Second, the sheer diversity of moral principle and practice in the human experience mitigates heavily against the universalism of Natural Law. Thomas is aware of this difficulty, but his rejoinder, that the reason may be darkened by passion or racial proclivity, is inadequate in that it presupposes the successful attainment, sans grace, of the Natural Law in at least some human beings. The possibility that no human being has attained such knowledge is not considered.
The ascription of a telos to aspects of the natural order is almost arbitrary in the practice of Natural Law, as the controversies over the various Papal Encyclicals show. Various structures in the created order or society, such as procreation or the family, are assumed by their presence to be God-given and thus given a higher moral rating. Thus the objectivity and rationality that Natural Law claims for itself is compromised by the mutability of its detailed precepts. It becomes difficult to defend Natural Law as an objective and reasonable system when the precepts it allows seem so relative and subjective.
1 comment:
Michael wrote:
“Thomas is aware of this difficulty, but his rejoinder, that the reason may be darkened by passion or racial proclivity, is inadequate in that it presupposes the successful attainment, sans grace, of the Natural Law in at least some human beings. The possibility that no human being has attained such knowledge is not considered.”
The idea of a “sans grace” position in Thomas really boils down to in-house theological squabbling over dueling assertions about grace. Thomas has grace accounted for in the Providence of God in the ratios/reasonableness of creation and in that “God imprints” these ratios in us (II, q.93). You may not like this definition of grace because of your favorite theological bias about grace. But, it’s not a fair description of Thomas to say that Thomas doesn’t account for grace by having grace imprinted in such a way as to be frustrated by human passions or racial proclivity.
The fair (not excessively parsimonious) question would be just what empirical evidence would count as evidence that “some human beings” have attained expressions in real life of natural law sensibilities? If empirical evidence and common sense observations count for purposes of showing diversity and variety among legal systems, cultural mores, and theological squabbles, then just what empirical evidence would correspondingly count toward showing that “some human beings” have attained expressions in real life that are consistent with a natural law sensibility? The fairer (not excessively parsimonious) question would be what Thomas might make of newly emerging sciences of ethology, psycho-biology, and comparative laws which show such things as both the universally criminalized and the universally low rates of infanticide? Even sociological and political science use factor analysis and a host of other metrics to show empirical evidence about the relative peacefulness (rather than violence) of the most human transactions and interactions.
One huge problem with theological evidentiary standards — such as “the possibility that no human being has attained [x. y, z] ” as a standard – is that theology does not bother much with setting uniform evidentiary standards including margins of error for sampling “human beings” by which hypothesis rejection would be judged perverse.
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