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Natural Law and Virtue
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14173 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
5,735 Words |
| Author
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Ralph McInerny
Ralph McInerny, who holds the Michael P. Grace Chair in
Medieval Studies, is professor of philosophy and director of
Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame. |
If virtue is making a comeback in contemporary moral philosophy, the same cannot be said for natural law.
I think this is unfortunate. Indeed, it seems to be that out understanding of virtue will suffer fatally it we seek to separate virtue from those objective conditions in human nature that support it.
Much continues to be written on the subject of natural law, some of it excellent, but the very ascendancy of virtue carries with it the suggestion that to speak of human action in terms of law is to adopt an exiguous point of view. More seriously, there may seem to be a conflict between the approaches that natural law and virtue take to moral philosophy.
Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of the Good, was one of the first to draw attention to the fact that actors cast in the role of human persons in the then dominant way of doing moral philosophy had little to do with flesh-and-blood individuals. The moral agent was thought of as someone facing a puzzle and seeking a solution to it, the suggestion being that clarifying the problem and finding the solution to it summed up the ethical task. From this seemingly innocent assumption, odd consequences result.
First, the following disjunction presented itself: Either every waking moment is one in which the agent finds himself puzzled, or the moral life is episodic. Since it is false that humans are forever confronting quandaries, the moral life, according to this division, would be composed of those separate and discrete occasions when one is confronting a moral problem. But how is human life in the intervals to be described? As a moral or nonmoral, or what?
Second, the assumption that the moral life consists of those events in which the agent confronts a cognitive problem--"What is the right thing to do?"--predictably ran afoul of one of the oldest issues in moral philosophy. We cannot assume that knowing the solution is the solution. Nothing, alas, is more familiar to us than that we sometimes act against our best knowledge of what it is that we ought to do.
Knowledge and Virtue
The hope that knowing what we ought to do is tantamount to doing it dies hard. Socrates insisted that knowledge is virtue. The reverse of this claim is that acting badly is due to ignorance. Once ignorance is replaced by
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