We live in
a time when more good books and essays have been written on natural law than
any time in history. I think of Maritain, Simon, Rommen, Veatch, Finnis,
Hittinger, Kreeft, Fortin, Benestad, Rice, Budziszewski, Arkes, Kries, George,
Sokolowski, d'Entrèves, and a host of others.
Yet in both
the public order and in our private lives, we see natural law receding to
transform itself into its opposite. We are quite close in many, if not most,
areas to establishing “un-natural ‘natural’ law” as the norm of our morality
and civil law.
By the term
“un-natural ‘natural’ law” I mean the notion that, if every one or most people
do this or that, it must be “natural.” Therefore, any notion of a natural law
that would forbid, say, abortion, must be wrong according to “natural law”
since so many practice it.
But the
natural law principles and logic that identify abortion for what it is, the
deliberate killing of a human person, are irrefutable – even if few will
acknowledge them. The only real alternative to valid natural law, as many clearly
see, is to deny any reason or order in things so that we be free to establish
whatever we want by will alone.
The primary
intellectual tool that has facilitated this transformation is, ironically, the
notion of “human rights.” The spiritual father to this transformation is
Hobbes, who gave us the “right” to whatever we judge is necessary for our
individual preservation and well-being. The state became the final power to
define and enforce these natural “rights.”
Much of the
recent natural law literature in Catholic circles is, in fact, devoted to an
attempt to reconcile natural law and natural rights. However
carefully this reconciliation may have been, it has made hardly any dent on the
popular notion that “rights” are what we define them to be in positive law.
Thus they bear the same voluntary mutability as positive law itself.
We now see
divorce, contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, homosexuality, fetal
experimentation, cloning, euthanasia, and various extensions of these practices
to be proposed and established as “rights.”
Moreover,
the civil power of many nations vigorously enforces these “rights.” In some
countries, including our own, written constitutions were established as
positive, fundamental law in an effort to control and limit the vagaries of
what human legislators, judges, and politicians can do. Beyond the
constitution, stood the natural law, which was the rule of reason that grounded
any human law or constitution.
Thus, no
civil or constitutional law simply by itself was just without having first been
implicitly judged according to reason. This is the universality of natural law
that, as it were, hovers over all national cultures and religions as well as
our individual acts.
It is
perhaps no accident that the ferment in natural law issues in recent times
arises over marriage, its meaning and its consequences. However of late, we see
a new area rapidly opening up.
The older
discussions of property that revolved around socialism and communism seem
rather antiquated. We understand that economic growth is caused by innovation,
just laws, profit, the market, bankruptcy, and demand. We have learned that
wealth needs to be created and to grow.
The poor
were not poor because the rich were rich. They were poor mostly because they
did not know how to be rich or because they lived in zero-sum economies that
maintained that redistribution was the only worthy social philosophy.
The
president has recently proposed the notion that everyone produces wealth. Thus,
wealth belongs to everyone not just to those who are said to create it. But the
present distribution is not “fair.” The rich have too much. That is the reason
why the poor are poor.
Therefore,
it is “right” for the government to interfere through tax or other policies to
take from the rich and give to the poor. The premise of this position seems to
be that of a no-growth mentality.
The normal
understanding of economics is that everyone can become richer if an economy
grows. If it does not, distribution will be politicized. Envy will become a
major factor in status. The government becomes the main arbiter of who has a
“right” to what.
This view
is a vague repetition of natural law discussions that were found in the history
of scholastic economics. The earth was created for everyone. Therefore everyone
had a “right” to everything.
With
experience, often over discussions about Plato’s communal property, Aristotle’s
response was more reasonable. Private property was really in most cases a
better way to produce and distribute the goods of all to reach each one
individually.
As I see
it, the president’s proposal is really a revival of Genesis now presented not
by God or reason, but by the state as the primary agent of all human
affairs.
