In his recent book, John Lawrence HillFootnote 9 chronicles the rise and decline of the Western natural law tradition, and argues that its reemergence in modern times is essential to preserving and making sense of our most fundamental Western moral, legal, and political values: freedom, personal responsibility, and human dignity.
Hill argues that intellectual history does not flow linearly, but swings between the poles of theistic natural law and materialism. These two worldviews have opposing understandings about the fundamental nature of reality—about what is real and what causes things to change. Theistic natural law holds that the world, as created by a good and knowable God, is ordered, purposeful, and intelligible, and that change is directed toward the ultimate perfection of things. Moreover, human consciousness is shaped by the imago Dei, “the notion that we have been made in God's image,” and is rooted in the soul that attains its proper end by becoming a better reflection of that divine image. On the other hand, materialism holds that all changing phenomena we observe in the world is the accidental result of material processes, and that human consciousness is nothing more than a byproduct of the brain. Writing as a Roman Catholic, Hill clearly favors the theistic natural law perspective.
Part I of the book examines the evolution of natural law, from its roots in Greek teleology to its full flowering in the writing of the thirteenth-century Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas. The teleology introduced by Plato more than 2,000 years ago holds that all things have their own particular end—their particular ‘form’ of perfection—towards which they are inherently driven. Change is that very process by which things move, or are attracted towards, their own ‘forms.’ Plato's student, Aristotle, took Plato's idealism and applied it to the world of matter and to the question of how human beings should live in the world. For Aristotle, all things, including human beings, are composites of ‘form’ (in the Platonic sense) and matter. A thing's form is its essence—the “active principle” that drives it through a process of change or growth towards the perfection of its inherent potentiality. The notion of form, end, or essence, Hill argues, is essential for us to be able to coherently draw conclusions about notions of the ‘good,’ ethics, and happiness.
From the ancient Greek philosophers, Hill moves to the Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas, who is commonly remembered as “the synthesizer of Christian Theology and Aristotelian philosophy.” Aquinas adopts Aristotle's idea of form or essence, holding that natural inclinations are directed towards the human good, and human consciousness, through education and the right external conditions, and is naturally designed to achieve its perfect end. He also borrows the idea, nurtured by both Aristotle and the Stoics, that the ordered and intelligible nature of reality, the logos, is mirrored in human nature. From Christian scripture, Aquinas fleshes out the principle that Divine Providence is the originator of logos. God, therefore, is at the foundation of Aquinas's worldview. Human law and morality is only ‘true’ if it conforms to God's eternal law or natural law.
Hill closes Part I of the book by considering several objections to natural law, but he ends up rejecting these objections, along with several innovative defenses of natural lawFootnote 10 that are not grounded in teleological metaphysics. As Hill notes, the very purpose of his book is to demonstrate that unless ‘Nature’ is directed towards human happiness and virtue, it is not possible to look at our natural condition and draw moral conclusions from it. Natural law and teleology must go hand in hand.
In Part II of the book, Hill chronicles the gradual decline of the natural law tradition. He begins with four significant modern philosophers: William of Ockham, Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes. Ockham takes aim at the idea of forms and universals; individual trees exist out in the world, but there is no common ‘form’ of tree that unites and represents all particular trees. Likewise, we can speak of individual human beings and their qualities, but not of any essential human nature. Ockham's denial of universals, Hill argues, which is essentially a denial that humans can share a common telos, begins a trend in modern philosophy that cuts to the heart of the natural law worldview.
Descartes, in his reflections on what can be known with certainty, identifies the person with mental properties: “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes sees the mind as utterly distinct from the body; he thereby, like Ockham, retreats from the Aristotelean idea that a person is a composite of body and soul. John Locke furthers the retreat by positing the existence of perceived qualities (e.g., redness, sweetness, etc.) in the place of a solid ‘self,’ and Hobbes, the first modern materialist, completely explodes the notion of self; he not only dismisses the idea of substance or essence, but denies the existence of Locke's phenomenal qualities as being nothing more than projections of the mind. The concept of self, for Hobbes, is little more than a way of organizing experience, and ideas such as Truth have no relation to human nature or the world, but are merely attributes of speech.
The gradual abandonment of the teleological self and the natural law worldview established a trend towards moral relativism. Hill identifies two philosophical systems, utilitarianism and the metaphysics of Emmanuel Kant, that emerged in the late eighteenth century as a way to hold on to the view of objective moral truth without depending on the idea of God as designer or on the truth of teleology. Utilitarianism defines the goodness of an act by its consequences. In the form promulgated by the classical utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the best measure of the appropriateness of an act is whether it maximizes overall happiness for all human beings.
Kant, on the other hand, argues that all actions have an intrinsic nature. Murder is wrong in and of itself — not only because it leads to unhappiness. For Kant, the right action, motivated by a sense of duty, is prior to the good action. And ‘duty’ is determined in a particular circumstance through the exercise of human reason, which, for Kant, is not necessarily tied to any objective moral law.
Because utilitarianism and Kantian ethics both move away from notions of natural rights, Hill argues, they did not stem the tide towards moral relativism. Moreover, this relativism infiltrated modern theories of Western jurisprudence, resulting in a “divorce of law and morality.” The legal positivism of John Austin (i.e., law is nothing more than orders backed by threats) and the legal realism of the twentieth century (i.e., there are no objective legal rules; law happens “when the gavel comes down”) are two examples.
Hill concludes by arguing that the decline of teleologically grounded natural law and the diminishing reliance on the idea of objective morality has eroded the foundation of the three core moral and political values of Western civilization: freedom, responsibility, and human dignity. True freedom depends on real free will, which does not exist in a materialist, deterministic worldview that denies the reality of our choices.Footnote 11 A deterministic world, devoid of the reality of free choice, belies “our deepest moral intuitions.” And if we deny the reality of free choice, we also negate the reality of personal responsibility, thereby rendering the notions of mercy and forgiveness meaningless. Furthermore, we risk undermining one of our most significant political values—liberty.
Finally, while talents, skills, capacities, and inclinations vary among people, true human dignity, which forms the justification for human rights legislation, depends upon the idea that the human being has inherent worth. Such an idea makes little sense, Hill argues, unless it is grounded in Aristotelian teleology and the Christian doctrine of imago Dei.
It is clear by the end of the book that Hill sees our ability to make real free choices as critical to preserving the teleological world view and its three corollary values of freedom, responsibility, and human dignity. Indeed, he devotes one passionate and persuasive chapter, “Doing Without Free Will,” to dismantling the deterministic view of the world entailed by materialism. But is ontologically ‘real’ free will necessary to Hill's argument?
Stoicism, discussed early in Part I of the book, offers one example of a natural law based worldview that does not include free will as part of the equation. Human beings partake in a divine ordering principle known as the logos by virtue of their capacity to reason. The task of human beings is to resign themselves to the logos, which, as an expression of the will of providence, will “unfold exactly as [it] must by necessity.”
Because law is embodied in the divine logos, expressed in nature, and known by reason, it is binding on us rationally and morally. The question of whether our conduct comports with the divine law can be determined by looking at the “inner intention of an act” rather than the consequences, which are beyond the capacity and foresight of our will. Clearly, the Stoics’ position that free choice is ultimately illusory does not prevent them from positing a universe that is ordered and intelligible, nor does it preclude them from measuring human action according to notions of intent (which assumes the capacity to choose freely).
What seems critical to the Stoics’ worldview and to teleology more broadly is not the ontological reality or unreality of free will, but the experience we all presumably share of making choices. This subjective feeling is perhaps all that is necessary to participating fully in the divinely ordered logos, and in seeking to be pulled to our perfected end. Hill's point about free will, therefore, might have come into sharper focus had he emphasized the human experience of making free choices, and that, with its scant regard for this undeniable aspect of human awareness, the contemporary materialistic worldview makes little intuitive sense.
While Hill makes a compelling argument that natural law provides a strong foundation for principles of freedom and human dignity, he is less than persuasive when it comes to his emphasis on the classical Christian conception of God as being an integral part of a teleological worldview. In both his chapter on Thomas Aquinas and his concluding chapter “Why God Matters,” Hill makes a strong case that a divine ordering principle that is intelligible, purposeful, and not arbitrary, and that is mirrored in our own spiritual nature, is crucial to the idea that morality is much more than human convention. But his argument is ultimately too narrow, focusing on the Christian God without seriously considering other religious perspectives.
For example, while Hill briefly references Eastern traditions in the first chapter of the book, he does so in one short paragraph in which he classifies Hinduism and Buddhism as extreme positions of “radical monism and radical nihilism.” Whether or not this characterization is true, surely these venerable traditions deserve more than a one paragraph analysis and summary dismissal. In any event, it seems less than obvious that a distinctly Christian conception of God is crucial to the natural law worldview.
All in all, however, After the Natural Law serves as a rigorous and lucidly written account of the intellectual history of the natural law worldview, and a persuasive call for re-examining, learning from, and revitalizing classical Western teleological philosophy. With its penetrating insight into how questions of reality and the purpose of human existence directly apply to articulating a foundation for modern moral, legal, and political values, the book, at the very least, is likely to stimulate reflection about what, if any, connection there should be between our moral and metaphysical assumptions. Given its tremendous breadth of historical and intellectual coverage, the book can be recommended to a broad readership, though perhaps especially to students and scholars of philosophy, jurisprudence, and Christian theology.
