Right Reason

MLK and Natural Law

 

Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is one of the natural-law classics of our time. If you have not read the letter, I highly suggest that you do so. Bombastic in style, the letter asserts one of the principal theses of natural-law thought: That an unjust law is no law at all. Natural law argues that there is a higher law than those of human nations and that, ultimately, our conduct should be evaluated by that standard. King’s life is a witness to how powerful that idea can be.

From a natural-law perspective, one of the more noteworthy aspects of King’s “Letter” is his reference to St. Thomas Aquinas:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

 

The part of Aquinas’ philosophy that King argues from can be found in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae I.II.96.4 ad 3:

This argument is true of a law that inflicts unjust hurt on its subjects. The power that man holds from God does not extend to this: wherefore neither in such matters is man bound to obey the law, provided he avoid giving scandal or inflicting a more grievous hurt.

Thomas Aquinas on Natural Law

For being a perspective which is largely tacitly embraced across the modern world, natural law is a perspective that has largely fallen into oblivion as a way of thinking about morality. Much of the fault lies in the abandonment of virtue ethics and in the emphasis on the Is-Ought problem, as if what an entity, whether dog or man, ought to do can be deduced independently of its nature. The task of ethics in to a virtue-ethics philosophy was to identify the contrast between people as they happen to be and people as they could if they adopted the virtues. Virtue, and the good, was therefore directly related to the essence of the entity in question. 

Natural law was then a question about the good life and how patterns of behavior emerged out of an entity’s pursuit of the good life germane to its nature. In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas describes natural law as being founded in practical reason—that part of reason dealing with determining what actions a person is to take—and in each person’s pursuit of the good in life:

Now as being is the first principle that falls under the apprehension simply, so good is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of practical reason, which is directed to action, for every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. And so the first principle of practical reason is established on the notion of the good, that is the good that everything strives after. This is therefore the first precept of law, that the good is to be done and pursued, and evil to be avoided. All the other precepts of natural law are based on this, so that all the precepts that the practical reason apprehends as naturally a human good belongs to the presents of the natural law as something to be done or avoided. (ST: Ia.II.ae, Q. 94, A 2, co.) 

Aquinas’ formulation is deceptively simple. To a modern philosopher, it would be almost incomprehensible, but that is because of modern philosophy’s jettisoning of human nature along with the virtues. Like vines in a rainforest growing vertically to approach the sunlight, all biological life is in search of a better world and natural law emerges as the universal patterns of that search. So, Aquinas’ formulation of natural law is about that law emerging out of a rational being’s inclinations and the patterns of behavior those inclinations will stimulate.

 

Apart of that formulation is a robust understanding of what human beings are. To know the natural law, we have to know an agent’s inclinations. As a result, natural-law ethics comes with an understanding of human nature. Without that human nature, the natural law would not exist because human beings would not tend to pursue certain ends. 

In Aquinas’ estimation: “there is in man an inclination to according according to the nature of his reason, which is proper to him, as man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society” (Ibid). To Aquinas, natural law, therefore, pertains to man’s  relationship with God and his fellow human beings because people will always tend to those interactions. Out of those interactions, certain grammatical forms will emerge and those grammatical forms will be the natural laws. 

 

The great truth of the natural-law perspective that is embraced across discourse today, yet never recognized as part of the natural-law perspective is the importance of emergence. As written above, natural law flows from the simple principle that all life is in search of a better world. Anyone who seeks to understand that search must, in turn, understand the nature of life and how the good is determined by their nature. It is apart of the nature of human beings to live in complex societies and so natural law has evolved so as to make such a life possible. As a species that has evolved a particular penchant for social interactions, natural law reveals itself in social rules of conduct, commutative justice foremost among those. If people are to be able to pursue a better world in complex society, they have to respect the rules of mine of thine. That is simply the natural law.