3. The Relationship of Natural Law Ethics and Science
The natural law consists of rules which guide practical reason. The first principles of natural law “Good is what all things seek after” and “Good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided.” By good, St. Thomas Aquinas referred to as an end of our actions that we have a natural inclination to desire. Consequently, those things that our nature desires are perceived by practical reason as good for our human nature and are to be pursued in our actions.
All other rules of natural law proceed from such fundamental principle; 1) Human nature is inclined to desire its own survival. It is then natural law to preserve human life and avoid what is destructive to life; 2) Human nature desires whatever accords animal nature such as the mating between sexes and caring for one’s young; and 3) Human nature desires those good which fulfill reason such as the knowledge of truth about God and living in a social life. In order for one to “do good, avoid evil”, one must “act in accord with nature”, meaning, one must “act rationally”. It is to the natural law ethics that people are directed to act.
Science, on the other hand, is a branch of study concerned with facts, principles, and methods. The natural law governs what we do with it. I would argue that in theory, natural law ethics and science could exist separately but in practice they cannot. In Aristotle’s structure of the soul, one can see that science takes precedence over ethics. In the rational side of the human soul, there are two divisions. They are the practical and the contemplative. Aristotle always gave the contemplative side superiority over the practical. The contemplative division consisted of the pure sciences, but the practical enabled the human with moral actions. Though this trend was set many years ago, it still holds true today. Natural law ethics do govern what is allowed in science. Some one also mentioned that every act has its own consequences. Because of this, Natural law ethics can never be separated from science.
Science is definitely an area where ethical consideration will always need attention. As technology increases, and the progression of science opens doors to further engineering of human lives, ethical dilemmas also increase. Natural law ethics is a set of rules that are constantly changing and govern to what degree science may act. The necessity of ethics in our society is to keep the human race in check. Without the limitations that Natural law ethics impose on science, scientists would have enough power to drastically alter the world as it exists today.
4. Problems with the Natural Law Ethics
The classical doctrine of natural law, according to Cicero, states that true law is right reason in agreement with Nature. It is a sin therefore to alter this law and to repeal any part of it. Likewise, any purported law which is in conflict with natural law is a mere corruption of law and so not binding by virtue of its own legal quality. God is the author, promulgator and enforcer of the natural law. Thus in promoting morality, the Christian church has been the most active defender of this law.
However, the weakness of the natural law ethics lies in its failure to implement the law itself. It generally fails to respond to the changes in customs and social practices. According to Aristotle, a thing’s nature is its inner principle of change, and a change will be natural if it is the work of this inner principle. It holds true for culture and social change. A society’s nature is its people, who have their own inner principles of change. Therefore, changes in society are natural because they are the result of the work of inner principles which govern its development and eventual decay.
This problem is manifested in the field of science and technology. Ethical issues in cloning and contraceptives have been fiercely debated by ethicists and scientists. As mentioned in the previous part of this essay, natural law ethics governs science. However, it does not suggest that ethicists should suppress new changes brought about by science. The pursuit of knowledge, therefore the pursuit of good, is a nature of human.
On the other hand, abortion, masturbation, homosexuality have been the target of the ire of the moralists. Man is naturally after his/her survival. So abortion is necessary if the life of mother is in danger. As for a healthy mother, ‘naturalistic’ arguments such as the right of the unborn child to be born have been used by ethicists in condemning abortion. However, natural law also supports every human’s pursuit of happiness, in this case, of the mother. Homosexuality poses a threat to natural law ethicists. They argue that same-sex intercourse prevents the end of sexual activity which is procreation. In this line, one may ask, to what are human hands designed for? Not for typing and writing, for sure. So does writing is immoral because it prevents the human hand to perform its natural biological function?
5. Areas which Natural Law Ethics Stand Out
The strength of natural law ethics lies in its consistent claim of universal and natural good. Natural law theorists provide Hobbesian, Aristotelian and Platonic explanation to this claim.
The Hobbesian solution proceeds on the basis of a subjectivist theory of the good. On subjectivist theories of the good, what makes it true that something is good is that it is desired. One might think that to affirm a subjectivist theory of the good is to reject natural law theory, given the immense variation in human desire. But this is not so, since one might hold that human beings’ common nature, their similarity in physiological constitution, makes them such as to have some desires in common, and these desires may be so central to human aims and purposes that we can build important and correct precepts of rationality around them.
Hobbes thinks that humans are similarly constructed so that for each human, his or her central aim is the avoidance of violent death. Thus Hobbes is able to build his entire natural law theory around a single good, the good of self-preservation, which is so important to human life that exceptionlessly binding precepts can be formulated with reference to its achievement.
In the Aristotelian solution, the idea is to reject a subjectivism about the good, holding that what makes it true that something is good is not that it stands in some relation to desire but rather that it is somehow perfective or completing of a being, where what is perfective or completing of a being depends on that being’s nature. So what is good for a human depends on what is completing or perfective of a human, and this depends on the kind of thing a human is by nature. So the fact of variability of desire is not on its own enough to cast doubt on the natural law universal goods thesis: as the good is not defined fundamentally by reference to desire, the fact of variation in desire is not enough to raise questions about universal goods.
The third answer is Platonic. Like the Aristotelian view, it rejects a subjectivism about the good. But it does not hold that the good is to be understood in terms of human nature. The role of human nature is not to define or set the good, but merely to define what the possibilities of human achievement are. So one might think that some things — knowledge, beauty, etc. — are just good in themselves, apart from any reference to human desire or perfection, but hold that the pursuit of these are only part of the natural law insofar as they fall within the ambit of human practical possibility.
6. Utilitarian Ethics, Duty Ethics, Situation Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Cultural Relativism, Behaviorism, Egoism
Utilitarian Ethics
Utilitarian ethics states that the rightness of an action entirely depends on the value of its consequences, and that the usefulness can be rationally estimated. The value of said consequences are measured by the Greatest Happiness Principle, which states that each person’s happiness counts for exactly the same as every other’s, and that value of an action is positive if and only if that action increases the total happiness in the world. The central idea of the utilitarian theory is that ethics is a reality which can be demonstrated.
However, utilitarian ethics suffers from a number of problems, one of which is the difficulty of comparing utility among different people. It has been argued that the happiness of different people is incommensurable. Utilitarianism has been criticized for leading to a number of conclusions contrary to ‘common sense’ morality.
Duty Ethics
Some philosophers such as Kant think of duty ethics as the mirror image of rights ethics. For most rights, there are corresponding duties. So duty ethics takes duties rather than rights as fundamental, and in doing so it shifts the emphasis to what we owe morally to others. Recent duty ethics attempt to identify a comprehensive list of basic duties. According to Kant, each duty expresses respect for persons. People deserve respect precisely because they have inherent worth as rational beings who have the capacity for autonomy. Autonomy means governing our own lives in light of universal moral principles – principles that apply equally to all people, rules that as rational agents we freely accept as binding on us.
Situation Ethics
Fletcher’s (1966) situation ethics possesses a simple structure: the principles were pragmatism, relativism, positivism and personalism. According to this ethics, the essence of immorality is to love things and to use people (Bensons, 2003).
However, situationists have been accused of refusing to allow any predefinitions of the nature and content of love, and blithely assume that individuals, given only encouragement, will usually act lovingly when they understand the various facets, ramifications and implications of the particular situation. Moreover, it can be argued that the only ethic that could stand above human limitations and prejudices and establish absolute human rights is the one that derived from the realm of the transcendent and not from individual finite situations.
Certainly, love is an obvious first choice as such a moral absolute, but it cannot be the sole intrinsic good. In the final analysis, this proposition is inadequate and lacking in truth as foundations for a Christian ethic. The notion that there is only one intrinsic good, namely love, is simply not attested by the biblical evidence. It is neither true nor adequate (Bensons, 2003).
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics takes virtue and vice to be at least as basic as moral duty and the goodness of situations. Many versions of virtue ethics take character traits to be basic. To be a virtuous person is identified with being a person in full possession of the virtuous character traits. This version explains moral duty in terms of a virtuous person: what one ought morally to do in a particular situation is to do what a virtuous person would do in that situation (Harman, 1999). In this view, ideally virtuous people are robustly disposed to do what they ought morally to do. Other people should try to become so disposed and should in various situations imitate virtue. In a typical situation of moral choice, an agent ought to do whatever a virtuous person would do in that situation (Hursthouse, 1991).
One obvious objection to the standard form of virtue ethics is to its account of the relation between what a person ought morally to do and what it is to be a virtuous person. The objectionable claim is that what one ought morally to do in a given situation is to do what a virtuous person would do in that situation. The objection is that this cannot cover all cases, because someone a nonvirtuous person will be in a situation that a virtuous person would never be in (Harman, cited in Hursthouse, 1991).
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism is the position that all points of view are equally valid and that all truth is relative to the individual and his or her environment. All ethical, religious, political and aesthetic beliefs are truths that are relative to the cultural identity of the individual. Relativism can include moral relativism, situational relativism and cognitive relativism. Right and wrong are now defined by socialization. Society changes and morality becomes a moving target. In truth, if the standard of right and wrong is based on relativism, then society has no standards at all.
Cultural relativism is the philosophical belief that all views are equally valid. However, if you test this position under general rules of logic, you soon discover that relativism is illogical and self-defeating. If relativism is true and all points of view are true, then the assertion that relativism is false, is true. Further, relativists believe that all truth is relative. Therefore, the statement, “All truth is relative,” would be absolutely true. If this statement is absolutely true, then not all things are relative and the statement is false. Moreover, relativists declare that “there are no absolute truths.” However, this is an absolute statement, which is supposed to be true. Therefore, it is an absolute truth and the statement is false.
Reference:
Benson, B. (2003) Joseph Fletcher and Situation Ethics. John Mark Ministries. Available at [www.pastornet.net.au]. Accessed 28/10/03]
Chomsky, N. (1959) Review of Verbal Behavior, Language, 35, 26-58.
Fletcher, J. (1966) Situation Ethics. London: SCM Press.
Harman, G. (1999) Virtue ethics without character traits. Available at [www.cogsci.princeton.edu]. Accessed [28/10/03].
Harman, Human flourishing, in Hursthouse, R. (1991) Virtue theory and abortion, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20, p. 227.
Hursthouse, R. (1991) Virtue theory and abortion, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20, p. 225.
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