Descriptive Natural Law

As I indicated in earlier posts, people have good reason to worry that woke ideology is harmful. It causes unnecessary ignorance, confusion, and conflict. The alternative to woke ideology is natural law, an idea that can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy and to Christian scripture. The basic idea is that we can use reason to identify the principles that make sense of the world, and we can use those principles to understand what is real and what is good for us to do.

As this description suggests, natural law principles come in two varieties. Some principles help us understand what is real, i.e. what we encounter in the world around us. We can call those principles of descriptive natural law. Other principles help us understand what is good to do, i.e. what actions will enable us to flourish over the long course of our lives, even if they involve pain and sacrifice in the short term. We can call those principles of practical natural law. In this essay, I'll briefly describe the principles of descriptive natural law.

Descriptive natural law enables us to know what is real. It helps us to understand both the reality that is given in nature, such as gravity and animal procreation, and the reality that we human beings create, such as smart phone technology and universities. Those principles include the principle of non-contradiction, that the same proposition cannot be simultaneously affirmed and denied. For example, it is incoherent to say that the sun rises in the east but the sun does not rise in the east. The principles also include the basic principles of logic, of scientific observation and hypothesis, of essence and accident, and all the other principles that enable us to distinguish between false opinions, which do not correlate with reality, and true opinions, which do correlate with reality.

In its descriptive mode, natural law helps us to identify and use the principles that enable us to perceive the order in reality, to look past unimportant similarities and differences and to discern important similarities and differences. For example, descriptive natural law enables us to figure out what a human being is. Humans come in different sizes, shapes, and colors. We have different abilities, interests, and cultural assumptions. But what is most essential about being human is what distinguishes us from all other beings in creation, namely our capacities to think, reason, and communicate; to create and build; and to be grateful and to love. Those capacities are essential to human-being-ness. (They are also the seat of our unique and inherent dignity and worth, as we will see when we get around to practical natural law.)

Using descriptive natural law, we can understand that our differences of skin color, subjective experience, and cultural identities--all the traits that our woke friends emphasize in their ideologies of power struggles--are relatively non-essential and unimportant. What makes a human being a human being is the radical potential and innate capacity to act as a human being does: to master one's own appetites, desires and aversions by the exercise of reason, then to exercise mastery to order some small part of the world, then to participate in ordering the world in community with others. Every human being possesses those capacities, even if we do not all develop the resultant abilities in equal measure. This is the factual reason why we should understand every human being as a person, a bearer of special legal and political status. (There are non-factual reasons, as well. Those come in later, when we consider practical natural law.)

Using natural law well enables us to cut through the fog of confusion and dissension that woke ideologies have dispersed in our universities, schools, and throughout our culture. It enables us to understand what is most true, what is most essential, what is real. And that is the first step in reasoning well and in living well.