Course Notes on Natural Moral Law for Edexcel students

From the specification:

Concepts of absolutism and legalism in ethics, early development of natural moral law, biblical and classical foundations of the approach, concepts of purpose, telos, primary and secondary precepts, contemporary applications and adaptations, including proportionalism.

With reference to the ideas of Aquinas and B Hoose

This is a deontological, absolutist theory which asserts that the basic principles of morals are objective, accessible to reason and based on human nature. In its theistic form essentially states that God created all things to work within a natural order to fulfil their purpose (telos).  Humans also have a purpose, being part of the natural order, and so by using their God-given power to reason (and the Bible) can find their purpose and achieve their God given calling.  This theory asserts that there is a natural order in the world, given by a supreme being but one must apply reason to discover it.  It is not just doing what comes naturally.  It is a theory that has most famously been described by Thomas Aquinas, though several other philosophers and theologians have contributed to and developed the theory.

And now for the most important part of this post: Aquinas’s general approach to Philosophy explained with the help of Bananarama.

ARISTOTLE

The origins of Aquinas’s version of Natural Law theory can be found chiefly in Aristotle and his theory of cause, Stoicism, and Roman Law. 

Aristotle believed the final cause of humans (to fulfil their purpose) was to achieve a state of maximal flourishing in their lives (meaning an all-round contentment with life that results from the cultivation and expression of a variety of personal qualities).  This he referred to by the Greek word ‘eudaimonia’. 

Eudaimonia was achieved through the practical use of reason in ordinary life – not just the ability to think and understand – but also to act.

Meanwhile, the Stoics maintained that we should live in agreement with nature. In doing so we would be working in harmony with God’s plan of the universe – which includes morality and is essentially rational.  Inspired by this Stoic view of nature, the Roman philosopher Cicero (106 – 43 BCE) wrote as follows:

‘True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions…And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchanging law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law.’

We see from this that Natural Law is universal and objective – thus it is an absolutist theory.

The quotation from Cicero also demonstrates that the Natural Law tradition also has its roots in Roman law, which developed over a thousand year period, from about 500 BCE to 500 AD, and in particular, the concept of jus natural, natural law, which was defined by the Roman jurist Ulpian as what nature has taught all animals. Ulpian goes on to specify some items of this supposed teaching: sexual union of male and female, and the procreation and education of the young. The natural inclinations identified by Ulpian were adopted by Aquinas and underpin his formulation of the Primary Precepts (see below).

The stage was therefore set for Aquinas to put together from these various influences, a detailed and coherent theory which would fit into a Christian framework.

AQUINAS

You don’t need to learn Aristotle’s theory of the four causes for the Ethics paper but knowing about it will help you to understand how Aquinas ‘Christianised’ the theory. So here it is.

 Aristotle believed that everything has a cause and had four different explanations for things being the way they are:

1. The Material Cause – the material or matter that the thing is made of e.g. the bronze of a statue/the ingredients of a recipe.

2. The Efficient Cause – the agent that brings the thing about – the sculptor of the statue/the chef.

3. The Formal Cause – the model or idea that the statue conforms to – the pattern that the sculptor followed/the recipe followed by the chef.

4. The Final Cause – the reason for the thing – its purpose – the reason the sculptor carved the statue/the satisfaction of the diners when they eat what the chef has cooked.

Aristotle therefore defines an object not just in terms of the stuff that it is made of. In particular, he defines an object in terms of its purpose.

Now for the bit that you do need to know and learn: Aquinas believed that the EFFICIENT cause of humans was God.  He believed the FINAL cause, being made imago dei, was to seek union with God, started on this earth and attainable in the afterlife, when we will enjoy the Beatific Vision and, as he puts it, ‘We shall see God as He is’. In other words, the purpose of human life is no longer to achieve eudaimonia.

Aquinas argues that there are four distinct kinds of law: eternal law, divine law, natural law and human law.

• Eternal Law – these are the principles by which God controls the universe. They can be thought of as a kind of master database of all God’s laws. Only God has access to these laws, and we humans will, at best, only have partial knowledge of the list.
• Divine Law – the commandments of the Bible as revealed to mankind. The purpose of Divine Law is to help eliminate human error when we are trying to work out moral rules through the use of reason. It is there as a safeguard that helps us to confirm the validity of the laws we have arrived at by using our power to reason.

• Natural Law –  this is a subset of Eternal Law and includes general moral rules for conduct.
• Human Law – this represents our attempt to derive more specific legal rules from the general precepts of natural law.

For Aquinas then, all moral laws are ultimately grounded in God’s unchanging Eternal Law. Since we don’t have access to the complete list of eternal laws, morality begins with a search for the general rules of Natural Law. And in order to discover these rules, we must look to human nature as a guide.

Synderesis and Natural Law

According to Aquinas, when God created us, he gave us natural inclinations from which can be derived the primary precepts or general moral principles of Natural Law. He also provided us with a faculty called synderesis..

When you study Divine Command Ethics as a form of Christian religious moral decision-making, you will find that Christian philosophers disagree about where God is getting his moral standards from. Some considered God to be literally the author of these standards. However, Aquinas disagreed. For him, the moral principles of Natural Law exist independently of God.  God simply adopts moral principles because, as an inherently rational being, God has an affinity with such principles. And since God created human beings imago dei (in his own image) as rational creatures, we too have a more limited ability to grasp moral principles. So rationality, the ability to reason, is an essential component of the synderesis faculty.

Aquinas noted that we use reason in two ways, when we speculate abstractly about things, such as whether 2 plus 3 equals 5, and when we use reason practically about an action we wish to perform, as when we might figure out the best way to get to a place we want to visit. For Aquinas, synderesis is an aspect of practical reasoning, which entails reasoning about the performance of moral actions (see your notes on the Conscience for an example of how this works). In terms of practical reasoning, synderesis for Aquinas involves reasoning from general moral principles from which we then deduce more specific things.

Now for the important bit: according to Aquinas, the synderesis faculty also supplies us with a single, general principle of Natural Law, which can be described as the synderesis principle:

“…the first principle for the practical reason…the first command of law [is] ‘that good is to be sought and done, evil is to be avoided.’ All other commands of Natural Law are based on this.”

This is also our purpose when we are here on earth. If we want to eventually ‘see God as He is’, this is what we must do. But how do we discover what is ‘good’ and therefore to be ‘sought and done’? For Aquinas, we can find out by rationally reflecting on our natural inclinations.

Aquinas lists six of these inclinations. First of all an inclination to be rational is what sets us apart from other animals. The other inclinations are : 2) self-preservation, 3) heterosexual reproduction, 4) the nurturing and raising of offspring, 5) knowledge of God and 6) sociability – to live in society. Just as God implanted the the synderesis faculty within us, so God also implanted these six inclinations within us. At this point, God’s task is done and it is up to us to use the synderesis faculty to discover the moral implications of these natural inclinations.

THE PRIMARY PRECEPTS

Aquinas argues that, from the six natural inclinations, we will discover six primary principles of Natural Law: 1) to preserve human life 2) reproduction through heterosexual intercourse 3) to educate children 4) to seek truth and shun ignorance 5) to worship God and live in society 6) to avoid harming others.

NOTE: some textbooks only list five primary precepts, so you might need to mention that you are basing your explanation on James Fieser’s account of Natural Law theory.

In other words, ‘good is to be sought’ by adhering to these general principles. But Aquinas argued that the process of deduction did not stop with the primary precepts. Rather, we should draw out more specific secondary precepts.

As you can see from your notes on the Conscience, practical reasoning for Aquinas involved a syllogistic process.

The way to work out what a secondary precept should be is to first of all identify and then be guided by the relevant primary precept. Then reason should be used to figure out how that precept relates to the situation at hand. For example, from the primary precept of reproduction through heterosexual intercourse, the secondary precept that homosexual sex is unnatural and should be avoided can be derived because there is no poss

As you can see from your notes on the conscience, practical reasoning for Aquinas involved a syllogistic process. So to illustrate how moral decisions are made using Natural Law theory, here is the above example rendered in this form.

1. One should seek good and avoid evil (the synderesis principle).
2. Humans are naturally inclined to reproduce through heterosexual intercourse.
3. So seeking good involves engaging in exclusively heterosexual intercourse for the purpose of reproduction (primary precept).
4. Homosexual sexual activity runs contrary to our natural inclination to reproduce in this way and so is unnatural and immoral (secondary precept).

Note that mistakes of reasoning are sometimes possible when deriving secondary precepts from primary ones, and this is where we can end up pursuing apparent goods rather than real goods. For example, from our natural inclination to be sociable we might – during an intensive and stressful revision period – convince ourselves that blowing off some steam with our friends in a nightclub would be a good idea, convincing ourselves along the way that in doing so we are subscribing to the primary precept of living in society. However if, as a result, we find ourselves the worse for wear the next day and unable to revise properly, we can see, with hindsight, that we have pursued a merely apparent good.

Note that Christians find it easier to follow Natural Law as they also have the Bible to guide them. For example, Aquinas specifically notes that divine law corroborates the last two of the primary precepts (numbers 5 and 6 above) by specifically instructing us to ‘love the Lord your God’ and your ‘neighbour.’ Non-Christians will still have access to Natural Law, but will find it harder to follow as a system of moral decision-making.

Another way for Christians to ensure that they are pursuing real goods is to cultivate the natural virtues (first identified by Plato) – prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice – and the theological virtues – faith, hope and love.  

STRENGTHS OF NATURAL LAW THEORY

• It can give a firm moral foundation for a society because it is absolutist.  It offers clear guidelines and is designed to bring about social harmony, which seems to be a goal worth striving for.
• It can be adapted to different times and places and new moral issues through the working out of secondary precepts.  It therefore does have some flexibility, unlike Kantian ethics or Divine Command Ethics.
• It offers a universal moral code that people can get behind – building a good society, preserving life, educating the young etc. Most people tend to agree that things like this are good regardless of what kind of society they live in.
• The code is based on reason and so is open to non-religious people. We therefore don’t need to actually believe in God for the synderesis faculty to give us knowledge of Natural Law. 
• Natural Law stresses the Sanctity of Life (the idea that human life is sacred and special). This might give it an advantage over Bentham’s utilitarianism as a competing moral theory as innocent people or racial minorities might lose their lives for the pleasure of ‘the greatest number’.
• It stresses the importance of the physical body in morality (rather than concentrating on motives). This can encourage careful reflection on moral issues that involve the body, such as abortion, genetic engineering and euthanasia.
• Natural Law theory would also find support amongst a significant number of committed Muslims and Orthodox Jews. So it is arguably suited to a significant number of people in our multi-ethnic and multi-cultural world.
• Natural Law theory has undoubtedly been influential to an extent because it is based on a supreme principle: ‘to do good and avoid evil’. Moral philosophers since have often come up with alternative fundamental principles e.g. the categorical imperative in the case of Kant, the selfless law of love in the case of Fletcher, and seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number for Bentham. So the legacy of Natural Law can be said to live on in the form of moral theories involving rights, duties, social contracts, and so on.

WEAKNESSES OF NATURAL LAW THEORY

• It would seem that nature does not magically hand us moral principles through our natural inclinations in the way that Aquinas claims. This is revealed by the fact that other Natural Law theorists disagree amongst themselves about which natural inclinations are relevant for morality. For example, Grotius thought that the human tendency to be sociable was all important and the foundation of Natural Law. However, Hobbes disagreed and argued that humans have no inclination to be sociable. Instead, he thought the instinct for self-preservation was what mattered, as this leads people to co-operate with each other in order to increase their chances of survival, which in turn entails entering into a ‘social contract’, according to which we give up some of our personal freedoms in order to be protected from others by our rulers. Meanwhile, Pufendorf argued that we are naturally unsociable, but that our instinct for self-preservation forces us to try to live together peacefully. So sociability is not instinctive, but is the highest principle of Natural Law because it is crucial for our survival. This lack of consensus is itself an argument against attempting to distil moral obligations from natural inclinations. It also suggests that Aquinas’s own list of inclinations is subjective, restrictive and contrived, perhaps in order to suit his own very specific moral agenda.
• Mixing up nature and morality can be confusing.  If there is no God, then why should nature (minus God) be our guide to what is right or wrong? 
• What was thought to be ‘natural’ at the time of Aquinas does not seem to be so in the 21^st Century. For example, a gay person would find attraction to a member of the same sex very ‘natural’, probably as a consequence of a genetic predisposition. For that estimated 1 per cent, homosexuality may well therefore be their natural inclination, which would make heterosexual activity as foreign to them as homosexuality is foreign to heterosexuals.
• Additionally, Aquinas is incorrect in his assumption that heterosexual activity is exclusively for the purposes of reproduction, as this does not account for many sexual activities that are not devoted to reproduction, even for married couples, such as oral sex or post-menopausal sex.  These nonreproductive sexual activities might therefore serve a different purpose, that of enhancing our most intimate relationships. And once we reject Aquinas’s assumption about the exclusively reproductive purpose of sex, we cannot single out homosexuality for violating that purpose.
• One of Aquinas’s natural inclinations is to seek knowledge of God. But rather than being a natural inclination, this seems more likely to be a culturally shaped inclination which not everyone has and which can also vary dramatically, depending on one’s religion and conception of God. However, re-shaped as an inclination to seek the meaning of our existence, it might possibly make a little more sense, though arguably not everyone is interested in pursuing this quest.
• Aquinas considered masturbation to be a worse sin than rape. As masturbation cannot result in procreation, it is more ‘unnatural’ than rape. But this seems self-evidently wrong because rape involves violence.
• Aquinas admitted that secondary precepts, which are usually rationally derived from the primary precepts, can be changed in certain rare cases. For example, he cites biblical examples where God appears to have ordered men to kill, or steal, or commit adultery or polygamy. This seems to open the way to a wide range of conduct which has often been claimed to be morally wrong. For example, Aquinas wrote that although ‘the possession of all things in common and universal freedom are said to be of the natural law’, that private property and slavery were ‘devised by human reason for the benefit of life’. But if slavery can be excused this way, why not contraception, abortion or euthanasia?
• Natural Law assumes that all human beings are similar. But if some people are naturally homosexual or psychopathic, then the theory is contradicted by the modern scientific understanding of human behaviour.
• Aquinas assumes a) that there is such a thing as a common ‘human nature’ and b) that it is fixed and unchanging. But these are assumptions is that need to be argued for rather than taken for granted. For example, the 19^th century German idealist philosopher Hegel believed that the universe is a giant, continually evolving spirit. As this absolute spirit evolves over time, so, too, do human social values here on earth. They started out a bit rough but got better over time. Is it not therefore possible that our core human essence or nature that produces these values evolves and improves over time too?
• Given that there are now over 7 billion people on the planet, it may not be a good idea to follow the Primary Precept of Reproduction because of the problems that would result from overpopulation e.g. not enough food and other resources for everyone.
• Aquinas may be overestimating the power of reason to direct our moral actions. For example, Hume wrote that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions’. He thought that the use of reason was restricted. It could only ever be employed to help us attain our non-rational drives and desires. The fact that Hume thought that reason ought to be used this way further suggests that, by itself, reason is lacking something. A totally rational person might lack emotional sensitivity, for example. Certainly, this seems to be true when it comes to Kantian moral decision-making, where we are seemingly urged to behave like rational but emotionless robots in situations like the one famously debated, where our duty to a would-be murderer is to be honest and therefore possibly to reveal to them the whereabouts of someone we may be close to. At least Aristotelian Virtue Ethics allows emotions to play a role in moral decision-making.
• As David Hume (and others) have famously pointed out, many ethical theories are vulnerable to what he called the Naturalistic Fallacy. In other words, from the fact that we naturally seek to procreate, preserve life etc. it cannot not be said that we ought to do so. If we want to make the jump from facts to moral values, we have to say why this is possible. To be fair to Aquinas, he does try to do this. He argues that what is natural is in accord with the dictates of reason, and is also what God would wish us to do. But those of us who have our doubts about the ability of reason to operate in this way, and who do not believe in God would not find this explanation convincing.

Proportionalism

The challenge of Situation Ethics proved to be so great that some theologians came to believe that there needed to be a compromise between Natural Law and Situation Ethics. Proportionalism, a theory put forward by Bernard Hoose, was one such attempt at a compromise. Proportionalism is so called because of its emphasis on the proportion of good and evil involved with the moral choices we make.

Proportionalism accepts, as Natural Law theory does, that certain acts are wrong or evil in themselves. However, it says that such acts might, in exceptional circumstances, be the right thing to do, if there is a proportionately more valid reason for doing so rather than sticking to a primary precept.

For example, one of Aquinas’s primary precepts is to preserve life, and within Natural Law theory it is therefore generally thought that it is morally wrong to have an abortion. However, when a woman has an ectopic pregnancy there is no hope that the child will be born. The developing embryo will cause the fallopian tube to rupture, probably killing the woman and at least making her infertile. So performing an abortion to save the mother and allow her to have children in the normal way in the future may be considered to be proportionally right in a situation like this.

Proportionalism arguably therefore attempts to overcome a problem that deontological theories are often criticised for, namely, that they do not allow for exceptions to be made to moral laws in situations where making an exception does seem intuitively to be the right thing to do. However, Proprtionalism itself been criticised for ending up looking far too much like Situation Ethics itself, the theory it is meant to be an improvement on, because of the greater flexibility in moral decision-making that it permits.