The search for universal ethics

Natural Law and Morality

"The Search for Universal Ethics" recommends a reconsideration of natural law as a path toward a universal ethics. The key features of natural laws theories unify divine providence, human rationality, and morality. In brief, the view is that God has endowed us with the ability to recognize the moral truth, and this truth affords a place for all of nature and a cherished place for human rationality. As "The Search for Universal Ethics" says:

The vision of the world within which the doctrine of natural law developed and still finds its meaning today, involves therefore the reasoned conviction that there exists a harmony between the three substances which are God, man, and nature. (3.3)

This paper is dedicated to understanding this harmony in its broadest outline; I shall dwell on each of the three central features of the harmony -- God, persons, and nature. We shall see that the harmony is also a mutual reinforcing: for each, the better we understand it, the more we see the others in it.

In the contemporary zeitgeist, the natural order is characterized as impersonal and perhaps even hostile to human ambitions and morality. The cosmos care nothing about us, and we tend to think of ethics as a concern localized to human interests. "Christianity," by contrast, "affirms that the Logos [the "divine founding principle"] is personal, transcendent and creator." (3.3) This is an immediately striking and inspiring feature of "The Search for Universal Ethics." It envisages a universe that has not only been imbued with an "ethical message," but which is itself benevolent, rational, and loving. (3.3) Moreover, we have been provided with free will that transcends this natural order, but also with the rationality to act in accordance with its ethical message. God has done all of this out of love and so that we may live ethical lives. According to Aquinas:

...as God has care of the entire universe, God's choosing to bring into existence beings who can act freely and in accordance with principles of reason is enough to justify our thinking of those principles of reason as law.

As nearly all philosophies of the world recognize, we humans are both embedded in the natural order and in some sense distinct from it or "outside" of it; as Aristotle had it, we are both rational and animal. "The Search for Universal Ethics" is no exception, but it accounts more completely than most other such theories for the unity in the apparent diversity of human nature. It tells us that "...the human subject is ... A substantial and personal whole called to respond to the love of God and to unite himself through a recognized orientation towards a last end ..." (3.4) a natural law theory of ethics accounts for our unity by denying that our difference from the natural order is a "deep" difference; on the contrary, what would ostensibly differentiate us from natural things -- our rationality -- is in fact complement to nature's teleology. Our rationality reveals to us nature's ethical message.

We have already said quite a bit about nature. It carries with it God's inspiration toward ethics just as we do, even if we have free will: "a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe." (3.3) in our work to understand God's creation and to care for it responsibly, we are serving God and fulfilling the capabilities with which we have been divinely endowed. God has created us, our yen for truth, our rational capacities for discovering truth, and the universe which reveals itself to our inquiries; it is a harmonious creation without excess: