Natural Law, or gradual human consensus?

[fhansen]

Having a philosophical intuition doesn’t require a natural law, I think. For instance, I’m going to assume that most posters here are going to say that same sex marriage (just as an example, let’s not spin off into that) violates the natural law, and they have an intuition that it is wrong. But there are plenty of people who have the intuition that it isn’t wrong. What this shows is that the natural law (if it exists) doesn’t map to all intuitions, and that our intuitions don’t need a natural law to underwrite them.

If that’s correct, then stuff can feel wrong without an appeal to natural law. Many ethical theories try to explain how morality works without that appeal. I would say that the majority of moral philosophy doesn’t use natural law in the Christian sense. (Of course this doesn’t mean there is no natural law - just that it isn’t expressly needed to build an ethical theory)

Ok, but we end up with moral relativism anyway, aren’t we? Some can say rape doesn’t feel wrong -that its the natural order of things for persons freed from religious or societal mandated ethics, in fact.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Ok, but we end up with moral relativism anyway, aren’t we? Some can say rape doesn’t feel wrong -that its the natural order of things for persons freed from religious or societal mandated ethics, in fact.

People can say that rape doesn’t feel wrong no matter what we happen to believe about morality.
For example:

If thou go out to fight against thy enemies, and the Lord thy God deliver them into thy hand, and thou lead them away captives,
And seest in the number of the captives a beautiful woman, and lovest her, and wilt have her to wife,
Thou shalt bring her into thy house: and she shall shave her hair, and pare her nails,
And shall put off the raiment, wherein she was taken: and shall remain in thy house, and mourn for her father and mother one month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and shalt sleep with her, and she shall be thy wife.

Society can be justified in punishing people even if morality is not fundamentally objective.

 

[Rhubarb]

Ok, but we end up with moral relativism anyway, aren’t we? Some can say rape doesn’t feel wrong -that its the natural order of things for persons freed from religious or societal mandated ethics, in fact.

I guess that depends what you mean by ‘moral relativism.’ In academic philosophy, it tends to mean specific things. Relativism means that the truth value of moral claims are determined by the attitudes of a person or group - generally the individual or the society. Like I said, that’s different from ‘error theory’ in nuanced ways. There are lots of different theories in meta and normative ethics that aren’t properly called relativism. (don’t worry about the lingo, it’s not really important)

For instance, a popular normative ethical theory is utilitarianism. It says that the right act is the act that results in the highest net utility. That is not a relativistic idea - there is a system in place that says what is and what isn’t right.

 

[fhansen]

I guess that depends what you mean by ‘moral relativism.’ In academic philosophy, it tends to mean specific things. Relativism means that the truth value of moral claims are determined by the attitudes of a person or group - generally the individual or the society. Like I said, that’s different from ‘error theory’ in nuanced ways. There are lots of different theories in meta and normative ethics that aren’t properly called relativism. (don’t worry about the lingo, it’s not really important)

For instance, a popular normative ethical theory is utilitarianism. It says that the right act is the act that results in the highest net utility. That is not a relativistic idea - there is a system in place that says what is and what isn’t right.

But that just succeeds in evading the question. We “know” rape, and presumably pedophilia and incest are wrong, even if we can’t defend it-and any possible number of “systems” we can come up with may, indeed, support those acts as permissible, as moral. And yet, we, the larger majority, know.

 

[Oreoracle]

I think the issue here is that you and your friend are speaking past one another. “What is moral?” and “How have humans answered the question ‘What is moral’?” are entirely separate questions. It’s like the difference between asking whether or not something exists and asking why people believe it exists. Referring to human evolution and culture is a perfectly legitimate way to answer the questions about belief.

 

[Rhubarb]

But that just succeeds in evading the question. We “know” rape, and presumably pedophilia and incest are wrong, even if we can’t defend it-and any possible number of “systems” we can come up with may, indeed, support those acts as permissible, as moral. And yet, we, the larger majority, know.

I didn’t mean to evade the question, just made a tangent about how ‘relativism’ is used in moral philosophy. The term has many senses, the two I talked about seemed like the most used reading of it.

We can ‘know’ rape is wrong. But critical thinking of that knowledge (which is what philosophers do, and I think what everyone should do on occasion) requires justification. You can justify it to an appeal of natural law, sure. (I don’t think it’s successful, but that’s neither here nor there) You can, also, appeal to other ethical theories though that do not require natural law.

My point in all this was to address the OP’s friend’s argument - that right and wrong come down to ‘historical consensus.’ Like I said, this can amount to different things depending on what the friend means by it. It sounds to me like the friend is either proposing that there are no moral truths and all we have is consensus for behavior. (Moral nihilism) Or that consensus actually does give moral propositions truth values. (Seems like what I’ve called cultural relativism) Depending on what the friend means by ‘historical consensus’ the argument against his position can change.

 

[Bahman]

I was having a conversation with someone and he doesn’t believe in natural law. His reasoning is that morality exists because “the gradual human consensus” decided that certain things were wrong and right (murder, rape, etc.). So he believes things aren’t intrinsically wrong and if they are “intrinsically” wrong, they are so because the gradual human consensus decided it was.

I’m confused because I immediately think “who are the people deciding this? Which group of humans? Humans have never had consensus, what if the consensus is wrong? Isn’t your reasoning very superstitious? etc.” I should ask him these questions, but can anyone help me to make a case for natural law by first defeating his notions logically and providing a positive support of the law written in our nature?

He is correct since we have a common sense of morality.

 

[Yeoman]

For example:

If thou go out to fight against thy enemies, and the Lord thy God deliver them into thy hand, and thou lead them away captives,

Poorly chosen quote, as that doesn’t authorize assault, as you’ve suggested. Let’s repost that from a current Catholic translation (I think yours is the Kings James version, with its archaic English). It then comes out as:

When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your power, so that you take captives, 11if you see a beautiful woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as a wife, 12and so you take her home to your house, she must shave her head,* cut her nails, 13lay aside her captive’s garb, and stay in your house, mourning her father and mother for a full month. After that, you may come to her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14If later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; you must not sell her for money. Do not enslave her, since you have violated her.

Still sounds pretty harsh, but let’s consider something further. What was the norm in the ancient world for the defeated? This was actually a restraint on that allowing for marriage and basically the same rights as a Jewish woman would have had, after marriage.

This gets to the poorly understood concept of slavery. Slavery is never approved of in the Bible, but that it existed is acknowledged. In Hebrew and Aramaic the word for “servant” and “slave” were in fact the same. Why was that?

The reason for that was that they lived in different economic times than we do, and that any human has lived in since vast antiquity. With thin resources, the ability to buy and sell your labor, as we do now, was simply non existent in many circumstances. People who worked in certain occupations were basically indentured into those occupations for life, there being no other real choice. That’s the nature of the classical slavery of the ancient world.

This is not to suggest that it was kind in all instances, that would certainly be in error. But even in what seems to be harsh circumstances, such as slaves generated by war, ancient societies basically had no other means by which to handle it. They couldn’t let a surrendered force simply go, as it would come back. A common practice amongst many ancient people was simply to kill a lot of the defeated. Slavery at least allowed the defeated to live.

This is striking in comparison to North American slavery which had no such economic of social “justification”, if a person wishes to call it that, whatsoever.

This is one of those sections of the Old Testament that has to be understood in context. In the context of the ancient world, brutality by the victors over the defeated was the norm, not the exception. The section quoted actually imposes restraint upon the Israelite’s in comparison to the norm at the time, holding basically that women were not to be taken as prizes (a la ISIL today), but rather if one of the victorious Israelite combatants was taken with a woman, he had to marry her, and acknowledge her loss.

It also doesn’t have much to do, in this instance, with the Natural Law, fwiw.

 

[fhansen]

People can say that rape doesn’t feel wrong no matter what we happen to believe about morality.
For example:

Society can be justified in punishing people even if morality is not fundamentally objective.

People can-and will attempt to-justify any behavior they deem beneficial to themselves, often breaking objective moral standards in the process. Murder is an obvious example. And they may even do it in the name of God-and record it for posterity.

 

[fhansen]

I didn’t mean to evade the question, just made a tangent about how ‘relativism’ is used in moral philosophy. The term has many senses, the two I talked about seemed like the most used reading of it.

We can ‘know’ rape is wrong. But critical thinking of that knowledge (which is what philosophers do, and I think what everyone should do on occasion) requires justification. You can justify it to an appeal of natural law, sure. (I don’t think it’s successful, but that’s neither here nor there) You can, also, appeal to other ethical theories though that do not require natural law.

My point in all this was to address the OP’s friend’s argument - that right and wrong come down to ‘historical consensus.’ Like I said, this can amount to different things depending on what the friend means by it. It sounds to me like the friend is either proposing that there are no moral truths and all we have is consensus for behavior. (Moral nihilism) Or that consensus actually does give moral propositions truth values. (Seems like what I’ve called cultural relativism) Depending on what the friend means by ‘historical consensus’ the argument against his position can change.

I think the question boils down to this: is our aversion to such things as rape natural-are we tapped into a deeper and truer level of humanity at that point-or is it man-made, conditioned?