Excerpt from a Letter

The other thing that I think is interesting — and I haven’t really teased this out into an argument yet — about Natural Law theory is the use of the term “law” to describe the body of knowledge that natural law theorists believe they are discovering. It is a kind of “law” very different from any other sort of jurisprudence, in that it is a “law” about which — and sometimes, they will even admit this — an honest observer can be mistaken or fail to apprehend. It is a law without authoritative interpretation or resolution of ambiguity or enforcement. As a kind of knowledge, the stakes are honestly quite low. Natural law is, at best, a sort of reference draft upon which “real” law might (and some would say ought) be based.

A cynical person might argue that “natural law” is an attempt to attach the authority that inheres in the term “law” to something which is remarkably un-law-like. I am more attracted to the argument that the use of the term “law” to refer to the “natural law” body of knowledge commits the natural law theorist to the understanding that no law is truly and immovably fixed, not even “real” law like the U.S. Code. It is all contingent on our understandings, our values, and the way we parse the world. That is to say, to the extent that the term “law” can encompass both “real” law and “natural” law, it is not an acknowledgement of natural law’s strengths but of real law’s weaknesses.

Of course, the natural law theorist is often committed to the idea that his knowledge is not contingent but objective, but this is not a problem unique to the natural law theorist. There are any number of people and philosophies which are willing to argue that their perspective is the view from nowhere. Why is it so important to couch opinions as facts?

This brings me back, again, to my great perplex: why are foundationalists so eager to do 99% of the work of nihilists?

gauche
21 Dec 09