Comments on: Our Law and God’s

By: A Scott Crawford

A Scott Crawford — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 06:31:13 +0000

Shouldn’t we distinguish between “Natural Law” and the codified laws of men? Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, & etc. all make the distinction, and it’s misleading to claim Thomas is arguing “Divine Rights” rather than “Natural Law” when he uses ‘God’ (so perhaps he should just use ‘Providence’ in place of ‘God’!) Spinoza’s Political Tract is worth considering before leaping to Unger. http://www.constitution.org/bs/poltr-02.htm

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 05:13:54 +0000

Rob—I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been. When I said contingent all the way down, I meant to suggest the possibility that society/community might not be at all. That is, not just that society/community might have turned out differently. My reference to libertarians was a reference to the general libertarian insistence that the state has no rights other than the rights of the individuals on whose behalf it acts. The state is us, contractually bound, not organically bound. If the state can punish, it is not because the community has a right to defend itself (whether divinely ordained or otherwise), but because some individual was wronged and has the right to punish. And so on. That’s the view rejected by Thomas.

By: rob

rob — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:42:11 +0000

Thomas, sorry, you’re right about Clarence Thomas, he can’t think society is contingent all the way down. Some ethical beliefs have necessary sociological implications (although I don’t think it runs the other way).

By: rob

rob — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:28:11 +0000

Thomas, I don’t think that’s even true. Thinking that society is contingent all the way down does not prevent you from thinking that we could intervene in it. Granted, if you think that the contingency of society is wholly uncontrollable, random, as it were, that intervention becomes impossible. This does not mean that you don’t think it would be better to intervene, note, just impossible. You would become a kind of libertarian by default (and a weird kind of libertarian, because all the libertarians I know of think that the state should intervene to enforce self-ownership rights, which would seem to indicate that they don’t think the society is totally unamenable to state interventions). Anyway, most people don’t think of contingency that way: a given society is the product of particular contingent factors, which can be manipulated by the state and other actors to some greater or lesser degree. So acknowledgement of contingency does not necessarily have to effect your (abstract) political-theoretical beliefs. The disagreement between liberals and libertarians is all about political-theoretical beliefs, not about sociology (at least in terms of society as contingent or operating to a divine plan).

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:42:13 +0000

rob—I think your point is mostly on the mark. But a small bit remains on the other side: Thomas’s view (as represented)—that the community, acting through the apparatus of the state,is a divinely ordained moral actor—is at odds with any view that believes that society is contingent artifact all the way down. It doesn’t mean much in practice—we are always in our society, not in a state of nature (whatever that would mean)—but it is a difference. I’d think that Kieran would feel this difference most especially in his conversations with libertarians, who generally deny that the community acting through the state has any moral standing of its own. Generally, secular left-wingers and conservatives end up on the same side of that discussion, with libertarians on the other side.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:22:59 +0000

I think the confusion I mentioned earlier is still going on. Nicholas does it (Hayek says we shouldn’t reorganize society, therefore saying that society is in some way a human construct writes him out of the history of social thought), the discussion of the Greeks is doing it (I know nothing about Greek philosophy, but it looks like ‘x held this moral view’, ‘no, x held this other moral view’), and citizen is certainly doing it (‘it matters where human rights come from’: yes, but does that necessarily have anything to do with your view of how society came to be the way it is?). Ethics and sociology are not the same thing, and I think Kieran has encouraged the obviously false view that they are by confusing them in this post. Equating the recognition that societies are built up out of a set of contingent human actions with secular liberalism is deeply misleading, both in terms of the secularism and and the liberalism. Locke appealed to the divine law to justify social institutions which were definitely human constructs according to his philosophical anthropology, so you can have religiously motivated ethics and believe in the human construction of social institutions (Alisdair MacIntyre also springs to mind, and I’m sure there are innumerable others). Burke, on the other hand, seems to have thought that we were bound by the social contract of our fathers, which must mean he thought that society was to some degree the product of contingent human actions, but was not by any stretch of the imagination a liberal. Indeed, society as contingent, yet a thing we ought not to interfere with, seems to be a fairly common conservative trope: one might say it was the core of their view.

By: Citizen

Citizen — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 01:57:51 +0000

I am so tired of hearing people respond to this issue by saying it does not matter where one thinks human rights come from. Of course it matters. Justice Thomas’ belief that human rights are given by his god allows him to shrink the list of god-given rights to fit his particular faith…and worldview. Justice Thomas’ god, for example, does not give people the right to be gay (he thinks its silly to ban buggery but of course one does not have right to sin!) or whether to burn their nation’s flag. This belief in divinely bestowed rights allows Justice Thomas to decide that certain symbols are either so sacred or so profane that the First Amendment does not apply to them.(See his dissent in Virginia v. Black). When the Ninth Circuit ruled that the inclusion of “under God” violated the First Amendment President Bush said “America is a nation … that values our relationship with the Almighty…We need commonsense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.”(http://constitution-first.org/reaction_to_pledge.htm ) “We acknowledge the separation of sectarianism and state, but affirm the belief that there is no separation between God and state,” said the Senate Chaplain, before convening the session at which the Senate condemned the 9th circuit’s ruling. (Id.) The Supreme Court has in the past endorsed this view. In 1952, at the same time the words “under God” added to the pledge in response to “godless communism, Justice Douglas declared, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” (Zorach v. Clauson) But, alas, the god Justice Thomas prays to is not very generous with his rights dispensing. He (or is it a She?) gives out rights, just not that many) One must be a citizen to enjoy the privileges of membership. (Guantanamo Cases) People like Thomas and Scalia believe that the authority of government, and human rights, come from their god. Anyone who does not see how fundamentally at odds this is with the American endeavor must believe the same thing or just isn’t paying attention.

By: ChrisPer

ChrisPer — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:49:46 +0000

washerdreyer, thanks for correcting my misreading. My apologies Kieran.

By: Sam Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:50:48 +0000

Ophelia: You evidently take Thucydides a lot more literally than I do. I’ve always thought that he’s not so much reporting outbreaks of relativism as criticising the Athenians by making their rhetoric match their policies. Not that there’s anything wrong with your reading, mind you. As for Aristophanes… I take his treatment of Euripides (and Socrates, for that matter) more as an indicator of the mood of the times than a useful portrait. People were certainly worried about relativism, whether it was common or not. All that having been said, though, I still don’t think there’s much about rights or the social contract in ancient Greek thought. Perhaps the modern innovation was finding a way to make relativism work?

By: Eddie Thomas

Eddie Thomas — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:37:23 +0000

As Rob notes in his comment, a recognition that the political order is made does not preclude the possibility of unmade standards that guide that making. It simply precludes the possibility that we have simply inherited the ideal political order or that it has been described to us by revelation.

By: Lee

Lee — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:04:24 +0000

I think the most interesting thing is the slipperiness involved in evolutionary explanations of society that have “the authority of nature without the contrivance of God.” Maybe someone else will find this chapter I found on Hayek as insightful as I did. It’s about how he sometimes pushes evolutionary explanations too far. http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/andy.denis/research/thesis/05.htm

By: winston smith

winston smith — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:41:20 +0000

We’re going to keep fighting these same battles over and over again until we take on the divine command theory of morality head-on. That theory’s a non-starter. Conservatives have the edge in these debates because, though most people recognize that cultural moral relativism is radically implausible, few recognize that the divine command theory is just as implausible, and for similar reasons. Specifically, both theories entail that moral obligations are rationally arbitrary, thus robbing morality of any rational authority and amounting to covert nihilism. We need to take this battle to them instead of playing defense all the time.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:56:54 +0000

No, I wasn’t saying Thucydides was advancing a relativist position. But he reports on people who were. I was just pointing out that the issue was very much under discussion – that the Greek view wasn’t one of uncomplicated unquestioned unanimous belief that morality was external and objective. But I did it in a quick and lazy way, so my meaning was not clear. (And you’re right, Aristophanes is another good witness.)

By: Nicholas Weininger

Nicholas Weininger — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:42:36 +0000

I note that Unger’s dichotomy reads Hayek right out of the history of social thought. “A product of human action but not of human design” is to my mind a better and more compelling account of society than either of his alternatives. In particular, it warns against the false proposition that “not given by nature” implies “amenable to deliberate reorganization”.

By: Sam Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 16:13:55 +0000

“Euripides”, obviously. God, I feel a fool.