Aquinas's Natural Law

[Rocinante]

Actually a nice healthy tan is perfectly healthy. Tanning has a potential for negatively impacting our health in the long-term, but that is beside the point. You are continuing to conflate factors that impact, or might impact, our health - which obviously we can be wrong or ignorant about and can investigate scientifically - with health itself. Can you see that?

your claim was that we just naturally know what health is. i am saying that we learn more about what health is through rational inquiry. if so, we can be wrong about what health is. if we all just naturally know what health is, then we can’t be wrong about what health is. do you think that we can’t be wrong about what health is?

if we can be wrong, and if one person has a different view about what health is from another, how could we hope to settle the matter about who is right?

presumably we would discuss criteria to try to agree on such criteria. if someone said, i think human physical health is no more nor less than being able to walk one mile in 10 minutes, we would disagree but we would have a common ground for continuing the discussion since i would agree that being able to do stuff is important to health. if someone said that human health is being in a state of conformity to human nature, or human health is passing an IQ test, or human health is an onion, i would think that we just aren’t both talking about the same thing when we use the term “human physical health.”

so disagreement can only run so deep before we realize that we aren’t both trying to have the same conversation. we stop feeling the need to care about what certain other people think. we certainly don’t let them into our medical schools.

perhaps at one time human health was understood as a matter of being in a state of purity according to biblical rules. such a view has been discarded, but hygiene is thought to be an important factor in promoting health now that we better understand the role it plays. this is how the matter progresses (gets settled and resettled). first we need to get some agreement on a paradigm for thinking about human health (say, being able to do stuff we’d like to be able to do rather than purity) and then try to learn more about health in those terms. or perhaps in the course of study, some of us come to start thinking of human health in different terms (for example, one could come to see and convince others that efficiency as more essential to health than functionality). such establishment of paradigms and paradigm change is part of the scientific process of inquiry. in other words, we learn about what human health is as we study human health.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

…but there is no reason to think that science is responsible for defining what human *health *is, as such, or that science is even interested in what human health is, as such.

I am returning to this initial statement that you earlier made which was pure ignorance on your behalf. I’ve previously addressed it but wanted to further tell you that your “moral” outlook on science is pitiful. I have concluded that this is a result mostly on your part because of your lack of knowledge or dislike for science. I’ll end on this note with the following. Hopefully you will learn something. Far be it for me to pursue it further with you. Here is a small section from the website though I sugest people should explore it further.

**Human Health **
Public health problems caused by environmental contamination and emerging infectious diseases are a growing concern worldwide. These public health threats are affected by the relationship between people and the physical, chemical, and biological nature of our natural environments. Population growth and the associated pressures of development are increasing the difficulties associated with sustaining effective public health practices and policies. Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases, water contamination, airborne contaminants, bioaccumulative contaminants in the food chain, and environmental threats to public health the world over require marshalling of all our scientific knowledge and know-how to develop new solutions. Understanding environmental and ecological health is a prerequisite to protecting public health. As the Nation’s natural science agency, USGS can play a significant role in providing scientific knowledge and information that will improve our understanding of the environmental contributions to disease and human health.
health.usgs.gov/

 

[Betterave]

I am returning to this initial statement that you earlier made which was pure ignorance on your behalf. I’ve previously addressed it but wanted to further tell you that your “moral” outlook on science is pitiful. I have concluded that this is a result mostly on your part because of your lack of knowledge or dislike for science. I’ll end on this note with the following. Hopefully you will learn something. Far be it for me to pursue it further with you. Here is a small section from the website though I sugest people should explore it further.

**Human Health **
Public health problems caused by environmental contamination and emerging infectious diseases are a growing concern worldwide. These public health threats are affected by the relationship between people and the physical, chemical, and biological nature of our natural environments. Population growth and the associated pressures of development are increasing the difficulties associated with sustaining effective public health practices and policies. Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases, water contamination, airborne contaminants, bioaccumulative contaminants in the food chain, and environmental threats to public health the world over require marshalling of all our scientific knowledge and know-how to develop new solutions. Understanding environmental and ecological health is a prerequisite to protecting public health. As the Nation’s natural science agency, USGS can play a significant role in providing scientific knowledge and information that will improve our understanding of the environmental contributions to disease and human health.
health.usgs.gov/

All I will say here is, please look up the term ignoratio elenchi. That’s all you’ve got going on here.

 

[Betterave]

your claim was that we just naturally know what health is. i am saying that we learn more about what health is through rational inquiry. if so, we can be wrong about what health is. if we all just naturally know what health is, then we can’t be wrong about what health is. do you think that we can’t be wrong about what health is?

I think we can be wrong about anything! I think you’re wrong about what health is, since you don’t think it is possible to have a “nice healthy tan.” I can’t prove that you’re wrong by referring to a scientific study though. Your problem is with not understanding the meaning of the terms you are using.

if we can be wrong, and if one person has a different view about what health is from another, how could we hope to settle the matter about who is right?

Well if the dispute was about “what health is,” we sure couldn’t refer to scientific studies to resolve the dispute (unless you wanted to take, say, an anthropological perspective, which isn’t really relevant here, it seems) - if it was about “what is healthy” (a dispute which presupposes that we already know “what health is”), then we could.

presumably we would discuss criteria to try to agree on such criteria. if someone said, i think human physical health is no more nor less than being able to walk one mile in 10 minutes, we would disagree but we would have a common ground for continuing the discussion since i would agree that being able to do stuff is important to health.

aha! - and how do you know that?

if someone said that human health is being in a state of conformity to human nature, or human health is passing an IQ test, or human health is an onion, i would think that we just aren’t both talking about the same thing when we use the term “human physical health.”

riight… so what’s your point? - that it’s possible to say stuff that doesn’t make any sense? do you think it’s possible to appeal to ‘science’ to show that these claims don’t make sense? which science?

so disagreement can only run so deep before we realize that we aren’t both trying to have the same conversation. we stop feeling the need to care about what certain other people think. we certainly don’t let them into our medical schools.

How is med school admissions relevant here?? People who engage in “other conversations” don’t belong in med school? What if they do well on the entrance exams and interview well, etc.?

perhaps at one time human health was understood as a matter of being in a state of purity according to biblical rules. such a view has been discarded,

you mean “*Perhaps *such a view has been discarded”; but not if that was never anyone’s view in the first place, and I assume it never was. You might as well say: “perhaps at one time human health was understood as a matter of being in a state of onion according to nature’s rules. such a view has been discarded…” Yeah; so what?

but hygiene is thought to be an important factor in promoting health now that we better understand the role it plays.

Right, the role of hygiene in promoting health has become much better known; so what?

this is how the matter progresses (gets settled and resettled). **first we need to get some agreement on a paradigm for thinking about human health **(say, being able to do stuff we’d like to be able to do rather than purity) and then try to learn more about health in those terms.

this is only true if we don’t already have agreement. if knowledge of what health is is ‘natural knowledge,’ then we always already have agreement. so you’re just begging the question here.

Here is the problem: if there was a time when humans didn’t agree on what health was, it would not have been possible to learn more about it. There would have been no ‘it’ to discuss and to learn about.

or perhaps in the course of study, some of us come to start thinking of human health in different terms (for example, one could come to see and convince others that efficiency as more essential to health than functionality). such establishment of paradigms and paradigm change is part of the scientific process of inquiry. in other words, we learn about what human health is as we study human health.

This is all so vague that I don’t see how it’s supposed to be relevant.

 

[CradleCath]

I think we can be wrong about anything! I think you’re wrong about what health is, since you don’t think it is possible to have a “nice healthy tan.” I can’t prove that you’re wrong by referring to a scientific study though. Your problem is with not understanding the meaning of the terms you are using.

Right, the role of hygiene in promoting health has become much better known; so what?

this is only true if we don’t already have agreement. if knowledge of what health is is ‘natural knowledge,’ then we always already have agreement. so you’re just begging the question here.

Here is the problem: if there was a time when humans didn’t agree on what health was, it would not have been possible to learn more about it. There would have been no ‘it’ to discuss and to learn about.
This is all so vague that I don’t see how it’s supposed to be relevant.

I think that’s because you are trying to make it too detailed, when in fact it’s very simple. So simple that all of us can know what pleases our Creator & what does not…IF we search.
The expression “natural law” refers to the basic principles of right and wrong **that are true for everyone **because they are rooted in the very nature of the created human person, and knowable to everyone because we are endowed with conscience and the power to deliberate.

BTW. When did it become acceptable on Catholic Answer forums, to change the thread title? I’ve been following this discussion on Aquinas’ Natural Law for a week, not posting…just reading, & now it’s “comments on Human Health”???

 

[CradleCath]

All I will say here is, please look up the term ***ignoratio elenchi/***I]. That’s all you’ve got going on here.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

All I will say here is, please look up the term ignoratio elenchi. That’s all you’ve got going on here.

No. You are wrong. I’m dealing with your philosophical issues by using science to dispute your philosophical meanderings. Like I said before, science isn’t philosophy. Quite frankly, I took two philosophy courses eons ago when I was young lady, and I along with several other individuals managed to get the professor ousted from the university for his continued diatribe that was pure poppycock. I’ll stick behind my scientific contributions that have falsified your claims against science regarding human health.

 

[CradleCath]

No. You are wrong. I’m dealing with your philosophical issues by using science to dispute your philosophical meanderings. Like I said before, science isn’t philosophy. Quite frankly, I took two philosophy courses eons ago when I was young lady, and I along with several other individuals managed to get the professor ousted from the university for his continued diatribe that was pure poppycock. I’ll stick behind my scientific contributions that have falsified your claims against science regarding human health.

It looks to me as if your “two philosophy courses” did not include anything about either Aquinas or Natural Law. If they did, you would know that for Thomas Aquinas, natural law is that part of the eternal law of God (“the reason of divine wisdom”) which is knowable by human beings by means of their powers of reason. Human, or positive, law is the application of natural law to particular social circumstances. Aquinas believed that a positive law that violates natural law is not true law.

Natural Law, or our ability to discern it, tells us that good health is a positive thing, a “good” if you will, that we should strive to acquire. The means by which we do so is, of course, through science. BUT, it’s Natural Law, a Law written on our hearts, that I thought we were discussing here & science has nothing to do with the actual “built in knowledge” that our Creator formed us to seek good health.

BTW., following is one of the rules one must follow in order to remain a poster of CA.:

DISCUSSION FORUMS
Messages posted to threads should be on-topic. If you wish to discuss another topic, start a new thread.

 

[Betterave]

No. You are wrong. I’m dealing with your philosophical issues by using science to dispute your philosophical meanderings. Like I said before, science isn’t philosophy. Quite frankly, I took two philosophy courses eons ago when I was young lady, and I along with several other individuals managed to get the professor ousted from the university for his continued diatribe that was pure poppycock. I’ll stick behind my scientific contributions that have falsified your claims against science regarding human health.

You didn’t look up ignoratio elenchi, did you? In any case, this is more of the same (and obviously so).

 

[Betterave]

I think that’s because you are trying to make it too detailed, when in fact it’s very simple. So simple that all of us can know what pleases our Creator & what does not…IF we search.
The expression “natural law” refers to the basic principles of right and wrong **that are true for everyone **because they are rooted in the very nature of the created human person, and knowable to everyone because we are endowed with conscience and the power to deliberate.

But I don’t think you understand the issue here. Rocinante believes that the basic principle of right and wrong is a consequentialist one, and (apparently) that this principle is not rooted in the very nature of the human person, but has been ‘scientifically’ (!) discovered somehow (please correct me if I’ve got your view wrong, Rocinante). This view does not entail a rejection of “basic principles of right and wrong,” but rather, presumably, a claim that the basic principles of right and wrong are best assessed within a particular kind of consequentialist framework, an ‘anti-essentialist’ one. The point of my discussion has been to try to show why that framework is conceptually confused and just doesn’t work, and to correct Rocinante’s straw man understanding of natural law approaches to ethics.

BTW. When did it become acceptable on Catholic Answer forums, to change the thread title? I’ve been following this discussion on Aquinas’ Natural Law for a week, not posting…just reading, & now it’s “comments on Human Health”???

I don’t know what that’s about.

 

[Rocinante]

I think we can be wrong about anything! I think you’re wrong about what health is, since you don’t think it is possible to have a “nice healthy tan.” I can’t prove that you’re wrong by referring to a scientific study though. Your problem is with not understanding the meaning of the terms you are using.

since we can be wrong about what human health is, doesn’t that mean that what human health is is not something that we just naturally know?

Well if the dispute was about “what health is,” we sure couldn’t refer to scientific studies to resolve the dispute (unless you wanted to take, say, an anthropological perspective, which isn’t really relevant here, it seems) - if it was about “what is healthy” (a dispute which presupposes that we already know “what health is”), then we could.

this is true. we can’t settle the matter by referring to a scientific study, but that doesn’t mean the issue is not a scientific matter. settling on a common understanding of human health for the purpose of inquiry into human health and revising that understanding of what human health is is part of scientific inquiry

consider that no experiment could ever settle the matter between whether gravity is a force or the effect of the curvature of space. but the choice between such paradigmatic understandings of the key terms of inquiry is still part of scientific inquiry.

riight… so what’s your point? - that it’s possible to say stuff that doesn’t make any sense? do you think it’s possible to appeal to ‘science’ to show that these claims don’t make sense? which science?

it isn’t that we can appeal to science as though science were a book where we look up the truth. it is that we approach such questions in the spirit of scientific inquiry and that paradigm selection is part of doing science. i gave some made up obviously bad conceptions of human health, but i think there was a time (the middle ages) when people would have actually said that human health is the state of having one’s humors in the proper balance. this is not something that can be proven or dis-proven by any particular scientific study just as we can’t decide between aristotelian, newtonian, or einsteinian physics based on an experiment since the concepts are different. there is what kuhn called incommensurablity across paradigms. but paradigm selection is still science. that’s why i say that we learn about what human health is (and by extension human well-being in general) as we study it. science proceeds according to assumptions about the best meaning of the key terms, but part of science is reevaluating what we ought to take the terms to mean.

 

[Rocinante]

How is med school admissions relevant here?? People who engage in “other conversations” don’t belong in med school? What if they do well on the entrance exams and interview well, etc.?

the bit about medical school is to explain how paradigm change happens. eventually, one conception of human health wins out and alternative conceptions aren’t so much proven wrong but rendered irrelevant to the current scientific conversation about human health and science progresses.

this is only true if we don’t already have agreement. if knowledge of what health is is ‘natural knowledge,’ then we always already have agreement. so you’re just begging the question here.
…
Here is the problem: if there was a time when humans didn’t agree on what health was, it would not have been possible to learn more about it. There would have been no ‘it’ to discuss and to learn about.

no, we agreed that it is possible to be wrong about what human health is. in fact, you said you thought i was wrong.

 

[Betterave]

since we can be wrong about what human health is, doesn’t that mean that what human health is is not something that we just naturally know?

No. Knowing ‘naturally’ very clearly does not mean knowing ‘inevitably’ or ‘unfailingly’ or ‘without-ever-being-confused.’

this is true. we can’t settle the matter by referring to a scientific study, but that doesn’t mean the issue is not a scientific matter. settling on a common understanding of human health for the purpose of inquiry into human health and revising that understanding of what human health is is part of scientific inquiry

Okay, I might follow you here, provided you don’t mean what people usually mean by ‘scientific inquiry’ and instead mean something much more general like ‘rational inquiry.’

consider that no experiment could ever settle the matter between whether gravity is a force or the effect of the curvature of space. but the choice between such paradigmatic understandings of the key terms of inquiry is still part of scientific inquiry.

Sure. But we all know what science deals with that kind of thing: physics, right? So what science deals with the question of what health is, in your opinion? There seems to be an important asymmetry between these kinds of questions.

it isn’t that we can appeal to science as though science were a book where we look up the truth. it is that we approach such questions in the spirit of scientific inquiry and that paradigm selection is part of doing science.

Yes it is. But my contention is that the selection of a particular paradigm for ‘health’ is not the kind of thing to which the notion of radical paradigm shifts applies. Does Kuhn think otherwise? I don’t know Kuhn well, but it doesn’t seem like one of his classic examples.

i gave some made up obviously bad conceptions of human health, but i think there was a time (the middle ages) when people would have actually said that human health is the state of having one’s humors in the proper balance.

But this is the same old issue: they didn’t disagree with us about what health is. They just had a different account of its underlying causes. So the following claim:

this is not something that can be proven or dis-proven by any particular scientific study

…is not true.

just as we can’t decide between aristotelian, newtonian, or einsteinian physics based on an experiment since the concepts are different.

Do you think there is a need to decide between them?

there is what kuhn called incommensurablity across paradigms. but paradigm selection is still science.

Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes incommensurable paradigms are not incompatible. They are not in direct either/or competition such that selection, in a global sense, is even an issue.

that’s why i say that we learn about what human health is (and by extension human well-being in general) as we study it. science proceeds according to assumptions about the best meaning of the key terms, but part of science is reevaluating what we ought to take the terms to mean.

sometimes, yes. but in this case, I don’t think so.

 

[Betterave]

the bit about medical school is to explain how paradigm change happens. eventually, one conception of human health wins out and alternative conceptions aren’t so much proven wrong but rendered irrelevant to the current scientific conversation about human health and science progresses.

It was intended to explain that maybe; but I don’t see how it does. What has been rendered irrelevant here? Only made-up counter-factual stuff, it seems to me.

no, we agreed that it is possible to be wrong about what human health is. in fact, you said you thought i was wrong.

well, weren’t you? …seriously, can’t you see that you were wrong? one can have a nice healthy tan. one can even have a nice healthy cigarette break! If you want to disagree, you need to explain why.