“Contrary to what many influential voices in our culture, politics, and even our institutions of higher education would have you believe, the truth about even the most controversial matters can be objectively known, and cannot be altered by one’s subjective feelings or ‘lived experiences.’”
So says Princeton professor Robert P. George, one of today’s most distinguished conservative thinkers, and he backs up his claim in his new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, a model in the application of natural law.
That term does not refer to scientific laws. Nor does this use of “nature” refer to mountains, forests, and wildlife. As an approach to moral reasoning, it does not mean emulating behavior we see in nature. (I’ve read arguments claiming that homosexuality is in accord with the natural law based on descriptions of what dogs and chimps sometimes do.)
Rather, in this context, “nature” refers to something’s essential properties, as in “human nature” or “by its very nature.” Understanding “the nature of the job” helps us know how to do that job well. Understanding “human nature” or “the nature of society” helps us know how we should live and how society should function. Such knowledge constitutes natural law.
This way of thinking derives from Aristotle as mediated by Thomas Aquinas, and it is foundational to Western thought. Natural law is the basis of Catholic moral theology, though Protestants too—such as the Anglican Richard Hooker, the Lutheran Samuel von Pufendorf, and the Reformed Hugo Grotius—were also important natural law theorists.
And yet, natural law thinking does not rest on religion. Though George is a Catholic, his arguments are based on reason, not revelation. Natural law works with concepts such as ends and means (that is, purpose and how we achieve that purpose) and intrinsic and instrumental goods (that is, things that are good in themselves and things that are good because they lead to other good things).
When I would teach Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, we made a game of it. Name something that would be good to have. “Money!” Is money good in itself or because it can lead to other good things? “Lead to other good things!” Like what? “A new car!” Is a car good in itself or because it can lead to other good things? “Other good things!” Like what? “Going on vacation!” Is a vacation good in itself or because it can lead to other good things? “Other good things!” Like what? “Spending time with my family.” Is family good in itself or because it leads to other good things? [Pause.] “Good in itself!”
Making money an intrinsic good, as in pursuing money at the expense of your family, creates moral problems. So does instrumentalizing an intrinsic good, such as using one’s family members to extract their money. In the natural law tradition, human life is considered an intrinsic good. While we may sometimes “use” people instrumentally—as in doctors to heal our illnesses or carpenters to build our houses—we must respect their lives and their intrinsic value.
George quotes Kant: “Man, however, is not a thing and hence is not something to be used merely as a means. He must in all his actions always be regarded as an end in himself.” Such regard has consequences for how we treat others. “Therefore,” Kant continues, “I cannot dispose of man in my own person by mutilating, damaging, or killing him.”
Such a high view of human beings and their innate value is at the heart of all of George’s arguments as he works through today’s moral, political, and legal controversies.
He begins by attempting to prove that “full moral worth is possessed by human beings in all developmental stages, including the embryonic, fetal, and infant stages, and in all conditions, including severely cognitively impaired conditions.”
A human being, he says, is a “rational animal”; that is, a physical living being with the capacity for conceptual thought, deliberation, and agency. But even if those capacities have not been fully developed or are impaired, the human natureremains.
Using another Aristotelian distinction, the difference between substance (the thing itself) and accidents (the variable characteristics of a thing), George shows that rights inhere in a “substantial entity” vs. “accidental attributes such as race, sex, ethnicity, age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency”:
One’s child, one’s neighbor, or even a stranger, is not valuable only because of the valuable attributes he or she possesses. If persons were valuable as mere vehicles for something else—some other quality that is regarded as what is really of value—then it would follow that the basic moral rule would be simply to maximize those valuable attributes.
If human beings are only valuable because of their intelligence, then it would be moral to kill human beings who were less intelligent than others. He concludes:
The basis of dignity or moral worth is being a certain sort of substance, rather than possessing certain attributes or accidental characteristics. … A human embryo is a human being. These words—“embryo,” “infant,” “adolescent,” and so forth—do not name different kinds of entities, they name the same kind of entity (a living member of the human species, a human being, like you or me) at different stages of development.
If we only value human beings according to their development, their characteristics, or what they can do, human equality and human rights become impossible.
Furthermore, the morality of abortion does not depend on speculations about when life begins. Medieval medicine considered the quickening of the child—when the mother can feel the baby’s movement—is the moment of “ensoulment,” when the fetus acquired an immortal soul (an argument I have heard from modern pro-abortion theologians). But the notion that the body is only a vessel for the soul was a tenet of the Gnostic heresy repudiated by orthodox theology. The notion that a fetus becomes a human only when it attains consciousness, or feels pain, or has brain waves, or can think for itself is simply more dualism. George, who calls such thinking “liberal Gnosticism” and “body-self dualism,” refutes such views. We are a union of body and soul.
Human dignity comes from what we are, he says, not the qualities that we have or do not have.
Since dualism is mistaken—since we are not consciousnesses inhabiting bodies but are physical organisms possessing from the beginning a human (that is, rational) nature—it follows that we came to be when these physical organisms came to be. And the science of embryology does determine when that occurs—namely, conception.
It isn’t imposing religion to say that human embryos are human beings. It is a biologically, scientifically detectable fact.
George concludes:
The pro-life view depends on an undisputed scientific fact plus a moral principle that explains and vindicates the worth of infants and the cognitively impaired, and affirms the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family. The defense of elective abortion depends on a moral view that must deny this principle, a biological view that contradicts science, or both.
Following these principles, George dismantles pro-euthanasia rhetoric. The right to die?
No one’s right to die can ever be jeopardized because everyone’s death is a certainty that no law, no political institution, and no culture can prevent. The “right” to die, in that sense, has no greater need of legal and ethical defense than the right to be subject to gravity. What is at issue is not a right to die but, rather, a right to kill.
Death with dignity? George takes the different senses of what “dignity” can mean, then shows that killing the person is inconsistent with all of them. There is no “death with dignity” in the sense of dignity meaning flourishing. Respecting a choice to die is to treat someone with dignity? But we don’t accept all choices people make. Accepting the killing of a certain class of people diminishes the law’s ability to protect everyone. It destroys “equal dignity.”
Actually, some arguments for killing the sick are not really euthanasia at all. “Euthanasia is the killing of someone for the benefit of that person. There is also the killing of someone for the benefit of someone else—the caregiver, someone who wants to save money, someone who needs their organs, etc. That is not euthanasia.” That is ordinary murder.
But can we kill someone for their benefit? It all comes down to the question, “Is [death] something good or evil for a human being?” Killing someone can only harm them, not benefit them. It isn’t making their life better, but ending their life. This is because “life is intrinsically good for a human being.”
George applies this kind of rigorous, objective analysis to issue after issue. His main field is law, so he takes on legal questions, including the brief he filed in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade and his critique of the Obergefelldecision legalizing same-sex marriage.
When it comes to political and economic issues, natural law applies another kind of “good”: the common good. “The common good of political society is fundamentally an instrumental good,” he says, “ and … this entails moral limits on justified governmental power.”
Flourishing consists in doing things, not just in getting things, or having desirable or pleasant experiences, or having things done for you. The good, as Aristotle taught, consists in activity. … Properly understood, then, the common good requires, as a matter of justice, limited government—government that respects the needs and rights of people to pursue objectives and realize goods for themselves.
Here George invokes the principle of subsidiarity, the importance of institutions other than the government—especially the family, but also the church, local governments, and other voluntary associations—in ordering society. An unlimited government usurps their role.
He also makes a natural law case for free market economics. But he rejects the notion put forward by some free marketers that economics must set aside morality:
Simply put, economics cannot be separated from morality because nothing can be separated from morality. Everything we do, as human individuals and as societies, should be understood at least in large part in terms of the idea of the intelligible value—the human good—that it seeks to advance.
Democratic capitalism, like all other human systems, must serve the common good and the good of the workers, consumers, and others who take part in it. Properly, though, the market does that, promoting social mobility, mobilizing resources not under the control of the state, creating opportunities for people, advancing the general prosperity, and diffusing power throughout society.
Included in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth are chapters on religion, education, and culture. Here George takes up the critique of liberal democracy being made by some Catholics, drawing on 19th-century papal encyclicals condemning the separation of church and state, religious liberty, and democracy. But George says that these teachings were in the context of the French Revolution and that modern popes affirm those liberal principles. He then makes a natural law case for liberal democracy. Religious freedom, for example, is grounded in the fact that religion is an intrinsic good. That should rule out coercion, which substitutes for sincere conviction the fear of penalties or other harms. George also criticizes “illiberal universities,” whose groupthink and dogmatism violates the nature of higher education.
Though natural law is generally in accord with Christian morality, Christianity brings something of its own. George seems to recognize that the imago dei, that human beings are created in God’s image, provides a better definition of what makes someone human than simply invoking rationality. Aristotle’s pagan version could still justify slavery, for example, but George’s Christian version drives Aristotle’s own logic to recognize that human “nature” implies universality, that all human beings are entitled to the same universal goods. Thus, Christianity made it possible for natural law to fulfill its own nature.
