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.
The value of positive law, therefore, is measured directly to its success in implementing the natural law to practical purposes. As all positive laws are metaphors in the sense that they are modeled on the law of nature, they are inherently imperfect. Yet despite their limitations, they are the products by which human society is ordered; hence it is in the interest of the philosopher as well as the statesman that the laws under which a state is founded are ordered well, in that they conform both to the particular surroundings and historical facts which make up a people’s collective experience as well as to the natural law, on which all positive laws are modeled.
Laws, therefore, are useful in their proclivity to mold people into becoming as good as possible, at least under their formation from the laws alone, under the archetype of the natural law as the beacon to be followed. Though most people obey the law simply out of fear of punishment, the hope is that they, through the strength of habit, will learn to obey the laws because they sense that it is just to do so; and hence from here learn to obey the laws insofar as they conform to the natural law. Thus it is from the combined fear of punishment and the practice of habit that most citizens obey the law, and it is these two pillars which provide the strength on which the compulsive power of the positive law rests.
These pillars, which provide the positive law its strength in coercing obedience, are also the reasons that make its subversion so destructive to a society gone wrong. In a society well ordered to the natural law, such a danger seems worlds away. The danger lies in states where the natural law has disappeared entirely from the legal tradition or is inverted into some monstrous substitute — such as the idea that one race stands superior to all others and thus has a natural claim to dominate, subjugate, and even exterminate those it views as its enemies. The history of Hitler’s Third Reich reveals some of the deepest problems related to the expression of positive law as the means to a well ordered society. The Nazis used the coercive power of the state to silence any and all who opposed their political programe, while at the same time they employed the routine obeisance of law-abiding citizens to run a bureaucracy and military machine that would otherwise have been inoperable. At its worst, this blind conformity led to one of the most tragic chapters in human history — the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, along with millions of others.
The question I would pose here is this: is mere conformity to the law a sufficient condition to one’s fulfillment of their civic duties. My answer is no. Insofar as one obeys the law merely to avoid punishment, one cannot be considered to have really obeyed it at all. The same would apply for cases in which habit is the sole reason for one’s obeying a particular law. Obedience to the law is only true obedience insofar as the citizen obeys the law insofar as it conforms to the natural law. Those who obey a law merely for superficial reasons can be described as obeying it more from compulsion than from any actual inclination to obey it. The good citizen will also ignore those laws which do not conform to the natural law, seeing them as a perversion of the attempt to frame the natural law in the form of individual laws. This does not mean that the good citizen cannot obey the law out of habit or from fear of punishment; it simply means that he will not obey merely because he is afraid of being punished or merely because he is used to following such a law; he obeys also and primarily because he obeys the natural law in which the particular law partakes.
Pingback: Outside the Fold: Natural Law, Civil Law, and Illegal Immigration « Written on Our Hearts