Paths to Moral Knowledge

The Ways We Know the Natural Law

Oct 16, 2024

Epistemology, our theme for this month of October, is usually described as a study of how we know. One who wishes to take a closer look may take on the questions of “how do we know x?” (whether x is natures, logical propositions, material phenomena, or something else). The particular question of this form that I wish to address today is “how do we know the natural law?”

By way of background, St. Thomas Aquinas means by “natural law” the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law, which is the divine Word. Spelling this out a bit more, I understand the “natural law” to refer to that Order which God establishes and maintains within the intellects of His rational creatures, and which Order maximally fulfils those creatures, insofar as they participate in it, as exemplified perfectly by the person of God the Word.

Now this is a concept that is cosmic in scope, so the question I have taken on is certainly challenging: how do we know this Order, this natural law? Tautologically, Christians say that it is written on every human heart. While this is an evocative description, that is just another way of saying that this law is “natural” to us, so something more robust is needed. To truly understand the way in which we know the natural law, I would like to look at complementary accounts given by two great thinkers: 1) Aristotle, whose epistemology emphasizes how knowledge comes from sense experience, and 2) Aquinas, who argues that the first principles of the natural law are self-evident. After this examination, I would like to propose an additional piece of this overall account to fill in an experiential gap that I believe needs explanation.

To begin with the Aristotelian account, when faced with the question of knowledge of moral maxims, the primary argument for the proposition “you should not lie,” for example, would compare the experiences of lying and not lying in similar circumstances and abstract the general rule. Knowledge of the maxim would arise from the observation that one approach tends to lead to a net gain in the long term, while the other produces a favorable result in the immediate aftermath, yet tends to quickly cause compounding problems and an overall less favorable result in the long term. This account seems to back us into consequentialism, and while consequentialism pursued with an honest and experienced view toward the long term usually yields the right result, we can do better. Aristotle’s account does leave another route open for such an argument which is somewhat more sophisticated. This route is to argue deductively from the definition of the nature of man that some actions fulfill his nature while others contradict it. But despite the logical coherence of an argument, there does seem to be a problem with this account that we will discuss shortly.

Turning now to Aquinas, we see that, whereas Aristotle begins his account with the extremely particular (i.e., raw material phenomena), Aquinas builds from the other direction, starting with the first and most general principles of the natural law. He argues that these first principles are self-evident (a technical term meaning that the proposition is simply the result of the very definitions of the terms it contains). Take, for example, the very first of these most general principles: “good is to be pursued, and evil avoided.” We should understand that “good” refers to all of Being understood as the object of the will, while “evil” refers to a depravation of Being under the same perspective. It follows by definition (even self-evidently) that good is to be pursued and evil avoided. In this way, Thomas establishes how we know the first principles of the natural law; they are evident and directly knowable in themselves.

Having touched briefly on these two accounts, I’d like to reintroduce the question I began with: What about moral knowledge in between the abstract, self-evident level, and the low-level sense experience which Aristotle begins with? This middle level of abstraction where the first principles meet the particularities of experience, accounts for the bulk of our moral framework, since it is the level which most forcefully drives our deliberations; examples of moral maxims of this level would include the Ten Commandments, and other partially abstracted rules of thumb such as “do not be cruel or vindictive to those under your control.” Yet, both of the accounts examined thus far are primarily concerned with the peripheries of the moral framework, and leave much unsaid regarding how the bulk of the moral code is to be derived.

So, we often hear from modern moralists that the way this happens is that the abstract principles, such as “it is good and necessary for people to live in society with one another” meets a particular experience, such as “the neighbors ostracized that guy who took their stuff,” and then the resulting moral maxim “thou shalt not steal,” follows naturally. In this account, the maxim is the result of a feedback loop within that society which rejects those members who steal, rather than the result of moral reasoning, and the start of that loop is actually an arbitrary decision; after all, why could a society not exist with a different standard regarding the behavior in question? Even further, the relativist would claim that the major premise in this moral proposition (i.e. the premise that it is good for man to live in society) is also merely the result of social habituation. How, then, can we avoid the pitfall of relativism?

It has been argued convincingly that moral maxims such as the Ten Commandments are deducible from the self-evident first principles of the natural law, but experientially, we seem to grasp these maxims more immediately. We feel the force of them intuitively and directly, not as we might grasp the conclusions of complex strings of logical propositions, whether starting from man’s nature or a self-evident metaphysical proposition. I believe it is because of this that the social habituation explanation leading to relativism has gained significant adherence.

But, perhaps there is another explanation for the manner in which we know moral truths which can account for the immediate experience we have of conscience, yet stands up to the claims of the relativist. This is an area where I believe Christians have a unique advantage. To see this advantage, let us return to our definition of the natural law, which, again, is not just comprised of the highly abstract first principles we discussed above, but includes all of these mid-level moral maxims. The natural law is defined as the rational creature’s participation in that eternal Order which God in His providence infuses into all creation. This Order, which is also called the Eternal Law, translates to the Greek “λογος” or “logos.” And it is in relationship to the Logos Himself, Christ Jesus, that Christians are at an apparent advantage. First, we see in Christ Jesus the incarnation of the Eternal Law as a man, and so Christ in his very person, as He says, is the fulfillment of the law, both the divine and the natural, and He provides a perfect model for us to participate in Him. Second, we have a sacramental union with Him, and participate in His mystical body, the Church. In light of this, it should be no wonder that Christians who participate in the sacraments would have this kind of immediate sense knowledge of even the secondary and lower-level aspects of the natural law; the knowledge is still abstracted from sense experience as Aristotle would demand, but the sense experience itself is augmented, since it is of an efficacious sign, a sacrament, through which we directly perceive that which we would otherwise need to abstract by ourselves.

Paths to Moral Knowledge

The Ways We Know the Natural Law

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