With Good Reason Got Natural Law?

May 13, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI gave an address last year to the International Congress on Natural Moral Law which was convened at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University. 

The idea of a group of very intelligent people getting together to talk about natural law gets some of us excited-even better when Pope Benedict weighs in on the topic. Though his statement was brief, Benedict still offered plenty of substance. In fact, he wasted no time in getting to the crux of why 'natural law' gets a lot of bad press in intellectual circles. Noting that we live in a moment in history in which our ability to "decipher the rules and structures of matter" is reaching a zenith, and that such knowledge holds out great possibilities for humanity as well as great threats, he went on to note the following:

There is another less visible danger, but no less disturbing:  the method that permits us to know ever more deeply the rational structures of matter makes us ever less capable of perceiving the source of this rationality: creative Reason. The capacity to see the laws of material being makes us incapable of seeing the ethical message contained in being, a message that tradition calls lex naturalis, natural moral law.

In other words, the better we have gotten at using science to penetrate and explicate the most intricate workings of nature, the more near-sighted we have become and the less capable of recognizing the Source of the very intelligence we employ in understanding nature. The greater our intellectual dominance of nature, the harder it has become to recognize the Source and Foundation of nature. And this, the Holy Father notes, is coupled furthermore by an estrangement from the moral law which also finds its grounding in nature, to be precise, in our own human nature.

If the whole notion of natural law has been systematically pooh-poohed in academia for well over a century, it is in large part due to a misunderstanding of what someone like Pope Benedict means by "human nature" in this context. He does not mean "human nature" in the sense of human biology; much less does he mean-as is too often simplistically supposed-that we derive moral norms from biological facts. Things like metabolic rate, fluctuations in hormonal levels or brain size clearly do not ground moral norms.

Rather, the Holy Father-in harmony with a two-millennia strong tradition of thought that preceded him-understands "human nature" to mean a lot more than the mere set of facts about human biology or physiology. The human nature which forms the basis for the natural moral law is our human well-being writ large; it is our peculiarly human way of being, including our built-in pursuit of all those goods that perfect us and can culminate in our total flourishing when pursued in a manner harmonious with the inner guidance of reason-which this same tradition maintains is man's participation in that very "creative Reason," the ultimate source of nature and natural law.

"The knowledge of this law inscribed on the heart of man," continues Benedict, "increases with the progress of the moral conscience." Hence, if anyone is to get beyond the myopia caused by hyper-focusing on scientific fact and technological know-how, one must turn to the heart, and to the voice of moral conscience.

"The first duty for all, and particularly for those with public responsibility, must therefore be to promote the maturation of the moral conscience. This is the fundamental progress without which all other progress proves non-authentic."

Now, there we have a noble proposition: the maturation of moral conscience as a key objective of public policy-a more acute moral reflection, a more deliberate pursuit of moral discernment from within the very core of human consciousness. Is such a proposition idealistic in the extreme? Perhaps. But it also has the merit of being utterly reasonable.