Natural Law and Moral Fallacies
I have an interest in ethics and metaethics, so it pains me to see fallacious ethical reasoning, especially so when it is employed to defend hateful laws and customs. Via Tal Atlas I found this, and far from a “fabulously eloquent statement on human rights”, it’s a wrong-headed and bigoted statement. Sds quotes and concurs with Adrian:
The American Revolution was different from most other revolutions in that it was based on the objective laws of human nature, and their Author. The Declaration of Independence was not a “we’ve decided to separate from Britain” document; it was a “humans are endowed with certain rights by their Creator, and those rights have been repeatedly and significantly dismissed despite attempts at redress, and these circumstances make it therefore just for us to declare independence” document.
Similarly, the state does not create or define marriage, any more than it creates or defines male and female, or family. These things exist in nature (I refer here to “human nature”—what it means to be human, not nature—paper vs. plastic). What the state does is acknowledge their existence, and recognizes a compelling public interest in protecting these realities. So marriage stems from the natural law, not from the civil law. And it is to the natural law that we go to determine who has a right to be married.
Marriage does not contain within it the relations between members of the same sex.
First, I’d like to point out the overt ethnocentrism and wrongful patriotism on display here — the American revolution is seen not only as deriving from “objective laws of human nature”, it is in fact the only revolution — or one of the very few revolutions — ever to have done so. The American revolution, folks, is not the pinnacle of human achievement. But that’s not what I was planning to address.
The issue with “natural law” in general is that it makes an unjustified leap from what is natural to what is right. Not only do natural law theorists have to cross the (in my mind) uncrossable is-ought gap, they also have to do it with something so contradictory as nature. It’s in human nature to be bigoted and xenophobic, to rape and murder. It’s also in human nature to oppose these tendencies. Human nature, in other words, is contradictory. From a contradiction, we all know, anything goes. In other words, basing law on human nature is a certain way of achieving the no-rules-no-values-holy society that conservatives fear.
I have a challenge for natural law theorists. If the natural (and thus right) law is “discerned by applying right reason to the observance of human nature”, can you convince a rational agent that this is so? Let’s pretend I’m a rational agent with no prior moral commitments. In fact, I don’t even know how to reason with regards to morality. Otherwise, I’m perfectly rational. I will agree with the conclusion of any sound argument. I will not be convinced by fallacies or emotional appeals. I do not believe that natural law is right and I don’t believe it’s wrong; I’m agnostic. How would you convince me?
No one is able to answer that question. (Personally, I agree with Mackie that morality can’t be objective and nod in the direction of Blackburn that objectivity is a negotiable component of moral discourse.)
So there are two errors here: first, there is an unjustified leap from what is, to what ought to be. Second, if you could justify the leap, you would end up with a contradictory morality — and also a morality that those who espouse natural law most likely would be strongly opposed to.
But that’s not all. Not only does Adrian here commit these two fundamental errors in reasoning, he makes a third, more specific error. He tries to justify denying homosexuals the right to marry by appealing to marriages as they exist in nature, or human nature. Except marriage doesn’t exist in nature. When was the last time you saw two squirrels walking up the aisle? Do you think Australopithecus held marriage ceremonies? What we do know is that heterosexuality and homosexuality exist in nature. Marriage, on the other hand, is a cultural concept. It’s a social creation. It’s not a “state of nature”. Before humans started getting all smart and defying nature, we lived in small groups, composed of both males and females, hunting and gathering. We didn’t live in suburban blocks and apartments in New York, drinking coffee, attending Church, going through the administerial and cultural trivia required to get a marriage certificate, then turn online to make fallacious appeals to nature in defending the denial of marriage to gay people.
Furthermore, there is a whole host of areas in which we humans defy nature that Adrian, Sds and their ideological compadres don’t oppose even though “what does not exist in the natural law, should not exist in the civil law, for then the civil law would have contradicted the very source from which it draws it legitimacy.” In a state of nature, we would die before reaching 40, with bad teeth and a bad health in general, and we would be working physically every day to survive, before turning to a leisure time that we couldn’t fill with all the things that we prefer to fill our leisure time with that didn’t exist at the time.
I haven’t even argued for gay marriage, although it must be obvious what my position on that is, because the opposition makes such fools out of themselves that it’s almost not necessary. I should note that the Norwegian parliament voted to allow gay marriage and adoption earlier this year, effective from January 1, 2009. Homosexuality was illegal in my parents’ lifetime, so we’ve come some way since they were young (as has the world, luckily). A happy day indeed (and I have no plans of marrying or turning gay anytime soon).
