This chapter and the next are something of a necessary detour in the dissertation—that is, transhumanism doesn’t really come up. Instead, over the two chapters I construct an ethic from nature through which to analyze bioenhancements, drawing on the insights of natural law and ordinary language philosophy. Here I’ll focus on the former.
For most people, when they hear mention of natural law, one or two not-necessarily-wrong but inevitably truncated ideas come to mind. The first is of the “law written on the heart,” mentioned in Romans 2 and elsewhere, an idea of moral rules known by intuition. The second is of an appeal to our biology—that our bodies are constructed in such a way as to elicit strict ethical positions (namely a prohibition on homosexuality). And while these are related to the doctrine of natural law, they miss out on a lot of nuance (and even misguide at times).
Natural law receives its classic Christian articulation in the work of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval scholastic. Aquinas is not the first to come up with the concept (and, in fact, relies a lot on ancients like Aristotle), but his version is both particularly thorough and influential for later Christian thinkers.
In Aquinas’s conception, the natural law is a part of a larger system, involving four laws: the eternal law, the natural law, the divine law, and the human law. None of these are necessarily laws in the sense that they are a collection of rules; rather, law here is a broader concept, something closer to a way of being. At the top of the system is the eternal law, which, for current purposes, is synonymous with Divine reason or even the mind of God—it is the good itself. It describes how all things ought to be. Below this is the natural law, which is how the order of creation participates in and reflects the eternal law; creation’s participation in the eternal gives it order, which in turn allows for human rationality. But because the natural law reflects the Divine reason in imperfect and unclear ways, God also communicates the eternal law in a more direct way: the divine law. This takes the form of Scripture and all other revelation. Finally, at the bottom, is human law, our attempts to synthesize what we know from natural reason as well as God’s revelation. This can take the form of literal laws or policies but can also be our conventions and ways of going about life. See the helpful image below.
The natural law, creation’s participation in the eternal law, does not simply give nature a static order but an oriented or directed order—to use the technical term, it gives it a teleology. What this means is that all things are directed toward an end (telos) and therefore have purpose or function. Fire is meant to burn, chairs to hold people while they’re sitting. Cells have purpose; organs have purpose; all the way up to human beings—we have a particular end we are oriented toward. And in Aquinas’s view, our immediate end is for happiness or (because happiness has connotations of shallowness that didn’t exist for medievals) flourishing. But even beyond this, we have an ultimate end: what Aquinas describes as the beatific vision, that is, seeing God.
This idea of teleology helps make sense of things by working backwards. If a chair’s purpose is to support people sitting, then we can come up with some attributes that typically make something a good chair. It might have four legs and a back; it needs to be sturdy; it probably needs to be comfortable, but that’s usually less important than sturdiness; and so on. In the same way, we might think through what a good human life looks like, the kind of life that leads to happiness. According to Aquinas, as humans we are inclined to at least five things: survival (which we share with all living things), sexual procreation and childrearing (which we share with the animals), and living with others as well as seeking the truth (which are distinctly human traits).
Having said all that, Aquinas is much more interested in the ways we live that lead to our flourishing and fulfilling those basic needs, behaviors that are in line with the natural law. Those patterns of living are what we call the virtues. Aquinas describes the main seven virtues, which he subdivides into dozens more: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, faith, hope, and love. What makes these virtues is not some commandment that these are good—rather it is that these habits for living are conducive for our flourishing in creation and, eventually, for seeing God face-to-face.
At the macro-level, humans reflect on these virtues and use their rationality in order to develop moral conventions. Some of these are formalized—laws against murder or robbery, the claim that all men possess “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—while others remain informal—you ought not to eat too many sweets or you’ll get sick, you shouldn’t lie or people will distrust you. However, what becomes abundantly clear in this process of reflection—and this is crucial—is that nature underdetermines ethics. That is, nature is complex, and ethics is complex, and there is not a one-to-one relation between them. Looking at nature (or ourselves or the material world and the things around us) does not produce obvious moral conclusions.
Thus, the natural law is more descriptive than prescriptive. It can tell us something about how we ought to live (and we’ll explore this more next week), but for the most part, it confirms why virtue and our other moral intuitions work—because they coincide with the natural order which coincides with the mind of God. It suggests that ethics are not something we primarily learn because they were dictated in the Bible but because God has instilled them into the way the world works.