In the August/September issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart gives us what he promises is his last word on the controversy generated by his article on natural law in the March issue. I responded to Hart’s original piece in “A Christian Hart, a Humean Head,” posted at the First Things website (and cross-posted here). Hart replied to my criticisms in a follow-up article in the May issue of First Things. I responded to that in “Sheer Hart Attack,”posted at Public Discourse. Hart also replied to several other critics in the Letters section of the May First Things, and I commented on his remarks in a further post entitled “Discerning the thoughts and intents of Hart.” What follows is a reply to his latest piece.
Hart does not refer to me by name this time, but he does quote a remark I made in my Public Discourse article to the effect that according to natural law theory, “there is common ground among all human beings, and particularly between religious believers and non-believers, on which moral disagreements can be rationally adjudicated.” Hart comments:
I am not sure I could sneak so minimalist a definition of natural law theory past, say, the piercing eyes of Russell Hittinger; but, by all means, if we are talking only about principles upon which we all agree in advance, then only details remain.
I, however, do not believe everyone agrees on those principles anymore, even when it seems they might.
End quote. The first thing to say about this is that I was not trying to give a formal definitionof natural law theory in the first place, but merely putting emphasis on one of its key features. I was also keeping my characterization general enough to cover both of the main theories that go under the “natural law” label these days (i.e. the traditional or “old” natural law theory defended by the likes of Hittinger, Ralph McInerny, and myself, and the “new” natural law theory of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert P. George). Had I intended my remark as a definition it would have been what Scholastics call a “nominal definition” (one which tries merely to capture a term’s usage) rather than a “real definition” (one which tries to capture the real essence of the thing named by a term). And had I given a real definition it would have been no more minimalist than the sort Hittinger would give.
Anyway, while on the substantive issues Hart concedes little if anything to his critics, he does allow that in some places in his earlier articles he perhaps could have been clearer, writing that “given the necessarily condensed nature of columns with word limits, I may have been guilty of a few cryptic formulations.” But though he tries to clarify things in this latest piece, I’m afraid it just doesn’t seem to me that he has succeeded in doing so.
One of the complaints Hart’s critics have raised repeatedly is that he appears to be attacking a phantom, refusing to name the specific natural law theorists whose work he has in mind, blurring the crucial differences between the “old” and “new” approaches, and as a consequence raising objections that apply to neither one. Amazingly, in this fourth time at bat he still does not resolve this ambiguity, or so it seems to me. On the one hand, he tells us that “while classical forms of the tradition are cogent given the religious and metaphysical assumptions with which they work,” he has been “dismissive” of “attempts to forge an effective natural law theory without the support of those assumptions, agreeable to the temper of modernity.” That makes it sound as if what he has had in his sights is the “new natural law theory,” which attempts to reformulate the natural law position without reference to the classical metaphysical foundation traditional or “old” natural law theorists would insist on.
On the other hand, Hart is critical of attempts to argue for moral conclusions via what he calls “philosophical arguments simplyfrom the evident natures of things” and spends most of the piece emphasizing how, given their “mechanical” conception of nature, modern people do not see “inherent purposes” in nature and fail to “find a moral meaning in nature’s forms.” That makes it sound as if Hart is criticizing the “old” or traditional natural law theory, which (unlike the “new”) appeals to formal and final causes in nature. (Or at least it sounds as if he is criticizing a caricature of the “old” theory -- I know of no natural law theorist who thinks he can appeal “simply” to “the evident natures of things,” as if the existence of such natures were uncontroversial.)
I do not have any satisfying explanation for Hart’s persistent ambiguity. He has read his critics and knows that this is one of their complaints (indeed, perhaps their chief complaint). It would be very easy for him to say something like “Let me make it clear that I am only criticizing the ‘new natural law’ of Grisez, Finnis, George, et al.” (if that is indeed the case) or “I am criticizing both approaches, but I realize that the same criticisms don’t apply to both, so let me first raise some criticisms of the ‘new’ approach and then some separate criticisms of the ‘old.’” As it is, he does not even acknowledge his critics’ repeated complaint about his failure clearly to distinguish the “old” and “new” approaches to natural law, much less respond to it.
Could it be that Hart does not understand the differences between the two approaches? That is hard to believe, given not only how well-read he evidently is, but also how clearly and frequently the differences have been harped on by his critics. One thing is plain, and that is that if Hart wereto disambiguate his position, his main objection to natural law theories would entirely collapse. For that objection -- which the new article essentially restates -- has consistently been that modernity’s conception of nature is too metaphysically desiccated for natural law theorists to be able glibly to appeal to nature’s purposes in arguing about morality with secularists. And the problem with this -- to repeat a point I’ve now made many times, in several articles, but which Hart has never answered -- is that it is directed at a straw man.
For “new” natural law theorists do not appeal to nature’s purposes in the first place. In response to Hart’s eloquent description of the moderns’ conception of nature as denuded from top to bottom of inherent purpose, they might say “Fine, but how is all of that relevant to us? The whole point of our approach is to sidestep that problem by grounding natural law, not in a classical philosophy of nature of the sort the moderns reject, but in a theory of practical reason sensitive to their post-Humean metaphysical scruples!” This may be a hopeless task -- I certainly think it is -- but Hart offers no arguments whatsoever against it. His repeated emphasis on the differences between classical and modern conceptions of nature, while correct, simply misses the whole point of the “new natural lawyers’” project.
We “old” natural law theorists, meanwhile, do appeal to “inherent purposes” and “nature’s forms.” We agree with Hart that natural law theory requires such a classical metaphysical foundation. But precisely for that reason, we are also well aware that that entails that we are committed to a radically different conception of nature from that of modern secularists, and that “any ‘natural’ terms [we] employ have very different meanings for [those] interlocutors” (as Hart tells us -- as if it were news). We realize that we cannot take for granted a common metaphysical understanding of the natural world and proceed directly to moral arguments, but have first to challenge the moderns’ understanding of nature itself, and that this is a Herculean project. In response to Hart’s eloquent description of the moderns’ conception of nature as denuded from top to bottom of inherent purpose, we would say “Fine, but how is all of that relevant to us? You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know -- indeed, you’re not telling us anything we haven’t said ourselves!”
In short, Hart’s targets are natural law theorists who both (a) appeal to formal and final causes inherent in nature but also (b) are blithely unaware of the fact that (or at least downplay the fact that) most modern readers firmly reject the very idea of formal and final causes. And the trouble is that there are no such natural law theorists. For (a) is not true of “new” natural law theorists, and (b) is not true of “old” natural law theorists. Certainly Hart has, in four different pieces now, failed to offer a single specific example of a theorist to whom his criticisms would apply.
Since Hart has now responded twice to me personally, it is especially odd that he should say some of the things he does in his latest piece, presumably as if they were criticisms of anything I’ve written. He emphasizes that the “rise of the mechanical philosophy” has made it possible for modern people to deny that there are purposes in nature; that “even those who believed that the exquisite clockwork of the universe had been assembled by an intelligent designer still regarded physical nature as an amalgam of intrinsically aimless energies upon which order had been extrinsically imposed”; that even in the biological realm moderns tend to reject “intrinsic natures” in favor of “local coalescences of diverse and meaningless material forces” so that there can be “no proper purpose inherent in any aspect of an organism” on such a view and thus no morally relevant criterion of what counts as “flourishing”; and that this overall picture amounts to a “nihilism” that when pushed through consistently enables those who embrace it to “dismiss logic” and tends toward a “limitless voluntarism” in ethics.
I hardly need tell my longtime readers that these are themes I have repeatedly emphasized and developed at length myself, e.g. in The Last Superstition and in countless blog posts (such as my series of posts on Alex Rosenberg). Indeed, I have, I think it can fairly be said, relentlessly hammered (some might say ad nauseam) on the theme that defending natural law and natural theology requires revitalizing the entire classical metaphysical tradition and attacking the metaphysical assumptions of modern philosophy at their core. Hearing Hart complain that natural law theorists are insufficiently mindful of how deeply at odds their basic metaphysical assumptions are with those of modern thinkers, I feel a bit like Richard Dawkins might if he were told that he really should consider writing something about evolution someday.
Agree though we implicitly do about the conditionof modern metaphysics, Hart and I certainly do not see eye to eye on the remedy. While I acknowledge in The Last Superstition that there are “non-intellectual factors” behind the crisis of modern Western civilization and that “some are more important” than the intellectual ones (p. 51), I have also long insisted that a major part of the problem is intellectual and philosophical, and can only be dealt with via sustained, vigorous, and painstaking philosophical argument.
And here is where a kind of “common ground” between the classical natural law theorist and the contemporary secular philosopher can still be found. For though the latter typically rejects classical metaphysics of the Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic sort, he can still understand arguments for those views if they are set out carefully. He is perfectly capable of engaging in debate with the classical metaphysician about such matters as whether a nominalist account of universals is ultimately defensible, whether Humean arguments about efficient causality are ultimately cogent, whether efficient causation is ultimately intelligible without affirming an end toward which a cause points as to a final cause, whether the existence of change can coherently be denied and if not whether it can be made sense of without the act/potency distinction, whether modern science can ultimately be made sense of without affirming that things have immanent natures, whether reductionist interpretations of what we know from modern chemistry and biology are correct -- and all the other philosophical issues I address in The Last Superstition and elsewhere (and which other traditional natural law theorists address too). That such debate can be fruitful is obvious to anyone familiar with the resurgence of Aristotelian ideas even outside the ranks of Thomists -- as several recent anthologies (see this one, this one, and this one), not to mention the well-known recent example of Thomas Nagel, make evident. Of course, this by itself does not entail the moral conclusions associated with natural law, but it does show that the metaphysical presuppositions of classical natural law theory can be recovered via philosophical argument.
Hart evidently disagrees. While he says on the one hand that his skepticism about natural law “arises not from doubts regarding the powers of natural reason,” he immediately goes on to say that they arise “rather from doubts regarding the powers of philosophical dialectic when it artificially confines itself to ‘purely natural’ principles.” I’m not sure I see the distinction here, much less a difference, but in any event Hart seems, as he did in his earlier articles, to be saying that the dispute between “these two views of reality” -- classical versus modern metaphysics -- is only ever going to be “mediated” by grace rather than nature, revelation rather than reason, and what he calls “the rhetoric of conversion” rather than philosophical argument. (How this squares with the existence of the many contemporary non-religious philosophers who have been brought over to various Aristotelian and other classical metaphysical views via purely philosophical arguments, he does not tell us.)
The problem with this alternative approach seems to me more obvious than any Hart purports to find in natural law. Whose rhetoric? Which conversion? Why should it be Christ’s call to leave our nets and follow Him, rather than (say) the call from the minaret, that stirs our hearts? Or why Christian renunciation rather than Buddhist non-attachment? And how can any answer that simply appeals to further conversion rhetoric be anything more than a riff on the sort of subjectivism and voluntarism Hart rightly denounces when it appears in its modernist guises?
It is no good merely to insinuate, as Hart does, that reason is at least a part of the story, as if this sufficed to keep the subjectivist and voluntarist genies in the bottle. For he also appears to insist that “the rhetoric of conversion” must always ultimatelywear the trousers, and the problem is that there are competing rhetorical influences on us. Either further rhetoric is what ultimately decides between them -- in which case we’ve fallen into subjectivism and voluntarism -- or it is not, in which case it is not Hart’s “rhetoric of conversion” that wears the trousers after all.
So, Hart has not only failed to lay a hand on the natural law approach, but has also failed to make clear exactly what his alternative is supposed to be. Or so it appears to me. But as an admirer of Atheist Delusions, I am (as Hart says of himself in his closing line) more than willing to be proved wrong.