naturalized ethics and natural law
by Sebastian Benthall
One thing that’s become clear to me lately is that I now believe that ethics can be naturalized. I also believe that there is in fact a form of ‘natural law’. By this I mean that that there are rights and values that are inherent to human nature. Real legal systems can either lie up to natural law, or not.
This is not the only position that it’s possible to take on these topics.
One different position, that I do not have, is that ethics depends on the supernatural. I bring this up because religion is once again very politically salient in the United States. Abrahamic religions ground ethics and morality in a covenant between humans and a supernatural God. Divine power authorizes the ethical code. In some cases this is explicitly stated law, in others it is a set of principles. Beyond divine articulation, this position maintains that ethics are supernaturally enforced through reward and punishment. I don’t think this is how things work.
Another position I don’t have is that there is that ethics are opinion or cultural construction, full stop. Certainly there’s a wide diversity of opinions on ethics and cultural attitudes. Legal systems vary from place to place. This diversity is sometimes used as evidence that there aren’t truths about ethics or law to be had. But that is, taken alone, a silly argument. Lots of people and legal systems are simply wrong. Moreover, moral and ethical truths can take contingency and variety into account, and they probably should. It can be true that laws should be well-adapted to some otherwise arbitrary social expectations or material conditions. And so on.
There has historically been hemming and hawing about the fact/value dichotomy. If there’s no supernatural guarantor of ethics, is the natural world sufficient to produce values beyond our animal passions? This increasingly feels like an argument from a previous century. Adequate solutions to this problem have been offered by philosophers over time. They tend to involve some form of rational or reflective process, and aggregation over the needs and opinions of people in heterogeneous circumstances. Habermas comes to mind as a one of the synthesizers of a new definition of naturalized law and ethics.
For some reason, I’ve encountered so much resistance to this form of ethical or moral realism over the years. But looking back on it, I can’t recall a convincing argument for it. I can recall many claims that the idea of ethical and moral truth are somehow politically dangerous, but that this not the same thing.
There is something teleological about most viable definitions of naturalized ethics and natural law. They are would would hypothetically be decided on by interlocutors in an idealized but not yet realized circumstance. A corollary to my position is that ethical and moral facts exist, but many have not yet been discovered. A scientific process is needed to find them. This process is necessarily a social scientific process, since ethical and moral truths are truths about social systems and how they work.
It would be very fortunate, I think, if some academic department, discipline, or research institution were to take up my position. At present, we seem to have a few different political positions available to us in the United States:
- A conservative rejection of the university of being insufficiently moral because of its abandonment of God
- A postmodern rejection of ethical and moral truths that relativizes everything
- A positivist rejection of normativity as the object of social science because of the fact/value dichotomy
- Politicized disciplines that presume a political agenda and then perform research aligned with that agenda
- Explicitly normative disciplines that are discursive and humanistic but not inclined towards rigorous analysis of the salient natural facts
None of these is conducive to a scientific study of what ethics and morals should be. There are exceptions, of course, and many brilliant people in many corners who make great contributions towards this goal. But they seem scattered at the margins of the various disciplines, rather than consolidated into a thriving body of intellect. At a moment where we see profound improvements (yes, improvements!) in our capacity for reasoning and scientific exploration, why hasn’t something like this emerged? It would be an improvement over the status quo.
Digifesto 
Can you give an example of a natural ethical law and how we know it’s true?
What an excellent question.
A couple caveats. I think there’s such a thing as defeasible knowledge. This means that it is possible to know something even if, given certain other reasons, we would cease to believe it. Justification is sufficient for belief knowledge even if it isn’t bulletproof.
Second, I use ‘ethics’ a little ambiguously. I think I mean by it principles or skills that guide individual conduct in a certain way. I use “law” in a more social or collectivized way — I see it as being about norms. These are different but related.
I think prohibitions against child abuse are good examples of ethical rules we know to be true. There are a lot of different reasons why child abuse is wrong. It causes suffering. It treats another as a means, not an end. It generally speaking makes the child less able to be a productive member of society, who can assist with the realization of collective goods. The broader community of rational interlocutors has debated the topic for a long time and come out against it. And so on.
Does it being a “natural law” put it in a different category vs deductive truths, such as mathematics? You saying it should be made “scientific” makes me think you might be thinking of something else. On the other hand, if people have some correct intuition for what’s right or wrong (or levels thereof), you could at least make a traditional scientific study of those intuitions… I can’t claim much familiarity with it, but I feel like there must have been a lot of work on this already?
What do you think of the work of Parfit? What work out there comes closest to what you’d like to see?
Thanks for the interesting post.
I do agree — I think there has been and continues to be a lot of work on what people’s moral intuitions are, empirically.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is a good readable pop-sci book about moral psychology. I’d recommend it as far as I’ve read through it (which is not all the way). I suppose I think that moral psychology is relevant to naturalized morality, but that ‘Person X intuits that action A is immoral’ does not, of course, imply that A is immoral.
Rather, I think there is in principle a set of moral principles that true in a similar way to how physics is true even if it defies some of our intuitions about how things work, or shows that sometimes we are subject to illusions. I think there’s a deductive aspect to this, like in physics — a lot of good work can be done to hammer out the inconsistencies in the logic of morality and law — and also an empirical aspect, because the logical theory needs to be grounded.
You know, I haven’t read Parfit, and that’s silly, because he’s very well known. I should check it out.
I do a lot of work in technology ethics and was trained by Helen Nissenbaum in Contextual Integrity, which is, I’d argue, a naturalized meta-ethical theory that’s more or less consequentialist at a communitarian level. I’m oversimplifying a bit but that’s the rough sketch. I think Habermas also has a substantive approach to law, morality, and ethics which is consistent with what I’m saying.