The Natural Law and Human Dignity: Reaffirming Ethical "First Things"

The truth about nature and natural revelation matters. While government cannot impose by decree moral truth, this truth should nevertheless be debated in the public square, if, for no other reason, it is intuited by all human beings. The alternative is an unhuman–and inhumane–consensus of “choice” and degradation of life. M OST PEOPLE HAVE HEARD, in one form or another, the wonderfully prescient story–perhaps apocryphal–of the student who submitted to his professor a paper under the title “There Is No Such Thing As Justice.” Without so much as a single marginal comment 2 or concluding evaluation, the professor returned the paper to the student with a failing grade. Outraged, the student went to see the professor–the requisite step, of course, before lodging an academic protest against injustice with the dean–and proceeded to plead his case, seeking to convince the professor of how hard he had worked on the paper. Not only did the professor proffer no counter-argument, he readily conceded that this was one of the better papers he had received in his many years of teaching. As a matter of fact, he stated, so powerful was the student’s argument that the professor in the end was forced to agree. In which case, the professor announced, “there is no such thing as justice, so quit your 322 Life and Learning XVI My paraphrase. 3 whining!” It goes without saying that our culture, like the student, will need to make up its mind. Either there are fixed, non-fluid–and therefore, universal–norms for justice, right and wrong, to which human beings, regardless of their place in history, are held accountable, or there are not. At the practical level, G.K. Chesterton put the matter in perspective: people differ less about what things they call evil (although they indeed disagree) than about what evils they are willing to excuse. Chesterton, I think, is on to something; nevertheless, when basics become blurred, one must begin with first things. Are there moral first principles–the “permanent” things–to which the natural law and human moral discernment point us? If there are, then we shall have the means by which to find our bearings amidst a morally obtuse and radically skeptical generation. Indeed, the Christian moral tradition historically has affirmed these ethical “first things”–what Aquinas reduced to “do good and avoid evil” and from which all other moral norms derive. The Christian moral tradition assumes the presence in all human beings of a basic moral intuition. Unhappily, particularly among Protestants (among whom I number myself), there exists a serious neglect–if not an outright disavowal–of the natural law in contemporary Christian ethics. But in the context of difficult, knotty, and critically urgent ethical and bioethical issues, the natural law will need to serve as a guide, both at the level of moral discourse and at the policy level. Without the natural law, without the moral “first principles” that help us maintain our moral equilibrium, we become, in C.S. Lewis’s words, “men without chests” who, wittingly or unwittingly, facilitate the degradation of all that is humane. As part of the Creator’s revelation of moral reality, the natural law witnesses to the fact that we have no “original and rightful jurisdiction” over the gift of life. We possess no moral claim regarding human life as such, regardless of whether these claims relate to beginning-of-life, lifeenhancement, or end-of-life matters. Thus, for example, natural-law thinking inhibits our efforts to develop or justify partial or “subhuman” beings, in the end mutating the species at the expense of some and for the convenience of others. Similarly, it inhibits our attempts at therapeutic J. Daryl Charles 323 This is the imagery employed by Leon R. Kass in The Hungry Soul: Eating and 4 the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York NY: The Free Press, 1994), p. 6. James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics (Chicago IL: Univ. 5 of Chicago Press, 1978), ch. 3. manipulation of life in its existing form for Promethean purposes. Finally, it inhibits us from determining the “quality” of existing life, as well as the timing and means by which we “terminate” life, since life is to be understood as an endowment. In the end, what in Plato and Jesus corresponds to the Golden Rule, what expresses itself in the contours of the Ten Commandments, what St. Paul described as the “law written on the heart,” what this nation’s fathers called “self-evident truths” based on “nature and nature’s God,” what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, or what we call the natural law serves as a reminder of moral reality. In the words of one public philosopher, it witnesses to what we can’t not know. On the important ethical questions of the day, we are rudderless, lost at sea, as it were, without a compass. Seduced by the enchantments of technological progress, we are deaf to the voices of common sense and right reason. To extend the seafaring metaphor, we have recklessly thrown overboard our accumulated moral and cultural wisdom, at the heart of 4 which lies the natural law. Here I would like to consider the relationship between law, morality and human moral accountability, before which I shall note, briefly in passing, specific reasons for the neglect of natural-law thinking in Protestant thought over the last sixty years. This will necessitate identifying several influential Protestant thinkers, past and present, wittingly or unwittingly, who have helped us to this place of relative impotence. And finally, I will simply identify several crucial categories lying at the heart of contemporary ethical and bioethical debates that bear some relation to the natural law. THE NEGLECT OF THE NATURAL LAW IN PROTESTANT THINKING But first, to the problem “within the camp.” In the 1970s ethicist James Gustafson classified Protestant opposition to natural law according to two tendencies–historicism and existentialism. Indeed, there is much in his 5 account that is commendable, for these two tendencies accurately explain 324 Life and Learning XVI Paul Ramsey, “The Problem of Protestant Ethics” in War and the Christian 6 Conscience (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1961), reproduced in From Christ, To the World, ed. Wayne Boulton et al. (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 212-14. Strangely, despite acknowledging its necessity in the marketplace, Ramsey insists that Christian ethics “transcends” the natural law (Basic Christian Ethics [New York: Scriber’s, 1954], p. 84, as suggested in his heading “What the Christian Does without a Code: St. Paul’s Answer” [p. 74]). Hereon see esp. the introduction to Karl Barth, The Church and the War (New 7 York NY: Macmillan, 1944). much of the rationalism and fideism that has pervaded Protestant thought. About the same time, ethicist Paul Ramsey, though not a strong advocate for the natural law a generation ago, cited a further contributing factor in its neglect: a particular understanding of “christological justification and divine forgiveness” that “strips politics of norms and principles distinguishing between right and wrong.” To begin, we should note that opposition to the natural law has been of two types–revisionist and orthodox. My focus for the purposes of this conference shall be the latter. Several names require mention, and this, due to the constraints of time, only in passing. One is Karl Barth. In citing Barth I find myself divided because of his important contribution to the “Confessing Church” in Germany seventy years ago by way of his assistance in crafting the Barmen Declaration that served to reiterate Christ’s lordship against the backdrop of National Socialist totalitarian confessions. With their theological affirmation the participants at Barmen 7 rejected the nazification of German culture and affirmed that a Christian’s ultimate allegiance could not be given to an earthly Fuhrer. Not for nothing did he lose his teaching post at Basel a year after the National Socialists came to power. A major concern of Barth was to critique and guard against the Enlightenment influences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by which, in his understanding, “nature” was at odds with revealed, logocentric, Christocentric religion. The “idealized” and humanized” understanding of nature, as Barth viewed it, would have serious implications for German thought. The increasing secularization of European culture, coupled with a romantic view of “nature,” for Barth blended easily into the core assumptions of Enlightenment thinking and the new J. Daryl Charles 325 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and 8 History (London: SCM, rev. ed. 2001), pp. 41-45.