My thinking on natural law goes back to John Joe Lakers's position that
human morality is governed by one of two metaphors: the metaphor of power and
judgment, and the metaphor of intimacy, which he defines as passionate,
respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of one person with another, or of
one person with God, or of God with us. Intimacy is another word for love.
The metaphor of power and judgment is clearly the more dominant of the
two. It can be found in much of "Old Testament" scripture, and certainly
in most of our criminal law. You judge whether something is right or wrong, and
if it is wrong, you punish it. This suggests a behaviorist assumption of how
humans operate. We act on the basis of punishments and rewards.
JJ, in the months and years before he died, carried on a sustained
attack on natural law theory. But in a sense, he is really stating that each of
his two metaphors is "natural," in the sense that humans naturally
operate on their basis. Therefore the attack should not be on natural law as
such. There is indeed a natural law, but it has both positive and negative
aspects.
Negatively, one could make the case that human beings are structured
naturally to dominate each other, even to the point of slavery, which is what
slave-owners argued. Or that men are naturally sexually promiscuous, which is
what some argue today. Or that men are naturally dominant over women, also
argued today. We have learned, I think, that when a woman leads a professional
life, she is not violating her nature.
On the positive side, we can argue that intimacy is "natural."
When one lives by that metaphor, good things happen. I might argue that
humanity might never have learned the value of that metaphor had not Jesus
taught it, but it might also be true that people have indeed discovered it
outside of Christianity. There is no doubt, however, that for Christians, it
should be dominant. "Love one another as I have loved you" is how
Jesus put it. Or, "The greatest commandment is this: you shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
strength. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as
yourself."
That intimacy can be the basis of a Christian ethic is clear enough. We
get into trouble, however, when we start to define specific behavior as
"natural." Is it any more obvious that contraception is unnatural
than that slavery is unnatural? Or that in vitro fertilization is unnatural
than that male domination is unnatural? Questions like these are the reason that
most social scientists reject the idea of anything being strictly
"natural." For them the nature-nurture debate colors every discussion
of what kind of behavior is good for human beings. To say that something is
natural is to end discussion, and ending discussion is something that a
scientist will not do.
