Reason and The Natural Law: Flannery’s Reconstruction of Aquinas’s Moral Theory

The Thomist 67 (2003): 119-31 REASON AND THE NATURAL LAW: FLANNERY'S RECONSTRUCTION OF AQUINAS'S MORAL THEORY DENIS J. M. BRADLEY Georgetown University Washington, D.C. KEVIN FLANNERY'S recent book, Acts amid Precepts,1 is divided into two parts, the first of which treats "Precepts" the second "Acts," and each part, in turn, is subdivided into four dense chapters. In these eight chapters, Flannery champions what he proposes as a genuinely Aristotelian-that is, nondeductivist -reading ofAquinas's natural law theory. In dialectical opposition to Martha Nussbaum's presentation of Aristotle, Flannery's Aristotle, although sensitive to the flexible and improvisatory character of morally correct particular decisions, also recognizes-like Aquinas-"objective, exceptionless moral principles" that are "associated with the divine" (5). It is easy to credit Flannery's general view: the first principles of the natural law do not allow us, by a simple process of deduction, to attain the morally correct judgment about complicated and, let us say, culturally novel, particular cases. Aquinas himself is well aware that even dear-minded and experienced moral "experts"meaning only those ethicians working within the framework of correct moral principles-can make mistakes about the particular application of the relevant moral precepts as well as about nittygritty factual issues. 1 Kevin L. Flannery, S.J.,Acts amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Logical Structure ofThomas Aquinas'sMoral Theory (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University ofAmerica Press, 2001). Pp. xxiv + 327. $54.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0987-0 (cloth), 0-8132-0988-9 (paper). 119 120 DENIS]. M. BRADLEY Thomistic natural law theory, then, is not a top-down "spinning out" of lower from higher precepts. Flannery attempts to make this evident by reconstructing the Thomistic theory according to his own, worked-over model (chapters 1 and 8) of Aristotelian practical reasoning. The challenge, which Flannery resolutely faces, is to formulate a more coherent version of Aristotle's sketchily developed practical syllogism (the conclusion of which is a choice/action) than the one that D. J. Allan provided in his now widely abandoned interpretation. Flannery closely follows Anthony Kenny: unlike the (solely) "truth preserving" theoretical syllogism, the "good preserving/attaining" practical syllogism moves analytically "upstream" toward the predicate term of the major premiss. Moreover, the conclusion of the practical syllogism, since it always can be defeated by extraneous but pertinent factors, is not necessitated by its premisses. Practical reasoning is not exclusively a technical determination of the means to ulterior or extrinsic ends; in ethics, praxis, as distinguished from poesis, can be considered either an intrinsic constituent of the end or an end in itself. In either case, practical reasoning is anchored, securely, in universal ends/goods. But since they must be apprehended experientially, pleasure and pain can corrupt practical reason's intellectual grasp of these archai. With this notion of practical reason in mind, Flannery finds (in chapter 2) the Thomistic subject matter (in STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2) for an Aristotelian science of natural law ethics. The multiplicity of natural law precepts can be unified, after the fashion of Aristotle's pros hen relationship, by being referred to one foundational precept-the famous but morally indeterminate First Principle of Practical Reason (FPPR), "Good is to be done and pursued; evil is to be avoided." First principles, by definition , are indemonstrable; they cannot be deduced from any prior proposition . However, an elenchic proof of first principles-showing that to deny them is, implicitly, to assert them-is possible. Imitating Aristotle's elenchic proof for the Principle of Contradiction, Flannery constructs a similar proof for the FPPR. Denying the FPPR negates the possibility of any action. Any REASON AND THE NATURAL LAW 121 human choice in pursuit of an end that could be recognized as intelligent and intelligible involves acting for an object of desire that (because it is under some description desired) is an apparent good which, at the moment of choice, excludes its contrary; otherwise there would be no reason for the agent to choose and no actual choice. Flannery, guided by Aquinas's somewhat desultory remarks, schematically groups with the foundational FPPR other per se nota (roughly meaning self-evidently and commonly...