The Relativism at the Basis of European Policy*
by Janne Haaland-Matlary
(University of Oslo)

5. Natural Law today: Where is the Evidence?
So far we have merely shown that the Western philosophical tradition for many centuries upheld the classical notion of human nature as ‘rational and social’, and that metaphysics was side-lined by first, British empiricism which equated the human and the natural sciences, and later by increasingly skeptical strands of thought. However, much of the problem with this evolution in the history of philosophy had to do with the immense progress in empirical and natural science and the deplorable lack of such in the human sciences. But it also has to do with the confusion between the two, premised on the paradigm that human science must imitate natural science in order to progress.
However, none of this has disproved Aristotle. The argument remains that the human being can reason about ethics as he can reason about facts. The Humean criticism misses the point when it faults Aristotle with confusing ‘fact and values’, for the classical concept postulates that the person is both ‘fact and value’ in its very essence – being rational means being ethical. This point is the most foreign of all to modern man, and the very unfortunate separation of the two that Hume made has henceforth obscured the possibility of natural law.
Let us now give natural law a chance, as it were. Could Aristotle be right?
In an interesting paper the Swedish MP Per Landgren records an imaginary incidence [22]: Two persons rescue people from a burning house. They are subsequently interviewed by the paper, and the journalist asks why they risked their own life to do this. One says that he did not think about that question at all; he simply acted. But the other says that he thought that he would become rich from getting a prize for valor, that he could get famous, etc. – The journalist is puzzled over this answer. Something seems very wrong, undignified, unnatural about it.
This example illustrates the argument that natural law makes: A natural reaction is to try to save life, even if one is afraid. An unnatural reaction is to do it to make money from it. One may even say that the latter reaction is evil, bad, wrong – thus, there is a natural ability in us to discern right from wrong.
Further, saving life – one’s own and that of others – seems to be a basic value, whereas the need to make money can be many things, and varies between being a vital and good thing when one must provide for one’s family, and being a bad thing when a life-rescuer saves life in order to make money, as in the example above. Thus, ethics makes sense only in a context of telos, as Aristotle argues.
Landgren makes the point that there are some basic values that are universally recognized as such: to live rather than to die, to be respected, to be healthy, to learn, to cherish truth rather than lies, etc. [23]. The opposite of these values are morbid and unnatural, most people would immediately agree. These basic values are called ‘intrinsic’, Grundwerte’, ‘Rechtsguter’ . [24] The point about these values is that they are inborn, intrinsic, constitutive – they define what a human being is, just like Aristotle’s definition. This is so because we cannot derive them from any principles or logical arguments; they are simply what human beings, grosso modo, are like. True, there are mass murderers and masochists around, but we tend to describe them as aberrations, perversions, unnaturals. If we were true relativists, we would have to say that a mass murderer just has another subjective preference that ours.
Thus, when we read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we see that the rights therein are largely such basic principles that are commonsensical to all reasonable persons. Reasonable means, we recall, that one is upright and human; not corrupted and evil. And the author of this human nature, creator or not, does not have to be mentioned, but the rights form a whole that reflect a view of human nature that is knowable through common sense and reason. But if the concept of human nature is denied, there is no basis for these human rights – they become mere ideological and political devices. Human nature remains an axiom, as it was also to Aristotle, an essence and prime mover, as he would have called it.
But it remains fully possible to discern what human dignity and therefore human rights is about through the faculty of reason, deductive as well as inductive. The sharpness of the rational mind is a function of its ascetic and logical training, both in terms of consistent argument – ‘if all men are equal, one man cannot be discriminated’ – and ethics; «if stealing is wrong, I must refrain from it lest my ethical sense be dulled». The problem, I think, lies not so much in lack of reason as in lack of virtue. It is rather easy to know what is right and wrong, but rather arduous and unpleasant to do what is right. As a Catholic dictum puts it, tongue-in-cheek: «A little virtue does not hurt you, but vice is nice».
In conclusion, the relativist position is untenable and the rationalist position is possible. There is no need to discard Aristotle’s ontology, the classical notion of the person; and mere logic itself demands that the law be concerned with universals, not with subjective interests. But it remains a tall order indeed to restore rationality to Western politics.

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* This relation was presented at the XIII International Congress of Canon Law of Venice (2008); it is now in the volume: J. I. ARRIETA – C.-M. FABRIS (eds.), Ius divinum, Venezia 2010, pp. 1299-1314.

[1] Diritti umani abbandonati? La minaccia di una dittatura del relativismo, Lugano 2007.
[2] M. A. GLENDON, Rights Talk: the impoverishment of political discourse, New York 1991, p. X.
[3] Ibidem, p. XI.
[4] M. A. GLENDON, Rights Talk, cit., p. 39
[5] F. NIETZSCHE, Jenseits von Gut und Bøse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, Munchen 1885.
[6] J. RATZINGER, L’Europa nella crisi delle culture, Siena 2005, p. 24.
[7] Ibidem.
[8] Ibidem.
[9] Ibidem.
[10] This encyclica is addressed to Catholics, not to all ‘people of good will’. It is thus an ‘internal’ document for the Church which addresses the role of the Church in the world. It is highly significant that the Church to non-believers can and should only be a contributor to society’s political debate on secular terms, thus sharply distinguishing between the society of believers – the Internlogik of the Church; and its external role in secular society, where it can only act and argue in natural law, secular terms.
[11] n. 28.
[12] Ibidem.
[13] Ibidem.
[14] n. 29, my emphasis.
[15] J. RATZINGER, L’Europa nella crisi delle culture, cit., p. 26.
[16] Private conversations and correspondence, 2003-2005
[17] Contra Eutychen, III, 6.
[18] E. BERTI, The Classical Notion of Person in Today’s Philosophical Debate, paper presented at the Papal Academy of Social Science, annual conference, September 2005
[19] See Appendix, Treatise of Human Nature.
[20] I am indebted to Enrico Berti’s paper, op. cit., for the remainder of this analysis.
[21] E. BERTI, Op. cit., p. 10
[22] P. LANDGREN, Naturretten – en mansklig etikk, Chapter 5, Det gemensamma basta – Om kristdemokratiens idegrund, Stockholm 2002.
[23] P. LANDGREN, Op. cit., p. 120.
[24] Ibidem.