In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in natural law within Protestant circles, driven by hopes of finding resources for moral agreement in the midst of a highly conflictual public sphere.Footnote 1 New scholarship has uncovered a continuous tradition of natural law reflection within the Reformed tradition in particular.Footnote 2 Despite all that Karl Barth's attack on natural theology accomplished by way of obscuring its traces, the jury is in: Reformed theologians took a natural-law framework for ethical reflection for granted well into the nineteenth century. But the phrase ‘Protestant natural law’ has long been used as a synonym for ‘modern natural law’, and identified with the likes of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke.Footnote 3 What is not yet clear is how the recently uncovered tradition of Reformed natural law reflection stands in relation to so-called modern natural law, and its own claim to represent Protestant natural law. There tends to be a disjunct in the scholarship. So, for example, David Van Drunen's important Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, which aims to tell a continuous story about Reformed thinking on natural law into the present, has no index entries for Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke or Hobbes, while Knud Haakonssen's Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment, although attentive to theological matters, makes no reference to the leading figures of Reformed scholasticism which are key to Van Drunen's account of seventeenth-century natural law reflection: Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), Samuel Rutherford (1600–61) and Frances Turretin (1623–87).Footnote 4 Interestingly, though, the narratives do intersect in discussing eighteenth-century American reflection on the natural law, and its roots in common-sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote 5
Contemporary Reformed retrievals of natural law have sought to show not simply that there is continuous reflection on natural law within the Reformed thought, but also that it has a distinctive and theologically compelling shape. While Reformed reflection on natural law was hardly uniform in its details, there has been general agreement that knowledge of the natural moral law, though universally available to humanity in its fallen state, is not saving knowledge. It serves primarily to provide grounds for moral responsibility, rendering fallen human beings culpable for their sins. But it also makes a stable secular order possible. It thus offers a theological and scriptural account of a universal common morality. By recovering that tradition, we can equip Reformed Christians to participate in public moral discourse with a well-grounded expectation that this can be productive and with confidence that this participation does not undermine their core theological commitments.Footnote 6
Now, I want here at the outset to underscore my wholehearted agreement with the conclusion that Reformed Christians can participate fully and optimistically in public moral discourse without sacrificing their core theological commitments. I think it is important to add a cautionary note, however: while a Reformed conception of natural law can undergird a general willingness to take part in public moral discourse aimed at constructing a just civic order, it should not be seen as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. It is simply not tailored to the task of providing concrete ethical knowledge. Moreover, the secularisation of modern natural law discourse is directly linked to pressures exerted by the hope and expectation that the natural law could provide such norms.
We can quickly add that Calvin never really expected it to do this kind of work. We can see this by attending to his accounts both of conscience and of natural human instincts. First, as I will unpack in greater detail below, he thought that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he held that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. Whenever natural law has been looked to as a source of concrete ethical knowledge, this has created pressures which tend to empty out the substance of key Reformed commitments which animated Calvin's thought, leaving behind intuitionist appeals to conscience, empiricist appeals to human nature, or unstable conflations of the two. Those thinkers who preserved an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge. Meanwhile, when characteristic features of Reformed natural law thinking were joined with the expectation that natural law could deliver action-guiding moral knowledge, they merged with the modern natural law enterprise of the secular science of human nature, the contemporary heirs of which include such social-scientific enterprises as evolutionary psychology.
The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. Our instincts, they thought, can themselves reveal our duties. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. Modern natural law thinkers, even when they insisted that God's will was the source of moral obligation, were not particularly interested in demonstrating the culpability of fallen humanity. Their focus instead was on developing as complete an account as possible of natural moral knowledge, in a way which could guide legislation and shape international law, even in the context of ongoing confessional divides. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption.Footnote 7
Modern natural law reflection was easily harnessed to providentialist natural theologies. Close attention to the salient features of human nature, such as the ways in which sociability and self-interest worked together to form stable social units, could provide evidence of the benevolent intentions of its Creator. But the providentialist interpretation was also dispensable, since extrinsic to the task of discerning the outlines of the moral science of human nature. Modern natural law reflection thus fed into the emerging secular social sciences and their study of the empirical regularities of human behaviour. Yet Calvin's own sense both of the opaque transcendence of divine wisdom and of the sharp separation between heavenly and earthly things prepared the ground for this emergence of a secular moral science which eventually saw no need to reflect on heavenly things. It is not a misnomer that the modern natural lawyers have often been dubbed the Protestant natural lawyers. Moreover, when Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human nature, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, were too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind.
There is a contemporary point to rehearsing this history. For, in our own context, it is tempting to look to natural law discourse not simply to justify the wholehearted participation of Christians in the public square, but to adjudicate controverted moral questions of our day. The moral of the story I am telling is that Reformed natural law reflection sets its eyes on this prize only at its own peril.
Obviously, within the confines of a single article I cannot develop all aspects of this story in equal detail. I will begin by sketching Calvin's account of conscience and his account of the instinct for sociability, both of which are key to making sense of his understanding of natural law. Conscience and instinct have to do, respectively, with the capacities of intellect and will under the conditions of the fall. I will indicate how Calvin's account departed from scholastic natural law, as exemplified by Thomas Aquinas, and how these departures made sense within Calvin's theological framework.Footnote 8 I then turn to Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon and their efforts to promote the science of human nature while restoring more robust Reformed theological commitments which they felt had been lost by the modern natural lawyers. In the American common-sense philosophy which both influenced, intuitionist accounts of conscience and providentialist accounts of human instincts were easily conflated, with both placed in service of the nation-building project.
Calvin on conscience
Calvin writes quite unambiguously in the Institutes that ‘the purpose of natural law. . . is to render man inexcusable’.Footnote 9 He goes on immediately to suggest that ‘this would not be a bad definition: natural law is that apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes sufficiently between just and unjust, and which deprives men of the excuse of ignorance, while it proves them guilty by their own testimony’. Natural law is linked emphatically with judicial conscience, and in particular with awareness of divine judgement.Footnote 10 There is a kind of knowledge of God which remains even after the fall, but it does not adequately teach us how God is to be worshipped. Similarly, there is a natural grasp of the distinction between good and evil, just and unjust, which remains to fallen humanity through God's kindness and general grace.Footnote 11 While the human mind is more acute with respect to God's moral law than with respect to knowledge of God and God's favour to us, the purpose of this knowledge, just like the residual knowledge of God which remains to the unregenerate, is to render them without excuse.Footnote 12 Now, in fact, Calvin does think that natural law can also explain why societies ordered with some degree of justice are possible apart from Christian faith. But what is primary for Calvin is the way in which conscience brings us before the judgement seat of God. His reading of Romans 2:14–15 is key here. It is just for the Gentiles to be judged by God according to the law, since they know what the law requires; it is written on their hearts. In particular, they have knowledge of both tables of the Ten Commandments: they know that there is a god who ought to be worshipped, and they know that they ought to treat their neighbours justly and equitably.Footnote 13 For Calvin, it is by way of conscience that we become aware of the natural law written on our hearts. Conscience is a knowing-with God's knowledge of us; it is an immediate access to God's judgement.Footnote 14 It is by way of our awareness of God's judgement that we become aware, even apart from revealed law, of the law according to which God judges us. Thus, our access to the natural law, and the function of antecedent or legislative conscience, is derivative of the primary reality of judicial or consequent conscience.Footnote 15
Because of his understanding of how conscience reveals natural law in the context of God's judgement of us, Calvin holds that even fallen humanity has access not simply to general moral principles, but to truths concerning the moral quality of specific actions and motives. As Van Drunen points out ‘it is surely ironic that Calvin, whose thought many have portrayed as fundamentally hostile to natural law, seemed to believe that, through conscience, a far greater amount of specific moral knowledge is immediately accessible to all people than did Thomas’.Footnote 16 And because conscience is a knowing-with God's knowledge of us, it is in some sense infallible. At the same time, Calvin's broader theological point is that fallen humanity has sufficient knowledge to justify being held responsible by God, not that this knowledge successfully functions to enable good action. So, on the one hand it is important to Calvin to be able to claim that all nations condemn murder, theft, adultery and false witness, thus grasping the precepts of the second table of the Decalogue.Footnote 17 On the other hand, Calvin holds that sinners ignore the judgements of conscience in a variety of ways. We avert our minds from the evil we commit, covering our vices with a semblance of goodness, even if we later suffer from an uneasy conscience.Footnote 18 This often happens in the course of applying a general principle to our own particular situation. ‘In reply to the general question, every man will affirm that murder is evil’, notes Calvin. ‘But’, he goes on, ‘he who is plotting the death of an enemy contemplates murder as something good.’Footnote 19 Habitual hypocrisy of this kind results in a kind of moral insensibility or dulled conscience.Footnote 20 It is also possible to act contrary to conscience, knowingly doing evil even without imposing on oneself a ‘false image of the good’.Footnote 21 So, natural moral knowledge is obscured and ignored in a variety of ways. Moreover, despite the fact that conscience is in some sense infallible, the knowledge that it gives is at the same time incomplete.Footnote 22 It does not instruct us about God's true nature or the appropriate way to worship God, and it does not extend to the evil of concupiscence, evil desires as opposed to wrong or unjust actions.Footnote 23
When Calvin's attention is focused not on how natural moral knowledge renders humanity inexcusable, but rather on the relationship between civil and revealed law, natural law appears in a different light. Here his point is that present-day nations are not bound by the ceremonial or judicial laws of the Jews, but simply by the moral law. Equity ought to be ‘the goal and rule and limit’ of all laws, and equity is natural and hence the same for all. One might wonder, if natural law is explicitly seen as a guide for the ordering of civil society, why judicial law is excluded. Calvin's answer is that judicial law gave particular laws to the Jews, ‘with regard to the condition of times, place, and nation’.Footnote 24 These laws embodied equity, but in particular ways which are not universally applicable. Calvin's example is punishment. While all nations naturally know, for instance, that stealing is wrong, natural law does not prescribe specific penalties for specific offences. It is legitimate for different ages and countries to mete out different punishments, all equally aimed at securing equity. Hence, Calvin suggests that the natural law can enable Christian nations to distinguish the moral from the ceremonial and judicial revealed laws. The point is not to use natural law to construct a body of detailed norms embodying equity, but rather to appeal to the natural law in order to argue against those who would impose divine laws, particular to the Jewish people, on all nations.
Contrast with Aquinas on conscience
Whereas patristic thinkers, following Paul, discussed both judicial and legislative conscience, the attention of scholastic thinkers was focused primarily on legislative conscience, and distinguished between synderesis and conscience. For Aquinas, synderesis is an innate disposition which grasps the first principles of practical reason, parallel to the intellect's grasp of certain self-evident speculative principles. Synderesis is infallible and incorruptible. Conscience, in contrast, is the act of applying general moral principles to a particular case; it is what we would call a particular moral judgement or judgement of conscience. Error can enter into conscience in a variety of ways, through errors in application as well as errors of fact.Footnote 25
Thomas’ position made it possible to hold both that there is an infallible moral knowledge which is universally available (through synderesis) and that this conveys knowledge only of the most general moral principles; disagreement and error are to be expected, given what is involved in the particular judgements of conscience. There is no infallible source of specific moral knowledge; conscience cannot give me definitive assurance that if I bludgeon this intruder I am acting in legitimate self-defence and not committing murder, although it can fallibly make such a judgement. As Irena Backus notes, ‘to Aquinas the term natural law applied in its strict sense not to the natural tendencies and inclinations of man on which his reason reflects but to the precepts that his reason enunciates as a result of this reflection’.Footnote 26 Whereas for Calvin conscience directly places the individual before the judgement of God, Aquinas’ understanding both of conscience and of natural law allow to human reason, as Backus says, ‘a certain amount of autonomy in the moral realm’.Footnote 27
The distinction between Aquinas’ and Calvin's ways of affirming both moral knowledge and moral error may not seem particularly significant. After all, while Calvin holds that conscience gives us immediate awareness of God's judgement of our individual actions, and thereby of the natural law according to which we are judged, he also holds that we regularly evade and obscure our consciences. Hence, while conscience theoretically offers quite specific infallible moral knowledge, practically speaking we often remain in error and self-deception. That this is culpable error and culpable self-deception does not change the fact that, practically speaking, conscience does not function to give us the very specific, infallible knowledge which it seems to hold out. Yet this new understanding of conscience was to take hold and outlive Calvin's understanding of the fall and what it has done to the natural gifts of intellect and will, giving rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to an understanding of conscience as a faculty which provides concrete, authoritative moral guidance to each individual. Lost was Thomas’ notion that the principles of practical reason grasped by synderesis are too general to be in themselves action-guiding, and thus that fallible human reason, informed by revealed divine law, must work out how good is to be pursued and evil to be avoided in each particular moral context. Thomas’ understanding of the interplay between synderesis and conscience required active human judgement and a holistic reflection drawing on all possible sources of knowledge. Calvin's understanding of conscience supported a passive reliance on conscience, together with a sharp separation of earthly from heavenly affairs.
This difference in how conscience is conceived is closely connected with broader theological differences in how human agency, the natural law, and our final end are related together. Calvin does hold, with Aquinas, that our final end is eternal life with God and that the natural law in some sense directs us towards that end.Footnote 28 We can be united to an infinitely righteous God only if we become holy.Footnote 29 The law points out this goal of holiness towards which we are to strive. And for both, it is the case that only Christ makes possible our holiness; neither thinks that we are capable of achieving our final end apart from grace.Footnote 30 Yet the relation between the natural law and our final end is nevertheless conceived quite differently by the two thinkers. For Calvin, the accent falls on obedience to God's commands. For Aquinas, in contrast, the accent falls on rational creatures’ participation, both by nature and by grace, in God's activity of directing all things to Godself. Calvin asks, ‘how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him’.Footnote 31 Our task is to commit ourselves fully to God's service, to making God's will the law by which we live. We must dismiss our own counsels and those of all men and be attentive to the will of God alone.Footnote 32 It is thus critical that we have reliable access to the will of God, access which bypasses our own counsels. This is precisely what conscience provides on Calvin's account. We can know with confidence that God's commands direct us to the good, but we may not directly pursue the good. We cannot fathom the reasons of God's providence; they have been hidden from us.Footnote 33 Our task is to submit ourselves to God's command. Whereas Aquinas emphasises that the transcendence of our supernatural end means that only grace-infused virtues and gifts allow us to grasp and effectively act for the sake of that end, Calvin concludes that we should not seek directly to fathom an opaque supernatural reality. Rather we ought to obey God's clear directives.
Calvin on instinct
Calvin discusses conscience and its grasp of God's judgement in relation to the state of the intellect after the fall. But there is another aspect of Calvin's understanding of natural law which emerges in his discussion of the state of the will after the fall. Calvin's broader argument is that the will, like the intellect, is deeply vitiated, though it is a natural gift which could not be utterly destroyed without destroying human nature as such.Footnote 34 Whereas it is conscience which gives even the fallen intellect access to the natural law, it is instinct which gives vitiated will a kind of access to natural law. Calvin notes that ‘the philosophers teach that all things seek good through a natural instinct, and this view is received with general consent’.Footnote 35 But Calvin emphasises that this is merely an instinct. It does not issue from an upright will capable of freely choosing the good. In fact, it is a natural desire which human beings have in common with animals. Here Calvin is drawing on the civilian understanding of the natural law, as opposed to that shared by canonists and theologians. Civil lawyers had accepted the definition of natural law given by the Roman jurist Ulpian as recorded in Justinian's Digest: natural law as that which nature teaches all animals. Given this definition, civilians had not been particularly interested in the category of natural law, though they had developed the somewhat parallel but more empirical and inductive notion of the law of nations.Footnote 36 Canonists and theologians, meanwhile, had understood the natural law as particular to human beings, and as prescribing the fulfilment of natural inclinations, including those shared with other animals, in ways which are suitable for rational animals.Footnote 37
This understanding of natural inclination is embedded within a broader assumption that God has created all things with an immanent tendency to return to God, who is the final end of creation. This means something different for various kinds of creatures; for inanimate objects their regularity of motion, for living things their capacity to sustain themselves and their kind by acting instinctively in ordered ways, and for human beings, the capacity to order their own actions and the natural world in conformity with God's purposes, participating by virtue of reason in divine providence. The return to God is not an absorption back into God; it is accomplished when those created by God come to know and love their Creator, returning the love that brought them into being in a mirroring which is the perfection of the imago dei.Footnote 38
When this assumption of an immanent summons of creation by God was lost, the relationship between the divine law and its requirements on the one hand, and natural well-being on the other, came to be seen as extrinsic. The natural order of creation could still be a kind of expression of God's glory, as well as an arena for the expression of divine benevolence towards created being, but it lacks a dynamic ordering to God. Thomas sought to show how the image of God in human beings made it possible for them to pursue the good as such, rather than merely what is advantageous for the agent, and so to participate, if in a limited, fallible way, in God's providential care for the well-being of the whole of creation. In contrast, in Calvin's account we have on the one hand God's providential coordination of private advantage through instincts given to all creatures and remaining to human beings after the fall and, on the other hand, obedience to God. The fall has rendered participation in providence through reflective reason impossible; we are left with instinct on the one hand and obedience on the other. Right reason is now obedient reason, not reason which rightly grasps what is good in itself; the moral order of creation has become opaque to us. It is through obedience that we rightly relate to God, not through consciously aligning ourselves with God's purposes. There is a desire for well-being which is natural to us, but this is not a natural desire for our perfection as embodied rational agents, but rather for what is beneficial for us as natural creatures. ‘Good’ here, argues Calvin, ‘refers not to virtue or justice but to condition, as when things go well with man’.Footnote 39 So Calvin's reason for invoking something like the civilian understanding of natural law as instinct is to show that this is not natural law properly speaking; the instincts we have in common with other animals point us towards our natural well-being, not to the principles according to which we are judged by God, nor to the end of eternal blessedness towards which God is leading the elect.
While the instinct to pursue natural well-being is for Calvin clearly distinct from our knowledge via conscience of God's law, the instinct to sociability is nevertheless relevant to understanding Calvin's account of natural law. For Calvin explicitly links the knowledge of earthly things pertaining to social order with certain natural instincts. ‘Since man is by nature a social animal’, he writes, ‘he tends through natural instinct to foster and preserve society’.Footnote 40 Calvin takes this notion of natural sociability, which was to play a central role in modern natural law reflection, from the Stoics.Footnote 41 He draws a tight connection between this natural instinct and the power of understanding earthly things, which has been less affected by sin than the power of understanding heavenly things. In connection with this social instinct, we also ‘observe that there exist in all men's minds’ ‘universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order’, the seeds of which have ‘been implanted in all men’.Footnote 42
It is key to obedience to God's law that it be grasped and respected in its character as law – something which conscience makes possible, if imperfectly, for the unregenerate. This is not key for the practical knowledge of earthly things – including the task of establishing civic order and discipline, as with developing medicine, mathematical science and all useful arts.Footnote 43 Therefore, it is not surprising that instinct can give us access to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. Fallen will and intellect can work together in this arena. In this sense, we can say that instinct gives us another avenue of access to natural law – but we must immediately add that, for Calvin, it does not give us access to natural law as law. This only conscience can do, insofar as conscience is an awareness of God's judgement of us and thereby of the principles according to which God judges us.
Calvin's account of conscience was sustained within the Reformed tradition all the way up through Thomas Reid, and entered through this tradition into popular common-sense philosophy. However, for many thinkers the appeal to conscience ceased to function primarily as a theodicy, an account of why it is just for God to hold fallen human beings responsible for their moral failures. Instead, it came to be regarded primarily as a positive source of moral knowledge which can clarify and confirm revelation. Meanwhile, modern natural law thinkers took up the enterprise of deriving natural law from the analysis of salient features of human nature, and in particular from the twin instincts of self-interestedness and human sociability. Rather than appealing to conscience to reveal the properly legal character of natural law, however, they offered deflated accounts of conscience and did not regard Romans 2 as central to their accounts of natural law.Footnote 44 In late eighteenth-century America, reflection on conscience and on instinct came back together in the common-sense philosophy which borrowed first from Hutcheson and then from Reid. Conscience and instinct were often brought together in a way which would have been unrecognisable to Calvin, however – the distinction between duty, grasped through conscience, and advantage, grasped through instinct, has faded, and the insistence that the fall has left the will incapable of conforming to right reason is a mere shadow of its former self. Yet Calvin's insistence that conscience does deliver specific, action-guiding moral knowledge, even to fallen humanity, ironically helped to make this optimistic anthropology believable. An intuitionist conscience was initially attractive to those who held that the infinite gap between God and humanity made it impossible to grasp the ways of Providence and thus to arrive through reason at an adequate account of human duties. Yet that very same divine–human gap also fuelled efforts to give accounts of morality which were focused solely on human nature and human instincts, with no reference to God's eternal law or to any supernatural end for humanity.Footnote 45
Carmichael and the study of human nature
To see this, I turn briefly to Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729), translator of Samuel Pufendorf, admirer of Hugo Grotius, and important influence on Francis Hutcheson, who succeeded him to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. Because the writings of Francis Hutcheson were one of the most important conduits of natural law thought into the American context, Carmichael is a key thinker to examine in order to understand the form of Reformed natural law reflection which shaped early American thought.
As enthusiastic as he was about modern natural law thought, Carmichael sought at the same time to engage in some theological damage control.Footnote 46 It is not clear that the result is wholly coherent. He agrees with Grotius and Pufendorf that ethics is a demonstrative science founded in the nature of things and wholly independent of revealed (though not of natural) theology (1, 10–11). Where Calvin had assumed that revelation gives us more certain knowledge than fallen human reason, and therefore that we look to revealed divine law in order better to grasp natural law, Carmichael assumes the reverse: that independent human reflection on the nature of things can confirm and help to interpret revealed theology (1, 13).
We are able through the use of reason to understand that we were not created for ourselves but for God (2.2, 22). By acting in ways which testify to our love and veneration for God, we serve God's glory, the display of which is God's end in all his works (5.3, 47). We are to serve God's glory, though, not simply because we grasp that it is good to do so but because God wills that we do so. We thus properly display our love and veneration for God by obeying God's law. This we do, moreover, only when we do what God's law requires because God requires it (2.10, 25). To obey the law out of fear of penalties is unjust (4, 43). However, what sounds like a traditional Reformed theocentrism, emphasising obedience over the active pursuit of divine ends, soon shows itself to contain a quick route to the anthropocentrism so pervasive in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural theology: for God's perfection shines out in a particularly radiant way in God's benevolence towards rational creatures. It is thus reasonable to conclude that we fulfil our mediate duties to God, those duties which express veneration towards God through how they relate to created things, by following God's example of treating the ‘universal system of rational creatures’ with benevolence (subordinated to love and reverence for God).Footnote 47
In some senses, Carmichael does grasp what has been lost in the modern natural lawyer's focus on the earthly welfare of humanity. In contrast to Pufendorf, he argues that natural law ought not to abstract from belief in the immortality of the soul and the afterlife (3, 30). In fact, it is not simply a generic notion of eternal happiness, but the beatific vision of God, which plays a key role in his moral philosophy. And yet it plays an awkward role, inserting an element of egoism which he seems to think is needed in order effectively to determine the will to obey God. Carmichael regularly began his exposition of the first principles of moral philosophy by noting that ‘it is natural for man to strive to be as happy as he can and to avoid misery so far as possible’ (1, 20). While this is a faint echo of the scholastic tradition and its roots in classical eudaimonism, Carmichael is employing not the rich and elastic conception of eudaimonia, but rather merely pleasure and immunity from pain (3, 36). Not only is it natural for us to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but our wills are determined by that which we think will lead to our greatest happiness and permit us to escape misery; this is the ‘original law’ of our nature (2.1, 21; 2.4, 22). Hence, while we recognise that we ought to obey God and serve God's glory, we are able to do so only when obedience to God is rendered agreeable to our nature (2.4, 22). This, argues Carmichael, is in fact the case; perfect obedience to God will be rewarded with the beatific vision, in which we will experience ultimate pleasure. In light of this moral psychology, his insistence that we ought to obey God's law because it is God's law, and not because of any rewards or penalties attached to obedience and disobedience, rings rather hollow. It would seem that he rather takes us to be obeying God because we know that doing so is the sure path to personal pleasure. It is difficult to render this consistent with his conviction that we ought to obey the natural law just because God requires it.Footnote 48
To put all of this in Calvin's terms of the goodness of condition versus the goodness of justice, Carmichael's thought is that we are psychologically capable of acting for the sake of the goodness of justice only when we believe that this will contribute to our goodness of condition. Carmichael does not grasp that this means that we can never truly act for the sake of the goodness of justice. And where Calvin saw in our irresistible tendency to pursue our own goodness of condition a result of the fall, Carmichael sees a neutral fact about human nature, which has called for God's providential connection of subjective human happiness with due subordination to God. This is not to say that Carmichael has utterly forgotten his Reformed commitment to the doctrine of the fall. He notes that in our degenerate condition it is uncertain whether our actions can contribute to obtaining beatitude. Nevertheless, he insists that we may ‘hope with some prospect of justice’ that they will (2.7, 24). This is as far as one can go within natural theology; he elsewhere notes that we fail to keep the precepts of the natural law and should not place our hopes in arriving at ‘absolute happiness’ by means of keeping them. Indeed, our hopes for happiness should not finally rest on anything we can ourselves achieve; natural religion ought to be a subordinate ‘helpmate’ to revealed religion (3, 49–50). Carmichael certainly intends to repair secularising damage incurred within the natural law tradition. But in his enthusiasm for developing the natural law as a moral science which calculates how best to benefit the universal system of rational creatures, he ends up with an incongruous mixture of providentialist natural ethics and Reformed interpolations.
Conscience after Calvin
If Carmichael gives us an example of how powerful the appeal of a moral science of human instincts could prove for Reformed thinkers, John Witherspoon offers a corresponding example of the ways in which understandings of conscience among Reformed thinkers shifted in the service of a constructive natural law. As I have already mentioned, the seventeenth-century modern natural lawyers had no use for a faculty of conscience which gave immediate access to God's law, tending to view conscience as conventionally formed. And there were later thinkers, such as Adam Smith, who offered naturalised accounts of the social formation of conscience. But Calvin's account of conscience remained appealing to later Reformed thinkers who shared his sense that we inhabit an opaque moral universe and that our task is obedience, not penetrating that opacity.Footnote 49 Here, too, pressure was exerted by the desire and expectation that natural law could deliver concrete moral guidance; the significance of appeals to conscience shifted from establishing human responsibility to scientifically establishing the possibility of a natural source of positive moral knowledge. Conscience gives reliable access to what really counts for morality, God's law for humankind. Even if thinkers who employed conscience in this way denied the possibility of fathoming and directly pursuing God's ends, they nevertheless drifted into a more optimistic anthropology: it is not simply moral knowledge, but moral capacity, which is providentially available to all.
A staunch opponent of the new science of human nature as long as he lived in his native Scotland, once in America Witherspoon became a major conduit of the new science. By way of his eclectic Lectures on Moral Philosophy, which were delivered to students at Princeton during Witherspoon's presidency and later published, Witherspoon played a key role in the American amalgamation of Hutcheson's affective moral sense with Reid's common-sense realism. In fact, Witherspoon claimed to have anticipated some of Reid's central insights in the early 1750s, having argued that ‘the ideas we receive by our senses, and the persuasions we derive immediately from them, are exactly according to truth, which certainly ought to be the same with philosophical truth’.Footnote 50
Reid had identified conscience with the moral sense about which there was so much enthusiasm in the eighteenth century, and he gave both a decidedly cognitivist rather than sentimentalist interpretation. There are for Reid complex ideas present to the mind in the form of first principles of common sense, and some of these are first principles of morals (such as the principle that we ought to comply with the intention of nature as it appears in the constitution of our nature, and that we ought to prefer a greater good to a less). Through conscience we grasp duty or obligation, which is quite distinct from that which is in our interest. Reid further identifies conscience with the law of God: ‘which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned’.Footnote 51 There is no need for complex moral philosophies, since all human beings who have arrived at maturity possess the moral faculty or conscience which gives them access to their duties. Reid thus maintained something like Calvin's account of conscience, but now emphatically as a source for universal moral knowledge.
But whereas Reid's affirmation of principles of common sense, that we necessarily take for granted in ordinary life, was rooted in a penetrating critique of Lockean epistemology, Witherspoon's affirmation of the reliability of our common-sense ideas was just that, a rhetorical counter to scepticism. He therefore also saw no real tension between Hutcheson's empirical science of moral sentiment and Reid's intuitionist conscience – both guaranteed common-sense moral judgements. This was often the case in the late eighteenth-century American context in which common-sense thought first took root; Hutcheson's thought had been received earlier, and Reid's thought was popularised in ways which allowed it to be conflated with Hutcheson in an indiscriminate mixture of sentimentalist and intuitionist accounts of universal human moral capacities. This also meant that Calvin's careful distinction between the kind of access to God's law as law which conscience delivers, and the kind of access to natural law as the instinctive drive towards goodness of condition, was easily lost. Both conscience and instinct are seen as allowing detailed and reliable access to God's will and intentions for humankind. Indeed, conscience has become one more universal human instinct to be taken up by the new moral science and its common-sense reasoning.
Witherspoon certainly saw himself as absorbing the science of the moral sense in ways which guarded Reformed commitments.Footnote 52 For instance, he appealed to conscience in the course of rejecting efforts on the part of human moral agents to aim directly at the good of the whole, thus arguing against mounting utilitarian tendencies in providentialist moral thought: ‘to make the good of the whole our immediate principle of action’, he wrote, ‘is putting ourselves in God's place, and actually superseding the necessity and use of the particular principles of duty which he hath impressed upon the conscience’.Footnote 53 Like Calvin, then, Witherspoon held that our place is simply to obey our God-given duties, not to try to fathom and become an active participant in God's providential care for the good of creation. He also regarded conscience as conveying not just a bare sense of rightness or wrongness, but an apprehension that we will be punished and rewarded according to our actions, preserving a link between conscience and the judgement of God.Footnote 54 Moreover, Witherspoon hedged his account of moral science as the knowledge of human nature with reminders that the fall has made it difficult to discern the lineaments of created human nature, which alone can provide the source for moral philosophy.Footnote 55 Yet this and other reminders of human depravity seem like lip service in the face of Witherspoon's enthusiasm for the very project of moral philosophy as a form of moral inquiry abstracted from revelation. Thus he appeals to the difficulty of correctly delineating the created nature of humanity as confirmation of the fall, like Carmichael using natural inquiry to confirm revelation rather than using revelation to interpret nature. He then proceeds to distinguish the proper dictates of human nature from the propensities of fallen nature, not by looking to revelation, but by consulting ‘the remaining power of natural conscience’.Footnote 56 That this is qualified as merely ‘the remaining power’ of conscience makes no difference to his account. In effect, the role of conscience is to provide the key end-run around the fall. Witherspoon was not, like Calvin, primarily interested in giving a scripturally grounded account of the culpable incapacity of fallen humanity. Rather, he sought to provide an empirically grounded account of universal human moral capacity which could support the enterprise of moral science, even if one which could be shown to be consistent with his theological commitments.
Conclusion
American religious historians such as Mark Noll, trying to puzzle through how an early American Protestant culture heavily indebted to the Reformed tradition, with its stress on human disability and noetic incapacity, could so enthusiastically seize upon the new common-sense moral science, have argued that it met the needs of a developing nation. Noll argues that ‘an intuitive, universal, natural ethic provided the most intellectually respectable way to secure public virtue in a society that was busy repudiating most of the props upon which virtue had traditionally rested – tradition itself, history, social hierarchy, inherited government, and the authority of state churches’.Footnote 57 This is a persuasive analysis which helps to account for Witherspoon's transformation of allegiances in the shift from the Scottish to the American context. Yet it is only part of the story. As we have seen, significant shifts away from historic Reformed commitments are present in Carmichael's thought and thus already under way within Reformed contexts quite apart from revolutionary or early republican America. It was not simply the needs of a new experiment in republican government which exerted pressure in this direction. In their enthusiasm for the project of natural theology in general, and the moral science of human nature in particular, thinkers like Carmichael and Witherspoon unconsciously reversed the relationship between revealed and natural knowledge. Natural, rather than revealed, knowledge becomes the independent variable. It is what is naturally known that is clear and secure, and revelation is to be tested and certified and interpreted accordingly. Whatever the effects of the fall, it cannot then have fundamentally interfered with these human capacities, whether they were understood, as by Witherspoon, in terms of an intuitionist conscience giving access to the judgements of God or, as Carmichael would have it, as the capacity to grasp that obedience to God's law will satisfy the original law dictating our pursuit of our own private happiness or, as Hutcheson argued, as a natural tendency to approve and be pleased by actions and characters which are publicly beneficial. Proponents of each were quick to identify the Achilles’ heels of competing positions. So conscience, rather than providing reliable access to God's judgements, could be criticised as merely reflecting the internalisation of received moral opinions. Efforts to distinguish those natural propensities, which indicate God's intentions for humanity from the background noise of all the rest, seemed likewise to follow from moral convictions already in place. Nevertheless, optimism about the project as a whole remained strong for a time, until its providentialist assumptions proved both vulnerable and dispensable.
If there were thinkers who preserved a tradition of Reformed natural law, thinking which remained distinct from modern natural law, Carmichael and Witherspoon were not among them, despite their evident and self-conscious concern for maintaining and restoring Reformed theological commitments within natural law thinking. Moreover, my suspicion is that faithfulness to something like Calvin's own understanding of natural law requires resigning hopes of appealing either to conscience or to natural human instincts or propensities as sources of action-guiding moral knowledge. At the same time, it is not surprising that Calvin's understanding of the natural law could, given certain key alterations, fuel such projects. For, in comparison to medieval scholastic natural law, with its distinction between synderesis and conscience and accompanying qualifications of the reliability of acts of conscience, Calvin viewed conscience as offering access to God's judgements even of individual actions. And in comparison to scholastic views which assumed the necessity of active human reflection on how natural inclinations could be pursued in ways appropriate to a rational nature, Calvin's view of providentially managed human instincts lent itself to a view of morality as something which could be easily read from a scientific study of human nature. Without convictions regarding the moral incapacity of fallen human nature and the necessity to correct – and not merely supplement – reason by recourse to revelation, Calvin's view of the natural law seemed to promise a highly determinate source of moral guidance.
