I often hear Christians, especially those who do not want to derive their morality exclusively from the Bible, appeal to some broad moral standard they refer to as "natural law", proponents of this idea arguing that this law reveals at least foundational moral facts and that it is accessible to all people through reason or experience.
As personally painful as it is to do so, I am going to refute the conception that natural law represents some clear and knowable standard.
Now what do people mean when they use the phrase "natural law"? Do they speak of moral principles evident in nature? If so, they speak of an unverifiable and obscure standard. No one can discern moral principles from observing nature. To claim one can decipher moral duties from the natural world is an astonishingly stupid claim which commits the naturalistic fallacy, making a logical leap from what is observable to what is not while seeking for immaterial ethical truths in the material world. Nature teems with decay, death, and darkness. Animals attack, kill, terrorize, and forcibly copulate with each other, yet we do not refer to these acts as battery, murder, or rape. What moral duties could we possibly ascertain from watching the cacophonous disarray of animal behavior many people would find unacceptable? And if people instead mean by natural law that some actions can be empirically proven to lead to human flourishing, they still have not found a way to escape committing the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is beneficial to societal or individual flourishing does not mean it is morally good; to say so would be to make a claim that does not necessarily follow logically.
Besides, people will always disagree widely about what specific moral obligations "natural law" reveals. Of course, this does not prove that natural law doesn't exist, for to conclude that it does not exist because of disputes is to embrace a complete non sequitur fallacy, but it does demonstrate that it is either inaccessible or highly obscure if people can reach such opposing conclusions.
What then shall we appeal to for "natural law"? Conscience? Conscience is certainly better than no moral guidance at all, but it is at best a subjective impulse that can be conditioned by society, easily misinterpreted, or even deadened, perhaps even permanently. The power of conscience is great and penetrating enough to make people feel deeply unsettled by actions or inward dispositions even if no one else could possibly discover these things. Yet, conscience remains malleable enough to be shifted or to be subconsciously conditioned by an outside source.
I write this post with sadness and loathing, with the loathing directed towards the fact that reason alone leads to moral skepticism and that observing nature leads to despair and not moral illumination. One can prove using reason, accessible a priori, that there is no such thing as morality if there is no deity, that apart from his/her existence moral intuitions are just random emotive or personal impulses which do not correspond to any existing moral law but merely correspond to the subjective psyche of the individual and nothing more. But people can never prove using reason alone that they can know for sure if their conscience is accurate and functioning properly or if it has become disoriented or desensitized. For an example, consider color. I know for sure that I see differences in what in my language I call color and there is no way I could be wrong about this [1]. But I can never know entirely if I am seeing colors as they are objectively or if my senses have subjectively deviated from perceiving colors properly. In the same way, the conscience proves to us individually that there are things which innately seem to us to be good or evil, but the conscience, on its own, can never prove the existence of any external moral obligations which impose themselves on us. It is also important to note that just as colorblind people do not disprove the existence of color, psychopaths or morally blind people can never prove that there is no such thing as right and wrong. The awareness someone has of morality or natural law--or indeed of anything else--is totally irrelevant to whether or not it exists.
I once believed that my conscience, which was always so deeply active and strong and sensitive, could inform me about ultimate moral truths even apart from the Bible. While in the past, especially after I began systematically educating myself about philosophy and theology, I always appreciated the finality of moral commands in the Bible and the ease of ability to simply show others the Bible to prove what it actually said, something majorly bothered me about people who didn't already view certain acts or attitudes as intrinsically wrong even if they had no concern for or knowledge of what the Bible teaches. I would have fully agreed with the concept of natural law, and I even once concurred with an atheist (or agnostic; it was difficult to tell which she was) that some sort of moral system could be constructed or discovered even if one did not actually believe in God. When people acted contrary to my internal moral compass, I experienced rage, sadness, and deep moral passion that was so intense that I seriously considered becoming at some point a type of vigilante to enforce these moral ideas. At this time I recognized at least some of these moral ideas as innate because I had yet to directly find some of them in the Bible, ruling that out as the origin of those ideas, and also because many of them contradicted what my society and planet taught and behaved like. But when I finally realized that moral intuitions in and of themselves are merely subjective perceptions of morality and that people disregard them frequently or truly seem to hold to different moral beliefs than I did, I was confronted with a piercing despair. In a desperate effort to use my reason to prove at least the most important moral principles, I quickly found that almost every argument for a moral claim commits one or more logical fallacies. Though I had been intellectually aware that if God does not exist there is no moral dimension to existence, I finally understood personally and experientially that attempting to justify ethics apart from theism is asinine and that trying to truly know or carry out morality without the help of God is futile.
I do not want others to miscalculate the reliability of their consciences and end up like I did at that point in my life. An ethical philosopher who overestimates the accuracy and verifiability of his or her conscience is setting himself or herself up for grave disappointment and despair. Natural law may be real, but it is futile to think we can identify it alone.
Flaring up and causing refreshing contentment or inner anguish, in a moral universe the conscience is better than no ethical guide at all, but it is not enough to grant us true moral knowledge in the sense of absolute certainty. There is no obvious a priori or a posteriori way to learn from some alleged "natural law" or to even verify that it exists at all. For that we would need the deity who grounds morality to reveal to us what the specifics and generalities of that morality are--and for this reason Christians can have no other authority to appeal to in ethical matters than the text they claim was created and assembled with the assistance of that God.
[1]. I mean that I cannot be objectively wrong in knowing that I perceive what I call color. It is hypothetically possible that I am a brain in a vat amidst a colorless external world and that an outside force is deceiving me by causing me to experience color when it is not a real thing in the physical world. And so it is with morality: my conscience proves only that I have a conscience and not that morality itself is not an illusion. In order to know if morality exists, one must search to find if God exists, for a deity is the only legitimate explanation for a universe with a moral dimension.
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