Within Christianity there has been a great deal of support for the view that there is a Natural Law of morality. The Christian understanding of the concept is based largely on Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and Aristotle influenced Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas set out to show that, if human reason is acknowledged to come from God, both faith and reason together can provide people with the best tools for living. He thought people should not have to choose between blindly following the commands of God revealed in the Bible, or using their common sense instead. Natural Law theory is an attempt to show how the two can be brought together to form a system, which is both reasonable, appealing to rational, intelligent people and faithful to God.
The key ideas of the natural law tradition are the following:
1. Human beings have an essential rational nature established by God, who designed us to live and flourish in prescribed ways
2. Even without knowledge of God, reason, as the essence of our nature, can discover the laws necessary for human flourishing
3. The natural laws are universal and unchangeable, and one should use them to judge individual societies and their positive laws. Positive laws of societies that are not in line with the natural law are not truly laws but counterfeits.
The natural law approach to discovering what is good has several basic presuppositions; God made the universe and everything in it, for a reason. Goodness involves being fit for a purpose. People, by nature, want to be good. The purpose for which people exist is self evident, a ‘natural law’, which can be discovered using God’s gift of reason.
Natural Law has been profoundly influential in ethics, particularly in the teaching of the Catholic Church. Many people continue to base their understanding of right and wrong around the concept of what is ‘natural’. However problems arise when people try to define exactly what is ‘natural’, and those who do not believe that the universe has any kind of purpose will not accept the principles of Natural Law at all.
AO2 “The natural law approach to Ethics is far too absolutist and doesn’t work in real situations”
Moral laws have objective validity. Reason can sort out which inclinations are part of our true nature and how we relate them to one another.
Aquinas’s position and the natural law tradition are in general absolutist. Humanity has an essential rational natural, and reason can discover the right action in every situation by following an appropriate, exceptionless principle.
But sometimes we encounter moral conflicts, dilemmas in which we cannot do good without also bringing about evil consequences. To this end, the doctrine of double effect was devised; a doctrine that provides a neat algorithm for solving all moral disputes in which am act will have two effects, one good and the other bad. The doctrine says, that it is always wrong to do a bad act intentionally in order to bring good consequences, but that it is sometimes permissible to do a good act despite knowing that it will bring about bad consequences. This doctrine consists in four conditions that must be satisfied before an act is morally permissible:
1. The Nature-of-the-Act Condition The action must be either morally good or indifferent. Lying or intentionally killing an innocent person is never permissible.
2. The Means-End Condition The bad effect must not be the means by which one achieves the good effect.
3. The Right-Intention Condition The intention must be the achieving of only the good effect, with the bad effect being only an unintended side effect. If the bad effect is by the means of obtaining the good effect, then the act is immoral. The bad effect may be foreseen but must not be intended.
4. The Proportionality Condition The good effect must be at least equivalent in importance to the bad effect.
We can illustrate the doctrine by using it in real life situations.
If we apply it to a woman’s life who is endangered by her pregnancy. Is it morally permissible to have an abortion? The Doctrine of Double Effect says that an abortion is not permissible. Since abortion kills an innocent human being and since intentionally killing an innocent human being is always wrong, it is always wrong to have an abortion, even to save the woman’s life. Abortion fails condition 2; killing the innocent in order to bring about a good effect is never justified, not even to save the whole city or the world. However, if the woman’s uterus happens to be cancerous, then she may have a hysterectomy, even though it would result in the death of the foetus. This is because the act of removing a cancerous uterus is morally good. The hysterectomy also passes condition 3, since the death of the foetus is the unintended effect of the hysterectomy. Condition 2 is passed; the death of the foetus isn’t the means of saving the woman’s life, the hysterectomy is. Condition 4 is passed since saving the woman’s life is a great good. This passes the doctrine of double effect.
On the other hand if the doctor could save the woman’s life only by changing the composition of the amniotic fluid, which in turn would kill the foetus, then this would not be morally permissible according to the DDE. In this case, the same result occurs in the hysterectomy, but killing the foetus is intended as the means of saving the woman’s life.
Another dilemma, which doesn’t follow the DDE, is the trolley problem. A tram is speeding down a track, when Edward the driver notices that the brakes have failed. Five people are standing on the track a short distance ahead of the tram and will be killed if something is not done. To the right is a sidetrack on which a single worker is working. Should Edward steer the tram to the sidetrack, killing only the single worker? Most people would say that Edward should turn the tram to the sidetrack, for it is better to kill only man than allow five equally innocent men to die. The DDE would seem to prohibit this action, holding that it would violate condition 2 and 3. Doing a bad effect to bring good about a good effect. It would seem to violate condition 3, since the effect of turning the tram to the right sidetrack is so closely linked with the death of the worker. The idea is that killing is worse then letting die. So Edward should not turn the tram to the sidetrack.
If the principles of Natural Law are strictly applied, some of the rules that result are unacceptable to common sense. For example human teeth include incisors, for nibbling vegetables, and canines, for eating meat; by the principles of Natural Law, this would mean that people therefore ought to eat meat as well as vegetables, and that choosing to be a vegetarian is morally wrong.
The principles of natural law claim that sexual intercourse is for the purpose of procreation; therefore people who are infertile, perhaps because they have passed the menopause or because of some other condition, should not have sex with their wives or husbands.
An appeal to Natural Law is not just an expression of opinion, but a way of asserting that there is an absolute authoritative code of moral behaviour, which applies to everyone. Many people would consider it an absolutist, rather than a relative, approach to ethics. Therefore it is possible for one society to judge another, and for one set of standards to be morally superior to another. If a nation commits an act of terrorism, it can be condemned for it, if one group of people decide to wipe out another through ‘ethnic cleansing’, they can be called to account; whereas if morality is purely subjective there is no way in which one society’s moral code can be said to be any better than another’s.
Natural Law theory appeals to many people’s instinctive conviction that right and wrong depend on more than just personal opinion and social conversation. The ways in which different societies come to the same conclusions about the existence of a natural law of morality support the idea that it is part of human nature to recognise this law through both reason and intuition, and that is self-evident. Our instincts from childhood often seem to tell us that there is absolute right and wrong.
