Homosexuality and Natural Law: Robert George, Andrew Sullivan, me

(This has been quite a week for natural law thought, what with Princeton philosopher Robert George featured in a New York Times Magazine spread and all. That excellent spread raised a lot of commentary, including a response by homosexual Catholic and erstwhile conservative Andrew Sullivan, excoriating George at his blog for The Atlantic. That commentary was sent to me by a leftist friend with the simple question, “thoughts?” in the subject header. It seemed only natural [pun intended] to put those first-reaction “thoughts” for my friend out there for the world to see.)

Is Torture Morally Permissible?: Part II

As I promised in Part I of this continuation, in the present post I will try to demonstrate that torture can be morally permissible in light of certain circumstances. Following my attempt at framing a viable definition of torture, I will explore a number of scenarios relevant to the discussion on torture and human dignity in order to discern in which of those would torture be morally acceptable.

Before I set out on this undertaking, I would like to bring consideration to the way in which Western society approaches the term ‘torture.’ Torture’ is understood to be akin to ‘murder’ in the sense that it excludes any possibilities of moral justification. If I admit to murdering someone, then there can be no defense for my actions (as understood on the level of Judaeo-Christian morals). In a similar vein, mutatis mutandis, it is assumed that if I torture someone, then there can be no defense for my actions.

Is Torture Morally Permissible?: Part I

Is it ever permissible to torture a human being? If this is so, under what conditions is this permissible. In the next two posts, I will try to defend the view that torture is indeed permissible in view of certain prerequisites, the most important being the consideration of the safety of others involved — in other words, will harm or death result to other people if the person in question, a terrorist or some other guilty party presumably, is not tortured? In the first I will try to ascertain a consistent and rigorous enough account of torture to, hopefully, meet most people’s expectation of the actions that comprise torture. In the second I will apply this definition to a series of cases involving torture and argue that under these circumstances, torture is morally permissible and socially responsible.

Aristotle and the Enlightenment

It is commonly known that, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, the Aristotelian ethics of the Middle Ages was supplanted by the new understanding of human nature provided by Enlightenment thought. The subsequent project of moral philosophers was to provide a system of ethics to replace the older Aristotelian model. This new system differed from the old one in a number of important respects, most significantly in its objective of creating universal maxims, freed from any particular cultural understanding or background. Its real result would be to rob morality of any justified basis whatsoever in reason, and thus to create a void in ethics that could not be replaced by anything but the most dessicated resemblance to the older system, e.g., emotivism, relativism, etc.

The emergence of the new moral understanding is grounded in the modern rejection of Medieval Scholasticism. According to Calvin and the Catholic-Jansenists, for instance, the fall of man completely destroyed human nature’s capacity to work properly in even its most elementary of functions. Included in this assortment of corrupted nature was human reason itself. Now, in order to see the handicaps of the newer system, it is important to understand some basics of the Aristotelian tradition that was being cast aside.

Is Caning Less Cruel and Unusual than Community Service?

Political cartoon from Kenya, where the answer is evidently yes.

In what was arguably the least politically correct conversation I’ve had this year, a friend and I discussed crime and punishment last night. He suggested that, in keeping with the idea of avoiding cruel and unusual punishment, we should institute public caning as punishment for petty crimes like graffiti and shoplifting.

Needless to say, I was a tad bit confused.

He reasoned that a $10,000 fine and 150 hours of community service is actually more cruel and unusual for your average young hoodlum than corporal punishment coupled with public humiliation would be. Cruel, because a $20,000 debt is enough to seriously harm someone already making somewhat stupid decisions. Unusual, because mandatory community service does not actually create the fear of the law that prevents future criminal behavior.

Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that the state ought to cause pain for wrong actions, in order to compensate for whatever disordered pleasure perpetrators get out of them. Certainly, corporal punishment has been legally prescribed throughout most of human history. At the most basic, natural level, people want to avoid physical pain and harm to their bodies even more than monetary burdens or the loss of time.

Debate: is public caning egalitarian, natural, and effective as a punishment for petty crime? Or is it needlessly violent and cruel?

The Naturalistic Fallacy: Revisited — Part Two

“I went up to Cambridge at Michelmas 1902, and Moore’s Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year … it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth.” Thus did John Maynard Keynes write about Moore’s work, and so too did Lytton Strachey and Desmond McCarthy, who would go on to make up what was later called the Bloomsbury Group. They comprised the intellectual elite of Cambridge. Well-educated, bright, ambitious, they sought to liberate themselves from nothing less than the entire moral heritage of the Western world. Everything which had come before them they now sought to rid themselves of, whether it be the teachings of St. Paul or the recent utilitarianism of Sidgwick.

We have already discussed the first of Moore’s claims, that the term ‘good’ denotes nothing more than a non-natural property that cannot be defined. The refutation of the argument I offered then I still consider valid, and it is then with the other portion of Moore’s work that I will concern myself. It is the last chapter of Principia that I would like to examine. Here, Moore, argues, “personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine.” The greatest truth of moral philosophy includes nothing more than this: the thing that the non-natural term good denotes is simply approval or disapproval, like or dislike, aesthetic attraction or repulsion.

A War of All Against All: Hobbes’ Interpretation of Natural Law Share

Modern notions of the natural law differ from the classical one in two very important respects. The first is the introduction of the concept of the state of nature, which would become practically universal in the modern setting. The second is the emphasis on individual rights in the abstract, as opposed to rights among members of a community. The natural law of the modern era undergoes a fundamental shift in the thinking of Thomas Hobbes, whose formulation of the origins of the state, along with the philosophical anthropology underlying it, was to set the stage for the discussion of natural law for the next few centuries.

Gandhi’s Swaraj: Rule the Self, Free the World

Today marks the 140^th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most potent theologians, reformers, and political philosophers in the modern world. Much has been said of his dedication to non-violence in the struggle for Indian independence, and his writings on the power of moral righteousness against coercion are well worth looking at. Few people know that Gandhi also applied this belief in discipline as the ethical superior to violence to politics, too.

Outside the Fold: Natural Law, Civil Law, and Illegal Immigration

As Zach pointed out in his last piece here, the natural law authorizes positive, civil law written by humans. One of the main functions, as Zach explored, is to encourage people to do good and to avoid evil. Two other important functions of the law are to protect the weak, and to establish the rules by which people in society can predictably act.

Hammurabi’s Code, written four millennia ago, stated that it existed so “so that the strong should not harm the weak.” Virtually every other code of laws since has echoed such an emphasis on securing the rights of the downtrodden. Biblical law permitted the poor to glean leftover bits of grain from the harvest so that they could survive. Greek and Roman Republican law enshrined the notion of equality under the law, such that even rulers had to submit to the law. The constitution that Muhammad wrote for the City of Medina granted Jews, Christians, and pagans the right to bring Muslims before the authorities to redress wrongs.

The other idea, that the law exists to clarify what people can do so that they know what life will bring within the control of the authorities, seems self-evident. The very notion of a state is that it will be the ultimate arbiter between people with conflicting claims, and that it will hold up a consistent law that people cannot be punished outside of.

Law, Positive and Natural

Though the natural law, as we have expounded it, is the sole reference to which all laws pertain, it would be false to conjecture that the natural law renders the positive law obsolete. It is by man’s reason that he can grasp the manifold of reality and lay claim to the truths of nature as such, but it would be unforgivably naive to believe that man’s knowledge of the natural law in itself is sufficient to lead him to good conduct. For the truth is that, even if all men could grasp and understand the natural law through the full exercise of reason, not all would accept its dictates as the measure by which to live.  As most are incapable or unwilling to heed the dictates of the natural law, it is to positive law which one must turn in order to guide society to stability and order.