Does Natural Law Have Any Relevance Today?

I have to tell you all the evolution of my knowledge of modern philosophy, moral philosophy in particular.

When I was growing up, and going to Catholic grade school and high school, all we ever talked about was the natural law and natural rights theory. The Catholic church sure still endorses it. And at the time, I had no reason to believe most modern philosophers didn't either.

But as I got older, and I was exposed to more modern systems of philosophy, I learned of emotivism and noncognitivism--and ethical nihilism in general. I guess that is really the dominant theory in philosophy now.

Anyways, there is one subject that still has some use for it, I have found. In political science, some modern law students subscribe to the view that our laws should be based on a natural law that is above the rest. This is ironic, because they may be using what other philosophers would consider to be a total fiction.

Also, I should tell you. I still somewhat subscribe to the view of natural law and natural rights. It just seems to me, right and wrong are inherent in the fabric of space and time, and that it is indeed absolute and unchanging. Yes, in the past most people at one time believed in slavery and oppressing women. But they were wrong, I think.

Anyways, though, I guess that is really my question. Does natural law have any relevance today, at all? As I said, law students still like it. But they could always be wrong. So where does it stand now?

:scholar:

 

Natural law, and wisdom philosophy in general, have not been popular among academia for over a century. It first began falling out of favor when the French Revolution inspired the modern military-industrial complex instigating the rapid rise of the industrial revolution. Later, the advent of Big Science during the 1920s, when industries started doing their own research on how to build a better mouse trap, radio, or whatever, sealed the fate of natural law and wisdom philosophy. Instead, academic philosophers began focusing on other lines of research that might help all these industries create a better mouse trap as everyone rushed to capitalize on the emerging technology rather than debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether it was wise for philosophers to participate in the military-industrial complex.

However, it appears extremely likely to make a come back in the near future. For over half a century Contextualism has made steady advances in every branch of the sciences and now looks likely to produce the next scientific revolution where all the more traditional metaphysical approaches have consistently failed. The only problem is that most academic philosophers merely espouse Contextualism as a useful tool and don't take it seriously as a philosophy because, duh!, as a philosophy it doesn't support the modern military-industrial complex. Its systems logic related to a Theory of Everything in physics and the next generation supercomputers are expected to be powerful enough to reveal the mathematical foundations, possibly embarrassing the hell out of many physicists who have also failed to produce a Theory of Everything or introduce the next scientific revolution over the last century.

System logic and Contextualism are based on simple pattern matching and I'm writing a book on the subject myself that combines Socratic wisdom with Tribal Taoism to produce a Theory of Everything and Nothing formulated as a simple systems logic. Pattern matching can also be called yin-yang dynamics or instant karma and, while it certainly requires a lot of knowledge of the subject and the willingness to pound your head against the wall for years, it certainly does not require an Einstein which is another reason the physicists and academic philosophers may find themselves seriously embarrassed at having failed to see the obvious.

 

the 'natural law' of diversity being 'law' of nature, is kind of eternal. of course i know that's not exactly the topic. but i sort of think its a more purr-tain-ent one.
pertinant to the problem of tyrannies, how they rise and how they might be prevented.
and technology follows culture the way predator populations depend on the availability of their prey, and not the other way around as is so popular in dominant fantasy,
(though not in science, which knows better)
there is certainly a natural morality, and that is consideration, and a natural and logical reason for it to so be.
and it is the insufficient abundance of universally mutual consideration that sucks all hierarchy into being, and with it tyrannies of all sorts,
which neither ideology nor belief of any sort do anything to prevent.

the problem is at base a cultural one, and that is where beliefs (and all forms of story telling more generally), come into it, or i should say have a responsibility to do so,
because the familiarity of stories motivate, however subconsciously, the formation of cultures.

 

i just read that 70% of species are migrating as a result of global warming - how does natural law work with that?

 

I think we need to clarify what we mean by natural law. As I understand it, natural law in philosophy (not to be confused with natural law in science) is the idea that legal and moral standards can be objectively derived from the nature of the natural order and/or human nature. A natural law in science, of course, is a description of an observed regularity in nature that has been confirmed by such a sizeable body of empirical data and testing that it is accepted by the vast majority of scientists as fact. Natural law in philosophy would say that if such a regularity is established it would have moral and legal implications. It would be wrong to do something that is contrary to natural law. Of course, if we try to violate a scientific law of nature, like the law of gravity, it could have fatal consequences--e.g., taking a flying leap off the top of a 20 story building. Yet many modern philosophers are skeptical that the facts of nature can dictate laws of human conduct. Natural law thinking has been accused of committing the "naturalistic fallacy": making an "is" into an "ought". There are ways around this, though. If we couple the idea of natural law with a premise based on higher purpose or plan, or idea of overall good, then the facts of life can dictate certain moral conclusions: e.g.,preserving human life is valuable; therefore it's wrong to go jumping off tall buildings. Where does the premise of purpose come from? Either from (1) God's Plan: a Higher Power, or from (2) Human Consensus: a presumed moral consensus among humans about what contributes to well-being.

The "God's Plan" version of natural law, illustrated by Catholic natural law thinking, is based on the so-called "natural theology" expressed in Saint Paul's epistle to the Romans. God reveals His will to humans in two ways: scripture and nature. The Bible tells us what God requires, but the patterns of nature should also make His plan clear, such as procreation, so that pagans have "no excuse" for not realizing that same sex relations, for example, are wrong. This thinking was adapted from the Greco-Roman Stoics, who were mostly Pantheists preaching the message "Follow nature". During the more individualistic era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the same logic was used by Deists to claim individual "natural rights".

In our more secular age, where even deism and pantheism are viewed with suspicion, some natural law advocates find their premise in a presumed human consensus on basic values. Ironically, atheist Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape, provides a good example of this, although he'd probably balk at the label "natural law". His theory is widely criticized by those who dispute the consensus. In political science, natural law stands for the position that there are natural normative principles for good government that political leaders and their constituents ignore at their peril. As Saint Augustine put it: "Kingdoms without justice are mere robberies". Our current political scene, in which norms of civility have broken down, and politicians see personal and partisan gain through the pursuit of power, puts this theory to the test, These political animals may not go to hell, but a society based on these principles is likely to do so. In jurisprudence, natural law has come to mean the position that law and morality cannot be separated--i,e. we can't divorce law from considerations of justice or legality. Dr. M.L. KIng said in his Letter from Birmingham Jail about segregation laws, "I agree with Saint Augustine that an unjust law is not a law at all." Lon Fuller developed a secular legal theory of natural law in The Morality of Law, which takes a functionalist approach based on the concept of legality or rule of law. He argued that politicians who used the slogan "law and order" (like Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Nixon and Trump) were the epitome of lawlessness. The purpose or function of law in human society is to order human behavior by means of rules; therefore, anything which promotes disorder by undermining rules is a violation of natural law. In answer to Chodpa's question, for natural law to apply to climate change, we'd have to assume that environmental devastation is either a violation of a Higher Plan or would be something most humans would consider to be undesirable.

 

What comes around goes around is considered natural law by half the planet and a leading candidate for a Theory of Everything. It would mean pattern matching, yin yang dynamics, or whatever you care to call them rule both the mental and physical universe because a context without any significant content is an oxymoron along the lines of a statistic of one. Natural law can work with that by assuming that whether we perceive anything as natural law is context dependent, but all we have to do is keep assembling more pieces of the puzzle and we can gain a better idea of what is going on.

 

the only natural law that is natural and law is what is discovered by the process known as science.
this isn't the beginning and ending of existence, but it is that of knowledge.

 

What quantum mechanics and yin-yang dynamics imply is that nature is fundamentally creative which is why John Wheeler once declared, "A black hole has no hair! Gravity without mass! Time is what prevents everything from happening at once! There is no law except the law that there is no law!" Which, of course, explains why a perfect vacuum is impossible as due to everything and nothing, including the Big Crunch, resembling the initial creative impetus of the Big Bang. To quote Billy Preston, "Nothing from nothing ain't nothing, ya gotta have something, if you wanna dance with me" and the ultimate law of nature is everything must remain context dependent including what does and does not exist, what is truth and what is bullshit, ensuring we must take even our own knowledge, awareness, and creativity on faith. Such spontaneous creativity can explain why everything produces maximum entropy production and seeks out the lowest possible energy state of the system as expressions of how the greater synergistic context must supply its own normalized content necessary because the alternative is along the lines of "A Statistic of One" which nature enforces, among other things, that we laugh sometimes just to supply it with content.

Authenticity becomes more important than knowledge or, as Socrates is credited with saying, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing" because the more humble we become in some respects the more outrageously creative in others. It is only in our remaining humble that knowledge has any meaning and the humble simplicity of a toddler means they can be more creative in other ways such as mindlessly slinging zingers all day long precisely because they have no clue what they are saying. It is what Socrates called the memory of God, or the greater context of the truth that the truth determines the identity of everything by lending everything meaning unconditionally.

 

A watched pot of entangled quanta will never boil or change in any way whatsoever.

The lowest possible energy state can achieve any higher energy state the fastest, thus, making it simultaneously the simplest and most complex.

Life is ambiguous.

 

Indulge yourself in the tantras brother, the pornography of the mind is transmuted into a crystallisation of desired sensations. The intellect takes a backseat, but the fascination is clear