natural law theory

causation

Fundamental to natural law theory is the notion of cause – the idea that it is at the centre of life. This understanding is most famously associated with Aristotleand his theory of causation, in which he postulated the existence of four causes (‘material’, ‘efficient’, ‘formal’ and ‘final’). It was later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, whose account of the theory continues to dominate (official) Roman Catholic moral philosophy.

A simple way of knowing what Aristotle means by these terms is to think of a snowman. It is made from snow (‘material cause’), by children (‘efficient cause’), in ways identifiable, because there are many other snowmen (‘formal cause’) and its purpose is to provide enjoyment (‘final cause’).

Aristotle, like all ancient philosophers, was fascinated by the changes that he observed in the world (it is for this reason that he is sometimes said to be our first scientist), and his account ofcausation is an explanation for the existence of such phenomena. He maintained, rightly, that it is always wise to pay attention to the thinkers that have preceded oneself, and Aristotle was referring here to Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Heraclitus maintained that absolutely everything was in a constant state of change, and one of his disciples, Cratylus, went so far as to say that it is impossible to derive meaning from language, since words will mean different things in various contexts, making communication between people almost impossible. For this reason, Cratylus famously said that the only way to communicate with other human beings is to wiggle your finger!

Parmenides, on the other hand, whilst acknowledging that,as part of daily living, we experience change and motion, maintained that these experiences areillusory. In other words, everything always remains the same- it is our senses that deceive us into thinking otherwise.

Hugh Lawrence-Tancred has expressed succinctly these two contrasting interpretations of reality, when he writes that ‘Heraclitus and Parmenides probably never met, and may well have been ignorant of each other’s existence. Yet, taken together, their work constitutes the first serious threat to the common-sense notion that the world is broadly speaking as wetake it to be, the doctrine that philosophers labelnaïve realism.’[1] In respect of Heraclitus’ position, he articulates well this observation, by remarking that ‘since we cannot absolutely trust our senses all the time, we can never trust them any of the time’[2].

Aristotle believed that Parmenides and Heraclitus were (almost completely) wrong. If Parmenides is right, then our observations of the stars moving in the night sky represent an illusion; similarly, ‘if everything always remains the same’ (the claim that nothing comes into existence or perishes), how do we explain the simple fact that people die? And if Heraclitus is right – the claim that words are always changing their meaning, for example – how is it that Heraclitus assumed, as he must have done, that when he said ‘everything is changing’, he was saying the same thing each time and not its opposite? Aristotle pondered these difficulties, and came to the conclusion that Parmenides and Heraclitus were not entirely wrong. In fact, they were both partly right, and Aristotle believed that the whole truthconsisted in a combination of these two partial truths. It is true that things are the way that they seem to be – always in a state of change. On the other hand, not everything is changingin every respect. ‘In every change, there must be something permanent –something that persists or remains the same while becoming different in one respect or another’.[3] A ball thrown across a room, for example, moves from one place to another, thereby ‘changing’, yet when it came to rest it remains the same ball. This discussion is the background to Aristotle’s theory of causation, and its implications for moral philosophy are significant.

In summary, it constitutes the answers that he gives to four questions. These are common-sense questions, and so are the answers. In respect of snowmen, ‘What are they made from?’ – snow (the material cause); with regard to ‘Who makes them?’, the answer is the children (the efficient cause); the answer to the question ‘What is being made?’ aresnowmen (the formal cause, recognisable by everyone as a ‘form’ common to all snowmen), and the pleasure experienced by the children is the purpose of such activities/productions in the first place (the final cause). An even shorter illustration, derived from Aristotle, who was fond of military analogies, is to say that theefficient cause of horse riding is horsemanship, and its final cause is the winning of battles (cavalries were very important in the ancient world). Thus, the good of horsemanship is realised when the cavalry wins battles, the (final) purpose of learning to ride a horse), on the assumption that one is in the army! Thus, in the production of any object (a snowman, say), or in the perfecting of any skill (horsemanship, for example) all four causes must be present together, related one to another, and because every object or action has some end or purpose (its final cause), that is what determines its good. And it is this notion of the good that is fundamental to Aristotle’s understanding of the ethical life, portrayed evocatively by his term the moral imagination.

If, then, we understand what, for human beings, is our final cause, we will know what we have to do in order to be good. For Aristotle, and later for Aquinas (adapted), the efficient cause for human beings is to live, work and reproduce; our final cause is to livethe moral life, and reason allows us to realise this vision, which is an exercise in moral imagination. ‘Reason’ and ‘morality’ are features of existence which are unique to human beings, enabling us to choose freely that which is good, thereby avoiding that which is evil. Aquinas develops such ideas, but we must first assess Aristotle’s account of causation.

It should first be noted that, for Aristotle, his argument is wholly empirical; in other words, our understanding of the world is based entirely upon experience –in Aristotle’s own words, knowledge is experience.

We mean by this that he looked to evidence, as best he understood it, to explain how we can have reliable, repeatable knowledge about things which by their nature appear always to be in a state of change (thus his interest in Parmenides and Heraclitus). This ‘evidence’ led him to formulate the theory of causation, which can be encapsulated in two key concepts: matter and form.

In using these terms, Aristotle sought to integrate the best aspects in the thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus: matter changes, form is permanent. Matter cannot exist without form, an idea which can be expressed by saying that snow, for example, is recognisable to us by virtue of our ability to characterise it as belonging to the form of snowness, which – in turn – enables us to transform snow into snowmen. Snow is constituted of different chemical properties – water, in particular. In its ‘water state’, it has the potential to become any number of things (vapour, most obviously); but, under given atmospheric conditions, it turns into snow. In similar manner, acorns possess the potential to become oak trees and fathers have the potential to procreate sons.This means that there must always be an actual being existing as the cause of any potential being, and this led Aristotle to postulate the idea of A First Efficient and Final Cause – the Prime Mover, which is not to be confused withthe first of the four causes. Aristotle maintained that a chain of movers has to begin with an Unmoved Mover, something which is not itself moved, but which could cause other things to move. He attributed the term God to this Prime Mover, which is a final cause in itself, and which causes things to be, not simply through physical or mechanical motion, but through an act of love. And because all things want to be in the image of God’s perfection, they are drawn towards him (think, analogically, of how a magnet works), the all-good, eternally necessary being, on whom all other things depend. God himself is engaged in noactivity other than intellectual self-contemplation, which is eternal, immutable and transcendent – the cause, Aristotle rather oddly asserts – of movement in all other things.[4] It should come as no surprise, therefore, that since Aristotle’s God spends all of his time in intellectual self-contemplation, the final cause or purpose for human beings is the right use of moral reason, which leads to the attainment of the state of Eudaomonia – the achievement of happiness,to be understood as self-flourishing, the final goal of all our endeavours.

For Aristotle, the notion of causation is at the centre of life. Is he right? Nina Rosenstand has observed, correctly, that people naturally ask themselves the question ‘What is the purpose of life?’ In this respect, Aristotle has provided an answer to the question. But he is concerned also with a wider agenda –not simply individuals’ teleological goals – but also with a telos for the species as a whole (but note the next sentence). And the purpose of the species is to do what it does best – to reason. Aristotle means that men should develop a rational character (he was not particularly concerned about women, whose main purpose was to bear children!). It is this idea that became so central to Aquinas’ development of natural law theory, most significantly the notion of ‘purpose’.[5]

But there are problems with this idea:

  • In the first instance, Aristotle argued ‘to purpose’ by maintaining that the perfect spherical motion of the heavenly bodies is possible only because of the existence of a first efficient cause– a prime mover. This is so because he insists that matter cannot move itself (remember that, for Aristotle, matter is eternal, meaning that the Universe had no beginning, a claim that we now know to be wrong, since the discovery of the Big Bang, for one thing). But matter can move itself, as any student of the natural sciences can demonstrate (look at how the movement of an electron constitutes electrical current, for example).
  • Thus, most people – theists or otherwise – acknowledge as ‘seriously weak’ the argument ‘to purpose’. It is true that, in general conversation, as Rosenstand has observed, people talk as if there is purpose to most things. If, for example, we were to explain why giraffes have long necks, the answer might be so that they can reach tall tree branches. The answer clearly implies that giraffes were ‘designed’ for such a purpose, or else that, over long periods of time, they have stretched their necks so much that they can now reach the highest branches (this is now the discredited theory – remarkable in its time, however – of inheritance through acquired characteristics). Yes, we know that giraffes eat leaves off tall tree branches, but modern scientists cannot accept teleological explanationsto purpose as the reason for the giraffes’ actions.Darwin’stheory of natural selection proposes that giraffes do not come equipped with a purpose, nor does any other creature for that matter, but all living creatures adapt to circumstances, and those who adapt the best survive, have offspring, and these in turn adapt. We should think of giraffes’ ancestors as being rather short-necked, with some having rather longer necks – a consequence of mutation. And because the ones with long necks were able to reach leaves that the others couldn’t reach, they succeeded during times of hardship, when others died. The surviving giraffes gave birth to long-knecked offspring, whose issue then produced even longer necks, and so on. The important point is that this is a causal explanation – not a teleological one – of giraffes’ evolutionary development, looking to reasons in the past to explain why something is the way it is today, rather than looking to some future goal. In summary, there is no need to postulate the concept of purpose at all.
  • It can be said, therefore, to follow from this conclusion, that because the notion of a final cause is unscientific, then its application to reason and morality has no basis (but refer to the final bullet-point in the next paragraph).
  • Related to these points, but an exclusively metaphysical one, is the objection to causation voiced by many religious believers (one that would have been of no concern to Aristotle, incidentally). Their worry is that Aristotle’s theory points, at most, to belief in a Prime Mover, whereas they wish to postulate the existence of an absolute being, reflecting the understanding of God present in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. [This was not, of course, a problem for St. Thomas Aquinas, who integrated Aristotelian thought into a Christian world-view, exemplified both by his extensive work on moral philosophy and the series of arguments for God’s existence.[6]]

These criticisms, however, are not so convincing to everyone:

  • In Philosophy, as in the Natural Sciences, progress can only be made on the back of previous attempts to understand and clarify concepts. It should be remembered that Aristotle was writing over 2, 000 years ago (when most Europeans were still living in caves!), and considering the fact that he did not have access to the scientific information available to people living today, his intellectual achievements are remarkable, for any epoch. In addition, whilst it is perfectly acceptable to criticise Aristotle’s notion of a final cause and purpose (as above), it cannot be said that, over two millennia later, our current understanding of causation is vastly greater than Aristotle’s (remember that the above criticisms are of a metaphysical nature).
  • And even if we acknowledge that Aristotle is mistaken about there being purpose in creation, it must be acknowledged that there are a number of contemporary developments, especially with regard to Cosmological Arguments for God’s Existence, maintaining that the created order seems to have some kind of direction (in essence, this was the position acknowledged by Antony Flew, Britain’s most famous atheist, shortly before his death, in 2008).
  • Aristotle adopted a teleological view of ethics, meaning that it points to a moral purpose for the lives of human beings. This position can be defended on certain empirical grounds – as a matter of observation, the pursuit of moral virtue, for most people, is an important dimension of their lives (even if there are fierce debates concerning its relative or absolutist nature), and it can be argued that this reality exists independently of disagreements about the nature of causation. It is certainly a position – adopted one way or another – by those who support Aquinas’ natural law theory, who made use of Aristotle’s understanding of ethics, centred on the notion of causation.

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aquinas[7]

St. Thomas Aquinas developed Aristotle’s understanding of nlt, by developing Aristotle’s idea of the Prime Mover. The idea of the PM – so central to Aristotle’s thinking – is developed by Aquinas against the background of the Juadaeo-Christian tradition. For him, God is actively involved in the created world, without Himself being part of it. Thus, the notion of human beings made in the image and likeness of God – the imago dei doctrine(Genesis 1: 27) – is fundamental to Aquinas’ understanding, but absent from Aristotle’s world-view. For Aquinas, therefore, perfection consists in human beings both living up to this ideal (with regard to its religious and ethical implications) and in acknowledging that it will achieve its complete – ‘perfect’ fulfilment only after death. In ethical matters, therefore, the call to moral perfection is to be realised by living according to the precepts derived from the natural law tradition, an absolutist theory of ethics. In the Summa Theologica (1273), ‘Aquinas described natural law as a moral code existing within the purpose of nature, created by God’[8], and this purpose is to be realised by the right use of reason, directed towards the achievement of humanity’s common good. And this notion of the commongood will reach its ultimate destiny after death, when people (hopefully, since ‘Hell’ is always an option!) will experience the Beatific Vision. Thus, ‘Law’, whilst never an end in itself, nonetheless provides people with a means whereby they can realise their best potential, and this notion of ‘Law’ functions at four levels:

  • Eternal law is the belief that this is in the mind of God, providing the whole Universe with its structure and purpose. Only God fully comprehends the principles underlying this reality;we possess only an inadequate understanding of the laws governing the Universe.
  • Divine law is given by God to people, through the media of the Bible and Church teaching. It is a reflection of eternal law, accessible only to the believer.
  • Human laws are formulated by communities for their ‘good ordering’ (thus, like Kant, Aquinas approved, under extreme circumstances, the use of capital punishment) and they are said to reflect the unchanging natural law,which is the ‘judge’ of particular laws as they function in societies.
  • Natural law, unlike divine law, is available to everyone through the use of reason, being an innate sense of right and wrong, activated when we use the faculty of conscience. This faculty is available to all human beings, at all times, and in every culture and when used correctly (it is important to remember that it can be fallible), it contributes to what Aristotle termed human flourishing. But, for Aristotle, this aim (known originally as eudaimonia) concerns this life only, whereas for Aquinas – as noted above –it can reach its full completion only after death.

Aquinas thought that God had instilled in all human beings the inclination to avoid that which is evil and to seek that which is good, though he recognised that people do not always behave in this way, which accounts for the distinction between real and apparent goods. He explains this distinction in a manner that may seem odd to our ears: An individual may have an affair, but his or her intention is not, as such, to hurt the ‘official partner’, thereby pursuing an ‘apparent, but mistaken, good’. The purpose of innate human reason, applied in keeping with natural law principles, is to enable us to achieve the real good, which leads – ultimately – to union with God. For Aquinas, our nature is knowable and there are said to be principles that enable us to elucidate this truth. And these are known as primary and secondary precepts.