps more precisely—as Pope Benedict has cogently pointed out—agnosticism with regard to the determination of what constitutes the ‘genuine human good’. Theories of natural law, of course, hinge on precisely our shared ability to recognize such a good as universally intelligible and, indeed, reasonable. From a practical understanding of the goods that are perfective of our nature and constitutive of our ultimate human good, natural law theory is then able to make sense out of the moral norms that ought to guide and direct our chosen behaviors.

Consequently, contemporary philosophical ethics by and large denies our ability to grasp, much less make any rational sense out of moral principles, axioms, and evaluative judgments on human behavior. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has conclusively demonstrated that the roots of this crisis reach back to the Enlightenment. [fn1] Enlightenment thinkers failed to offer any such rational explanation for the genesis of moral norms in our moral experience.

Natural law theory, on the other hand, can explain such norms as the fruit of reasoned reflection on the goods that fulfill human beings as persons and the demands placed on us by reason itself as we pursue those goods—demands which, in their integral influence, direct us to pursue those goods in a manner harmonious with an objective and universal conception of the genuine good of the human person, or, “the genuine good of the human race, [allowing] men as individuals and as members of society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.” [fn2]

Enlightenment thinkers failed to offer such a meaningful account of the genesis and existence of moral precepts precisely because the overarching project during the Enlightenment—though certainly an ‘age of reason’—was paradoxically to narrow and curtail what had been the classical understanding of the proper domain of reason. In broad brushstrokes, according to these thinkers, reason’s proper scope was that of utility, instrumentality, empirical scrutiny—and the execution of personal preferences as dictated by the passions. Hence, ‘the nature of God’, ‘the essences of things', ‘human nature', ‘genuine human good’ and other such notions were understood to lie beyond the boundaries of the proper purview of human reason. [fn3]

The convictions of contemporary mainstream and secular moral philosophy are today, by and large, a follow-through from Enlightenment thought. In the early 20th century, the eventual result was Emotivism which argues that there really is no rational basis for moral normativity. It equates moral judgments with the expression of one’s inner feelings.

The next time you are asked how you “feel” about a particular moral issue, you will know where the question is coming from.

The Emotivist insistence on intuition or “moral sense” as the ultimate source of our value judgments and moral norms, along with the perceived helplessness to make sense out of competing moral claims and systems, has gone a long way to effectively sideline questions about ‘the good’ and ‘the right’ from the realm of reasoned discourse in the arenas of policymaking, jurisprudence and academia at large.

This intellectual caving in to moral agnosticism and skepticism has spawned sundry moral theories—particularly in the tradition of egalitarian liberalism—that attempt (and fail) to provide a putatively neutral framework within which diverse peoples might peacefully and securely pursue their varying, and often contradictory, conceptions of ‘the good’ and the ‘good life’; all of which has only deepened the quagmire of contemporary moral relativism. Such is the predominant view, the secular orthodoxy of our time, within which Benedict and the rest of us must make our case for natural law.

Add to this, of course, that it’s not only the proponents of secular orthodoxy who upbraid us on this question. Lots of people have problems with the idea of natural law. There are those fideistic critics of natural law theory, for example. Why do we need natural law, they ask, when we have divinely revealed law? Then there are what we might call the common sense critics of natural law. If the precepts of natural law are supposedly so “evident” to human reason, “written on our hearts” as even St. Paul affirms (Rm. 2: 14-15), why, they ask, do human beings so easily transgress that law? If human beings are wired for morality by some inborn rational capacity to interiorly understand right human action, why are we so adept at immorality?

My immediate response is that the doctrine of original sin goes a long way in responding to such questions, but we’re not doing theology here. Suffice it for now to insist—with Benedict—that the crisis of belief in the natural law is, at root, a crisis of belief and understanding of the potentialities and possibilities of human reason, a crisis that has been dogging western thought and culture for the better part of five centuries. But that notwithstanding, I would also point out that five hundred years of horribly skewed visions of the human person and the ideologies they drive have not altogether managed to blot out a genuine understanding of human reason. That’s why we can also be confident that an authentic understanding of natural law will also stand the test of time.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright © 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person

[fn1] This is the central topic of his After Virtue.

[fn2] Vatican Council II, Apostolic Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 35.

[fn3] As MacIntyre explains: “...for [Kant], as much as for Hume, [reason] discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. ...[They] reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail (After Virtue, 54).

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