Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics (review)

While he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter in 2004 to Rev. John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, requesting that an academic symposium be held on whether and how one might find a “common denominator” for human morality. The results were to be sent back to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by way of the findings of a think tank. The fruit of the current pope’s request is this symposium in book form. In it, arguably the world’s pre-eminent Catholic moral philosopher engages the question of “natural law” and “natural rights” with a prestigious group of theologians, canon and civil lawyers, and religiously informed political scientists and philosophers.

The question driving the book is the search for a “natural law” or universal morality that might serve as a regulative principle in pluralistic societies. The volume begins with an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre in which he notes that the quest for a universal morality is reeling, given the radical moral disagreements between cultures and religions. Happily for the vertiginous, MacIntyre thinks that natural law as interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas can yield a universally valid set of moral rules. A claim that might seem like utopian bluster is given surprising credibility when MacIntyre makes a robust case that (1) those who disagree about the good know that they disagree about it only because they have deliberated to some extent together, (2) this deliberation itself gives performative evidence that both parties presuppose, prior to deliberating, a commitment to the basic moral norms that shared deliberation requires, and (3) it is precisely these basic moral norms concerning non-maleficence, honesty, integrity, and trust that correspond to Aquinas’s precepts of the natural law. The upshot is that to deny the basic moral norms of natural law is to show oneself to be the sort of person with whom no one can speak. Just as denying the laws of logic leads to an intellectual reductio ad absurdam, so to deny the precepts of the natural law leads to a social and behavioural reductio. Responses from his critics follow.

As MacIntyre acknowledges in his concluding response, the two most “searching criticisms” of his view are given by theologians Jean Porter and Gerald McKenny. Porter—who, like MacIntyre, is a Thomist—argues that no “ready-made” universally valid morality is to be had. The reason is that the precepts of the natural law are too general and vague to be applied across all cultures in the same way, so that an array of traditions and practices is needed for the natural law precepts to take specific form in that culture. To this MacIntyre responds that, whether they are sufficient in themselves or not, and however much they may be coloured by a culture’s particularities, the primary precepts of the natural law forbidding things like murder and theft must be presupposed by all cultures and communities, or else shared deliberation would be impossible, and thus exhibit his original reductio.

Gerald McKenny argues that even if MacIntyre’s arguments against moral relativism are sound, they would result in relativism at the political level. Since knowledge of the precepts of natural law coincides with a great deal of moral disagreement in culture, it follows that natural law does not give us enough to overcome that disagreement. In practice, therefore, we will need something like a liberal state stepping in as a neutral referee between moralities in order to prevent complete civil unrest. The great irony here is that it would make MacIntyre a liberal after all, despite his reputation as the philosopher who pulled the Enlightenment Project to pieces. To this MacIntyre replies that whether his arguments will script in the liberal state as referee between groups morally at odds with each other depends on whether people accept arguments—like his—that...