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Natural Justice
Animals act in their own self-interest. Every tree and bush, every cat and bird and ant works to maximize itself, without any consideration for others. These creatures compete endlessly, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes in cooperation with others of their species or their parasites. The idea of an animal deliberately and consciously favoring a different animal would be nonsensical. Man is not necessarily any better, of course. As Hobbes put it, the natural state of mankind without society is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In a state of nature, man is merely another animal.
Natural justice is thus very easy to define: might makes right. This is hardly new or surprising, but it bears mentioning because a good society requires people to not act that way. And so it is troubling to me when people talk of imitating nature. “Natural” becomes synonymous with “good.” In the ancient world, people were more direct: they worshipped nature outright.
The problem with worshipping nature is that we also come to make what happens in nature into something that people ought to emulate. For example, if one worships nature and seeks to imitate it, then what arguments are there for altruism or kindness? What arguments are there for acting outside of our own natures, to choose, for example, to dampen our anger or encourage our empathy for others? If “natural” is good, then acting against our nature must be bad. More than that: it is against nature not to accept “might makes right.”
A key symbol of nature is the tree. Trees are the largest living things a normal person ever sees, and they reflect (or even lead) the seasons and the natural cycles. Trees are about natural life, from generation and growth to renewal. Trees (and poles made from trees) were also broadly worshipped in their own right in the ancient world, as representative of a deity, Asherah.
All of this is my way of getting to an answer to a question that biblical scholars have long wrestled with. And until yesterday, I did not have an answer that made sense to me. Here is the text that prompts the question:
The Torah gives us the following verses, in this specific order:
In all the communities which the LORD, your God, is giving you, you shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes to administer righteous justice for the people. You must not distort justice: you shall not show partiality; you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes even of the wise and twists the words even of the just. Justice, justice alone shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land the LORD, your God, is giving you. You shall not plant an asherah or any kind of tree next to the altar of the LORD, your God, which you will build.
The question, of course, is why is a tree or an Asherah antithetical to justice and impartiality? What do these verses have to connect them in any way?
The answer is given above: Justice needs to be impartial and blind. A judge cannot decide the winner of a case by choosing whichever party paid the bigger bribe. Yet a natural way to act would be in naked self-interest. If we worship nature, then we cannot pursue justice. If we put a tree in the place where we worship G-d, then we are accepting that nature is a deity, and acting naturally is emulating the divine.
The Torah is making a very important point, as relevant now as it was then: civilization and a just society must act in contrast against, not in consonance with, nature. If we worship nature, then we will seek to emulate it. And if we do that, then we will seek our natural self-interest, solicit bribes, blinding ourselves to what is good and right. A society that worships trees cannot be just.
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This is why Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau is a non-natural moral realist rather than a natural moral realist. We can observe nature and see nature for what is “is.” But then we can view morality and see it for what we “ought” to do.
No, it’s not. You’ve misunderstood me.
Is it good or bad to move in the right direction?
Only to those who believe in a line of argumentation that leads to that conclusion.
Well, of course. But that includes a lot of people, who have drawn the atheistic implications.
I’m not sure what to make of this given you just finished saying you learned a useful lesson from the cruelty of cats. In any case, this is a statement generally agreed to by atheists.
So the difference between you and an atheist is that you both agree you can learn nothing of right and wrong from nature, but you have a book that gives you the moral lessons. What of the person who has never heard of the Torah? They must be entirely bereft of morals, correct, since they have no place from which to learn them?
I’ll have to answer your comments in pieces, due to space limitations.
You appear to cite Plato and Socrates, the Stoic philosophers, Kant, and Confucius as examples of natural law theory, but I think that they conflict with each other, and they conflict with the Catholic view. So there is disagreement about the nature of man and disagreement about the proper function of certain human activities, even among those adopting the “natural law” approach. I do not see any reasoned way to determine which is correct. There must be either a divine revelation, or an atheistic assertion of premises that are not, themselves, based on reason.
My main problem with this is that it implies God might create things just to frustrate their natures.
Dogs, for instance, are by nature social pack animals. It’s cruel to keep a dog penned up and isolated in a cage its entire life because it frustrates the dog’s nature. You don’t need the Torah to tell you that. We can know it just by understanding the nature of dogs, and in light of the principle that the natures of God’s creatures should be respected rather than abused when possible. Crating dogs their entire lives isn’t wrong because God arbitrarily said it was wrong (when He might just as easily have said it was right), but because God created dogs with a certain nature that flourishes in a certain way. Any reasonable person can figure that out. You don’t need a holy book.
Human beings are unique among animals in that we are “rational animals.” Because of that, it is in our nature to need education, and a person who is deliberately kept ignorant (as slaves were in the antebellum South) has had a wrong done to him. God would never command perpetual ignorance upon people, because He wouldn’t create a rational animal just to keep it ignorant. God is not evil. He wants His creatures to fulfill their natures, not frustrate them. So we are perfectly right in “reading off” morals from nature. This is why heathen peoples, never having heard of the Bible, are not entirely bereft of moral sense.
I expect that it will be difficult to convince you that the “natural law” doctrine is an error, because you have adopted “Saint Augustine” as your Ricochet name, and he is associated quite strongly with natural law doctrine. I realize that it is possible that you just took the name of a city in Florida, without any philosophical overtones, but that’s not my impression.
It is a good thing that we end up with agreement.
I find the “natural law” doctrine to be a bad idea because it seems to assume that a proper moral code can be derived from pure reason, which I think is an error, and it seems to try to meet unbelievers on their battleground, on which no victory is possible.
I think that it would be more useful to point out that those trying to derive a universal moral code without a theistic basis are engaging in an impossible endeavor, and they need to understand that it is impossible. They are building on a foundation of sand, as a certain Galilean carpenter once pointed out. This does not mean that the theistic approach is correct, but it means that any other system is going to be based on premises that are asserted as a matter of individual preference, or group consensus (which is just a summation of individual preferences).
I understand that people make assertions, such as the moral realists who, from the explanation that you quote, appear to posit a moral reality without any foundation, and hypothesize an ideal observer whose existence they deny (if they are not theists)
They are building on a foundation of sand, and they don’t even seem to know it.
I’d point out a couple of things. Heathen people are not bereft of any “moral sense,” but is that what it is? Might they behave properly because it’s in their own best interest to do so? Or some people have a tendency to be compassionate or helpful or kind–but they are not acting out of a moral sense.
Also, regarding people’s exposure to Torah, G-d doesn’t expect everyone to be Jews. But he did provide the Noahide laws for everyone, for all times and in all places.
I would say that acting in your own self-interest (properly understood) is part of being a moral person. The best things in life – love, friendship, trust, family – are available only to the moral. That is one of the lessons of Aristotle. Someone of low character – an inveterate liar, for instance – will never experience true friendship. I don’t think that, absent Revelation, man can know the entirety of the moral law. What I object to is the assertion that he can’t know anything at all about it absent Revelation. This seems to me manifestly false.
That is true, but we could say the same thing about religious believers as well, can’t we? How many of us go to Church or Temple out of habit and not much more, or go along with the prescriptions of our faith simply because it is easier to do that than buck our family or community? But we wouldn’t say religious faith is limited to that because some people practice it that way. Some non-believers are compassionate out of a kind nature, for sure, but there are others who do so on rational grounds.
We have a world of non-Torah religions that tell us what happens. We get eastern religions that do not value individual rights or lives.
They build functioning societies, but not necessarily good ones. Certainly they failed on their own to grow and improve humanity and the world. It is no accident that capitalism and the liberal arts and prolonged technological innovation has only come out of the West.
They evolve a moral code, but it is not recognizably good. That non-Torah moral code is functional, and does not welcome or accept dissonant voices or individual freedom.
I agree with this 100%.
You’re not going to get an argument from me that the West isn’t a superior culture to the East. I’m one of the most pro-West partisans on Ricochet. But that admission need not force us to conclude that the East has nothing to offer, and certainly not that the East is bereft of moral sense. The most we can conclude is that the moral reasoning of the East is limited, which is exactly what I claim. That’s different than saying that the moral reasoning of the East is entirely null, which I think is your position.
The moral code of the East is not recognizably good? Not at all? They have families in the East, are taught to tell the truth and respect their parents, to work hard and make something of yourself. Those seem to be good things. Asian-Americans are the least criminal demographic in the United States. They must be doing something right, if not everything right.
In this case I tend to agree with you, at least regarding Buddhism. The 16 Bodhisattva Precepts sound much like the Ten Commandments, except they don’t say “Thou Shalt Not” and practitioners “vow” to follow them. To non-religious Westerners, this is a big deal.
A question: Is is proper for me to “like” a comment that is simply agreeing with my own prior comment? I did so anyway, but it felt self-congratulatory, something like the psychic equivalent of that pain in the arm that occurs when you get carried away patting yourself on the back. :)
A post on the Jewish view of the Noahide laws would be interesting. I’m skeptical, as they appear to be part of an oral tradition, and not part of the Old Testament itself. It’s also not clear how people other than the Jews are supposed to know about these rules.
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If the Comment just expresses the agreement of the Commenter, I think it’s my practice not to Like it. I would be expressing only this idea, “I like it when people agree with me”, which, because it is true for everyone and every such comment, is not expressing any idea at all.
If the Comment adds something to what I’d written, my practice is this. If it adds something that I disagree with, I don’t Like it. If it adds something that I think is positive, I do.
For example, I recently wrote something criticizing a certain kind of political behavior, and gave examples. A Commenter (a) agreed with me and (b) added something to my article: he gave additional examples of the class of behavior. I didn’t agree that the examples he gave were instances of the class I was criticizing. He had misunderstood my article. Even though he agreed with me superficially, I decided not to Like it.
I will share Rodin’s 5 rules of “liking”:
It’s not building a foundation on sand. It’s arguing that the moral reality is the foundation. If there is a God, even God could not make genocide “good.”
Indeed. Cats truly are evil.
“Nature” in what sense of the term?
The usual approach by those who say G-d is the source of moral law is to agree that G-d cannot make torturing children for fun good.
The idea is that morality comes from G-d’s good character. For G-d to act against his character is in fact an impossibility.
(This is the approach of Robert Adams, C. Stephen Evans, William Lane Craig, etc. And, from what I can tell, the whole host of medieval theologians who believe in the doctrine of divine simplicity–Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, etc.)
Ok, but I never cited “examples of disagreements.”
And you think these views I cited conflict. That’s an interesting conclusion. Do you have a premise for it?
That phrase alone makes me crack up.
He’s also associated with a very dark view of human sin, pessimism about our chances of knowing anything without G-d’s grace, and a high a view of the Word of G-d.
Right on!
It does not so assume. Well, not necessarily so. Some versions do. Why not take a look at the chapters on ethics in my book on Augustine and see if that’s a good characterization?
(Ok, ok. I know why. The book’s too expensive! Fair enough.)
There’s some great stuff in Confucius.
When I first found out they weren’t joking with that line of thought I busted a gut. Oh, the hubris! I asked for the supporting scripture. Where did He reveal that? God is not a Greek philosopher nor a slave to man’s reason.
Are we all on the same page about what the word “simplicity” means in this context?
Jerry, G-d gave the Noahide law to all of humanity, and they are accepted by all Jews as part of the oral tradition, except for one sect, the Karaites, who believed that only the Torah was authoritative. The oral tradition is held in the same esteem by most Jews as the Torah. There are actually people out there who consider themselves to be Noahides; you can look them up. If your own tradition doesn’t mention them, and you don’t research divine law-giving within Judaism, you probably won’t find them. They were issued in response to the state of the world before the Flood.
I assume you mean something along these lines (from Catholic Exchange):
Which is the sound of a prat too proud to say that God is a mystery far beyond man’s comprehension and if you are reading me rather than His word I have successfully lured you away from the truth and into buying expensive books when Bibles can be had for free.
I enjoy Thomas, and I don’t doubt his piety and he makes some fine points and brings his opponent’s best arguments to the fore, but I never have mistaken him for being divinely inspired.
Yes, that’s it.
You don’t think Aquinas does say that?
Well, that’s one thing you and he have in common.