The Ethics Of Liberty - Natural Law And Reason

Since last  year, I have had the intention to read through Murray Rothbard's "The Ethics Of Liberty" and record my thoughts on it in this blog.  I read chapter 1 a couple of months ago but still couldn't find the time to do any writing.  I can't promise a consistent schedule going forward, but I decided I couldn't wait any longer to start.  Written in 1982, "The Ethics Of Liberty" is Rothbard's attempt to formulate a political theory based on libertarian principles and ethics.

The subject of chapter 1 is something called natural law, and the theme is that natural law is neither religious nor irreligious.  Rothbard's purpose is to convince the audience that religious faith isn't required to discover natural law, but at the same time it isn't opposed to faith either.

At the start of the book, he describes several factions debating political philosophy.  The first faction believes that "human nature" exists.  The other denies that.  Representing the second faction, a member of the American Political Science Association of that time states,

                "that "man's nature" is a purely theological concept that must be dismissed from

                  any scientific discussion."

Therefore the political factions were divided along religious lines.  Rothbard represented a third faction of those who were not religious but still believed that human nature exists and should be the foundation for political thought.  In order to define human nature and purpose, Rothbard depended on a secular version of the natural law framework of Thomas Aquinas.  Of course, that begs an important question.

Rothbard doesn't define natural law in chapter 1, but it is a part of an ideological system which attempts to explain the order God created in Genesis 1.  Aquinas described all of the orderly processes in the universe in terms of 4 laws:  1) Eternal Law, 2) Natural Law, 3) Human Law, and 4) Divine Law.  To keep this brief, natural law can be thought of as objective morality and the purpose of life combined, in short to "Do Good.  Avoid Evil".  Aquinas' claim is that humans live their best life when they willfully and consciously make decisions that align with natural law.  To Aquinas the ultimate good was to have a relationship with God through Jesus.  Another blogger, bionic mosquito, has summarized natural law as  actions which take others into regard or more elegantly love, both for God and our neighbors.

Rothbard argues that natural law, this definition of good and evil, can be discovered strictly through reason.  He calls it "right reason."  That means divine revelation like the Bible is not needed to discover it.  People using only their observations of the world and logic can discover it themselves, almost as if God doesn't exist.  A scary proposition for believers, but one that allows those who don't believe to hold to an objective morality.  The other option which Rothbard rejected was to believe in moral relativism or subjective morality.

He supports his proposition by quoting both Catholics and Protestants.  He also quotes from a more recent philosopher who wrote about natural law, Alessandro d'Entreves.

                "[Grotius's] definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary.  When he maintains

                that natural law is that body of rules which Man is able to discover by the use of

                his reason, he does nothing but restate the Scholastic notion of a rational foundation

                of ethics.  Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that notion which had been shaken by

                the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of thought.  When he 

                declares that these rules are valid in themselves, independently of the fact that God

                willed them, he repeats an assertion which had already been made by some of the

                schoolmen."

Rothbard sees morality and ethics as a scientific enterprise much like physics.

                "natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man

                apprehends such law is his reason -not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, 

                or anything else."

While I do agree that morality is objective and is reasonable, I have a hard time believing that it can be defined strictly through applying logic to observations about human nature.  I don't mean to sabotage the idea that natural law is an important principle on which to base a political ethical system, but I am afraid if I don't raise an objection the search for natural law will not lead to "the good" but to "the evil".

I say this for several reasons.  The first is that the whole concept of natural law came from Aquinas' interpretation of Scripture.  One of the important verses is, Romans 1:19-20, it says that God has made Himself and His character evident to us.  It also says that we can see those things in the creation.  This is an appeal to reason but also to intuition.  Another verse Aquinas used was Romans 2:15 where it describes God's law written on our hearts.  So God has given us a conscience outside of reason to understand what is right.  But is the human heart (thoughts, reason, and emotions) a reliable guide by itself?  Other Scripture tells us no.

                Jeremiah 17:9

                "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can

                 understand it?"

The second reason is that logic only arrives at the correct solution when correct assumptions are presumed.  In other words where you start largely determines where you end up.  If I start by observing the world as it is, I don't come up with what it should be.  People do many things which are immoral even though they believe it is in their best interest or is necessary to live their best life.  If we observe what pleases people in the world and apply reason to that in order to determine natural law, we most likely conclude that what is sin is good and what is good is foolish.  There has to be a something outside of mankind which guides us on our search to discover natural law.

The third reason is that the history of philosophy shows that Rothbard's proposed exercise has already been tried and failed.  In Francis Schaeffer's "How Should We Then Live?" he describes philosophers trying to use reason alone to discover natural law, even though they didn't usually call it that, for hundreds of years.  The result was they ultimately gave up on using reason in the 1700s.  Political/ethical philosophers started using emotion, impulse, and irrationality.  It remains that way to this day.

Observation, reason, and science are useful tools to discover impersonal forces and what exists in the universe.  It can tell us how humans behave.  It can to some degree explain what conduct produces what outcomes.  But the world is too complex and our ability to reason is too affected by sin for us to rely on "right reason" alone. I propose that we define natural law using our human capability to reason but having that reason constrained and directed by the divine revelation of the Bible.  When we do that we find that natural law is summarized by two things which Jesus tells us are the most important, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind" and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."