Here was a worldview promulgated by intellectuals who thought they could create their own order. CWR: Without natural law, what is the basis for moral judgment and thought in Western societies? All of this may seem a rather obscure academic debate, but the consequences of nominalism are devastating—once we follow them out to their logical extreme (as modern thinkers have done.) CWR: What is the relationship between the increasing loss of faith in God in the West and the decline of natural law? How did their approach affect the formation and ordering of modern political states in the West? The “moral” portion of the tradition, associated with thinkers like John Locke, began to think of natural law simply as the moral order God had created and imposed on human beings. And even our natural desires are “ordered to the good.” Aquinas’s natural law theory holds that, when human beings are properly educated, we naturally develop into fully-functioning human beings. And it is from this nature that we can derive specific conclusions about how we should live, what the good life is, what our political and social institutions should look like, etc. CWR: Why is William of Ockham—a Christian philosopher—so significant in the story of the decline and corruption of the classical worldview in general and natural law in particular? But there is no core essence or nature that they share. And, this, I think is exactly what we see happening in intellectual thought today. But what is freedom? In contrast to utilitarianism, Kant’s ethical philosophy is grounded on duties and rights, not on maximized beneficial consequences or outcomes. You need to adopt some underlying decisions about what to achieve, and the reasons for doing so. There is a fair set of rules for everyone. There have been objections and modifications to both groups of theories over the course of the past two centuries. He recently responded to questions from Catholic World Report about what natural law is and is not, common objections to natural law, how natural law developed and how it has been undermined, loss of faith in God in the West and the decline of natural law, and his journey from atheism into the Catholic Church. It assumes that nature has been created in a certain way, with specific purposes, and that we can draw moral conclusions from this design of nature. Dr. John Lawrence Hill is a law professor at Indiana University, Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, where he teaches constitutional law, torts, civil procedure and legal philosophy courses. Sophisticated atheists are usually “determinists.” Determinism is the idea that we don’t really make free choices—that no one is really responsible for anything they do because our actions our simply products of our biology and environment. The natural, in sum, is what we ought to do, not what anyone does do. (In fact, where utilitarians tend to think in terms of good and bad, Katians think in terms of right and wrong. They are, in a sense, contrary objections. The term “natural law” is ambiguous. But it was fashioned into a workable system by Christian thinkers, especially Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Kant would have agreed with St. Paul and disagreed with utilitarians that one should not do evil in the hope that good may come. Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima might be justifiable on utilitarian terms, but Kant and St. Paul would agree that the killing of innocents is always forbidden, irrespective of the beneficial consequences (saving the greater number of lives of American and Japanese soldiers who would have been killed had the bomb not been dropped.). The Natural Law signifies that we can know through our powers of reason what is right and wrong, and that our reason can thereby guide us towards an ethical life. This, in turn, winds up undermining many of our traditional values including human dignity. There is no innate moral knowledge. CWR: Since natural law is so closely associated with Christianity, notably with St. Thomas Aquinas among others, why would or should secular thinkers embrace or support it? So, it is perfectly “natural—if you’ll forgive the pun—for a world that has lost its faith to become skeptical of the natural law. As new wine was put in the old “natural law” skin, its central idea slowly morphed, then decayed—before it was abandoned altogether. A culture with limited material resources may adopt different patterns of property ownership, for example, than a relatively wealthier society. Dr. Hill: Natural law is based on the idea that the world is an ordered and intelligible place—that there is a correspondence between the way nature is designed and our human needs and purposes. Because now there is no such thing as the state of humanness. Natural law was “out there,” a rule made by God that we are bound to discover and follow. It is “doing what comes naturally,” as the saying goes. Lastly, a reasonable concept of natural law allows us to understand the intrinsic differences distinguishing natural law as such, the law of nations, and positive legislation. While each continues to have its defenders, it is safe to say that there has been a general slide toward moral relativism in academic philosophy which has accelerated since mid-twentieth century. Natural law in the Enlightenment and the modern era. If we grow skeptical of freedom of the will, political liberty will soon become an obsolete concept. Natural law thinkers, however, hold that the “natural” is neither a purely static nor a purely descriptive idea. In the case of human beings, our essence is what we really are. There is no justification for…, New history of Catholics in the United States full of scholarship, insight, humor, Chinese Patriotic Association announces ordination of new bishop. For example, think about Soviet era communism. We've had close to 6,500 deaths attributed to…. If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. "The natural law is immutable and permanent throughout the variations of history" (CCC#1958) because it is based on God-made essential human nature, which does not change with time or place, rather than man-made cultural developments, which do. There is no essential nature that trees (or human beings) share. Each thing is made of form and matter. Rather, there was a period of two or three centuries during which the words “natural law” continued to be used but in surprisingly new ways. CWR: What, in a nutshell, is “natural law” and how has it developed from the classical era to today? One of the most important assumptions of natural law theory is that this dichotomy between duty and desire, social obligation and self-interest—the “is” and the “ought”—has been greatly exaggerated in modern philosophy and culture. ), Kant insisted that the rightness of an action cannot be gauged by its consequences. It means that there is no built-in human nature. In some ways, our moral and political system is still based on the natural law but we have, since about the eighteenth century, become, as a civilization, intellectually estranged from the natural law tradition. Increasingly freedom is associated with rights to certain material resources—to a right to health care or a right to have a job at a certain wage.

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