Natural Moral Law

the four-fold division of law

ETERNAL LAW: comes from God's nature as the Creator. As God is the Creator of everything that is, the universe and nature inevitably reflect the principles of the natural and moral order which existed before creation, as a 'blueprint' in the mind of God.


humans must, therefore, live a life based on that order, which is objective and absolute and applies to all, because God's blueprint for humans means that we all share a 'common human nature'. What is right for one person must be right for everyone else, no exception

DIVINE LAW: these principles of natural and moral order are revealed to humans through the divine law, which can be found: 1) in special revelation, e.g. the Bible and 2) through the teachings of the Church

NATURAL MORAL LAW: The natural moral order is discovered through human reason and not through revelation. Although the divine law (e.g. the Ten Commandments) forbids murder, theft and adultery, that is only by way of a reminder from God, since we can know simply through reason that these things are wrong.
So Aquinas sees NML as that part of God's eternal law that human beings can discover simply through the application of reason

HUMAN LAW: through understanding NML, we can then formulate human laws, e.g. those which appear in our legal systems. Human laws should not contradict NML

the main guiding principle is that 'good is to be done and pursued and evil is to be avoided'

primary precepts (principles)

1) what human reason has in common with all other substances

  • the drive to preserve life

2) what humans have in common with other animals

  • the desire to reproduce
  • the desire to educate and care for their offspring

3) what humans have uniquely as rational beings

  • to know the truth about God (so to know and worship God)
  • to live in an ordered society

manualists converted the three main primary precepts into 5

NML is deontological, but primary precepts are teleological

1) our telos on Earth is happiness: what Aquinas calls 'human flourishing'

2) the telos of humanity as a whole has an ultimate focus. Complete happiness cannot be found in something created, but only in the 'beatific vision' of God that is promised in the next life.

3) the telos for humans after death has an individual as well as a collective focus
the telos for humanity as a whole is the vision of God-union with God; but Aquinas also thought that each person has an individual telos based on their natural abilities (or lack thereof)

secondary precepts derive from primary precepts

Aristotle's doctrine of the Four Cases explains why things are the way they are. Two of the causes are- the efficient cause and the final cause. Efficient causes tell us about facts/descriptions, final causes are about intentions
whatever promotes the final cause is right and whatever goes against it is wrong

masturbation, bestiality, using coitus interruptus to avoid conception, contraception, abortion, homosexual sex, adultery, consensual sex outside marriage, polygamy

secondary precepts are sometimes seen as culturally relative

Aquinas does allow some flexibility in the secondary precepts
The 'law' in NML for the Catholic Church has meant 'law'/'rule' where for Aquinas it meant 'justice'/'principle', and justice/principle are more flexible than law.
for Aquinas, the closer we get to the actual circumstances of a situation, the more variation there will be in what is judged to be morally right in the situation.

how do we avoid making mistakes?

we should avoid being confused about the difference between real and apparent goods

we should be aware of the difference between interior and exterior acts

the process of following the real good can be aided by following the virtues

we can avoid making mistakes in difficult moral situations using PRINCIPLE OF DOUBLE EFFECT

Aquinas argued that killing in self-defence is justified so long as the killing was not intended, but was the unavoidable result of the amount of force necessary to save your own life.

1) the nature of the act condition
the act must be morally good or neutral. Lying or intentionally killing an innocent person are never morally permissible

2) the means-end condition:
bad effect must not be the means by which the good effect is achieved

3) the right-intention condition:
the intention must only be to achieve the good effect. The bad effect must only be an unintended side effect. The bad effect may be foreseen but it may not be intended

4) the proportionality condition:
the good effect must at least be equivalent in importance to the bad effect

Proportionalism

1) in order to decide whether an act is moral or immoral, the intention of the moral agent has to be considered


2) if you ignore the intention of the moral agent, then you can only determine what is 'pre-moral', or 'physical' goodness or badness of the act, and not its morality. Only the good interior act is really good

3) so acts become morally good or bad only when you consider both the proportion of value to disvalue in the act and the intention of the agent

4) so, there cannot be any acts that are intrinsically evil, including the physical act of abortion

STRENGTHS of Proportionalism

1) as a principle, proportionalism has been aroud for a long time, so is fairly robust

2) the proportionalist approach seems to be based on common sense, e.g. it seems to be common sense to lie in order to save a life and to steal to avoid dying of hunger

3) the proportionalist principle is a wide one, and it is used outside NML. Allowing a proportional response to a threat is built into European Law

WEAKNESSES of Proportionalism

1) Proportionalism has been condemned by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paull 11 condemns it on the grounds that it denies that any action can in and of itself be intrinsically evil.

2) where proportionalists calculate the proportion of value and disvalue in an act, this looks like a consequentialist way of deciding on moral issues.
a big problem with consequentialism is that of how we can make accurate predictions about value and disvalue. One needs to predict the future, so guesswork is involved.


if proportionalism descends to moral guesswork: to a calculation of goods and evils, then the authority of NML is lost. Catholics might just as well become religious utilitarians

STRENGTHS of NML

1) in 'Socratic Ideas', John Waters argues that NML offers a foundational, universal and absolute approach to ethics. This is very important in 21st century 'post-modern' world which tends to reject all traditional institutions and authority.
NML enables people to establish common rules by which people can live in an ordered society. NML sets firm boundaries for moral behaviour

2) morality is about what is intrinsically good or bad, rather than being a matter of people's preferences

3) Aquinas' system is realistic in that it acknowledges that people can make mistakes, e.g. by being confused about the difference between real and apparent goods

4) NML has been a basis for developing our ideas about natural rights, e.g. American Declaration of Independence from Britain

5) Aquinas' NML is in line with Aristotelian virtue ethics, in that it focuses on the development of good moral characters through practicing the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, along with the theological virtues of faith, hope and love

6) NML is very adaptable. E.g. John Finnis introduced a version of NML that does not presuppose God's existence.

WEAKNESSES of NML

1) its teleological view that we all share a common human nature designed by God. This leads to some questionable claims about human sexual nature, particularly that God's plan requires human sexuality to be geared specifically to procreation

2) although some forms of NML can be atheistic, that of Aquinas cannot. Aquinas assumed that it was natural for all humans to worship God, but that is not a natural assumption for an atheist

3) even if there is a God, it is not obvious that NML is the best way of looking at morality and the world. For Fletcher, moral systems like NML amount to legalistic nonsense and should be replaced by an ethic of Christian love

4) it seems clear that NML can lead to immoral outcomes. E.g. the Catholic Church's prohibition of artificial methods of contraception has contributed to the spread of AIDS

5) the fact that some Catholics are following a proportionalist approach to NML shows that even some Catholics are dissatisfied with applying exceptionless, absolute rules to moral life.

Aristotle's Doctrine of the Four Causes help us understand the secondary precepts, especially the efficient cause and the final cause