Natural Law Theory: George and Arendt

The St. Thomas law school recently hosted Robert P. George, fellow at Princeton and natural law theorist, to receive the Humanae Dignitatis award and speak on “Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity.” His theory of natural law is that it is only known to us humans when we experience it. Knowledge of natural law is not innate, but rather experienced – something that we do rather than that is done to us. Through experience, we come to understand basic moral norms of natural law. The one he cited was a variation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Act so that your action furthers the fundamental reason for man’s existence. Virtue he defined as the habit of acting in accordance with these moral norms.

Yet he did not seem to answer what sort of experience we must make. While it might be assumed that man will always act reasonably, and therefore always act in pursuit of his good, George also noted that whole societies have been misled as to the nature of the good and yet have continued to act entirely reasonably. In fact, as Hannah Arendt describes in her study The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem, the entire German society in World War II seemed to have turned conscience on its head, and accepted that state of affairs. She writes: “[C]onscience as such had apparently got lost in Germany, and this to a point where people hardly remembered it and had ceased to realize that the surprising ‘new set of German values’ was not shared by the outside world.”

Supporting her theory was the fact that Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the “Final Solution,” was an ordinary man with an ordinary sense of morality, who had initially experienced great aversion to the idea of “liquidating” the Jews. Until that order was given, he had simply assumed the “Solution” was to make Germany judenrein by expelling, exporting, and otherwise physically removing Jews from the country.

He felt these twinges of conscience for approximately 10 weeks, Arendt reports. At the end of that time, he attended the conference at Wannsee, devoted to the particulars of the Final Solution. Everyone, without exception, states Arendt, spoke as though the immorality of the plan was not even in question: it was a nonissue. Since his superiors had adopted this position, and, indeed, everyone Eichmann knew, he gave it no further thought. (Eichmann stated that no one, not even the local religious leaders, ever pointed out to him the evil he was engaging in. Instead, they worked within the “law,” obtaining “exceptions,” but never directly challenging the law.) Eichmann had corrupted Kant’s principle (“act so the principle of your action can become the principle for general laws”) to mean “Act so that the Fuehrer, if he knew what you were doing, would approve.” Hitler’s will was substituted for Eichmann’s and was regarded throughout Germany as having the force of law.

The horrors of the Holocaust are well-known. Following the end of World War II, at the Nuremberg Trials, international law began to adopt a minimum moral standard that would apply regardless of what the law of the individual country had been at the time the crime had been committed. The source of this moral standard was to be what all nations regarded as moral. But, again, there remained the question, which is coming back in the recent debates about medical conscience clauses, whether the conscience can be relied upon to define an objective morality, or whether, particularly if knowledge of morality is predicated on experience and habits of acting, conscience is simply relative and dependent on individual experience, cultural norms, and other subjective and changeable criteria. If the latter, there is no guaranty that something like the Holocaust will not happen again.

Pi, etc.

We recently lost the internet at my house for several days. One realizes just how much it has become a part of everyday life when it is gone. Rather than listing all the things I could not do, suffice it to say I found something I could: watch movies. So I did.

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is a story about the search for meaning in the universe. It tells the tale of Max Cohen, a mathematician obsessed with finding patterns to explain phenomena around him. More to the point, he is interested in finding the pattern which will explain, well, everything. In the course of the story we encounter Wall Street types who are interested in such patterns primarily for the ability to predict the stock market, but we also meet kabbalists who seek to decode the Torah and find the long-lost name of God which will help usher in the messianic age.



The film reminded me of Eric Foner’s Story of American Freedom, a text I had to teach this past semester. Foner’s objective seems simple enough: to explain the changing definition of freedom from the time of the American Founding to the present day. However, as I tried to point out to my students, implicit in his presentation was another message. To help them tease that out, I gave a (very, very, very!) quick-and-dirty history of western philosophy, since such courses are not required at A&M.

Plato argued that there were such things as forms, things in heaven which embody ideas. Or rather, more to the point, are ideas, which are imperfectly embodied in particular occurrences. There is the form of the Tree, in which all trees participate, and by that participation they have something in common. There is the form of the Cat as well, along with abstract – but no less real – concepts such as Justice, Truth and Freedom.

Aristotle, though he spoke of substance and accidents, rather than forms, broadly agreed with Plato that there are fundamental categories at work in the cosmos, categories which transcend physical characteristics and abide in the very fiber of a thing’s being. But in the Middle Ages a fellow named William of Ockham denied that there were categories at all. Yes, he said, we can point to this fuzzy thing with whiskers and that fuzzy thing with whiskers, and we can call them both cats, because that would be a very useful thing to say. But in the end, Ockham argued, each is a unique object without anything fundamentally in common with the other. We apply labels for our convenience, but they do not correspond to any deeper meaning in reality.

Some centuries later Immanuel Kant tried to steer a middle course between these two positions, contending that there may be categories to the cosmos, but we cannot know them. Thus, in practice, he was an Ockhamite, arguing that the labels we affix may be handy, but may not actually correspond to the fundamental being of things. Finally, the nihilists – most famous among them being Friedrich Nietzsche – contended that there is no meaning to the cosmos at all, categorical or otherwise, a far cry from the ancients.

How did all this connect to Eric Foner and American history? While charting the changing meanings of “freedom” over the years, I would submit that Foner assumes – and implicitly argues – that there is no meaning to the term “freedom”; it does not really exist. Yes, Foner is willing to talk about it as a label we place on things, even a very convenient label, but in the end, does it correspond to anything in reality? Is there a right answer to the question, “What is freedom?” Foner demurs and – I would argue – ultimately denies.

Returning then to Mr. Aronofsky’s film and the pressing question it asks: Is there meaning to the cosmos? And if there is, what is it, and what does that meaning demand of me?

Agnosticism, exceedingly vogue in the ivory tower of academia, seeks to avoid these questions. Perhaps the answers simply are unknowable, though I doubt most have ever truly sought them. And if the point of all our academic endeavors is to know the truth, what does it say about us that we have abdicated any responsibility for knowing the highest truths?

This post first appeared yesterday on True. Good. Beautiful., a forum about entertainment and the film industry.