by Kolbitar » January 25th, 2008, 2:01 pm
Part III
In Part II we argued from within the Declaration, with help from sources, to determine the general properties of the common good, which outline our pursuit of happiness; what we have left to do is to tie this together with the “natural law”, also referenced in the Declaration, in order to say that it’s not merely convenience or good grace by which we “contract” liberty for, for example, the property-less, African-Americans, and women; that liberty for all is, in fact, a law of nature, which we absolutely and imperatively ought to reflect in our Constitution.
Concerning liberty; I think most people have at least a vague understand of the difference between liberty and license. I think most people tend to think of “liberty” and equality at least implicitly in these terms:
“Liberty to act on one’s behalf must be fenced off by the equal liberty of others, so that freedom for one individual doesn’t become oppression for a second.” –Evans
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more concise and wonderfully put definition of what liberty for all must look like (this is one of those quotes where an author fits into prose what you’ve always believed but never thought of with such explicit and communicable precision). However, despite its wonderful virtues (and it has more, as you will see -- I’m not merely explicating a redundant point) our question remains: is liberty for all established in an “ought” of natural law as opposed to the convenience of social contract?
I left off Part II speaking about our rationality -- our intellect and our will; that herein lies the basis for discovering the difference between what’s natural for man and what’s natural for animals. The difference is that man not only has instincts and inclinations, he knows about them, and can arrange them according to an outline, according to a “pursuit.” But this “pursuit” is not spontaneous, we have warring tendencies within us, tendencies which have to be disciplined, which take a tremendous effort to tame. Here’s an illustration: Let’s imagine millions of people suddenly transported to an undiscovered country -- the result would be chaos; this raw state would need a governing body to establish and maintain peace, or harmony. In order for this government to be a fair government, it would have to, as we said, “fence off liberty to act with the equal liberty of others.” It would have to tame, so to speak, those “tendencies” which would oppress others in order to have peace. This is precisely what man has to do at an individual level, with the inner disharmony of his soul: we have to fence off the liberty of warring tendencies within ourselves, which would otherwise oppress us, would keep us from attaining what is truly good for us. In a word, we have to practice Virtue.
Before we touch on virtue, there’s a tacit distinction we have to bring to light. Only what is truly good for us can belong to the desires of our essential make-up, for “the good” defines our essence, it is our first principle and our end. But sometimes we don’t have desires for what is truly good for us, that is, sometimes we don’t feel good desires. Conversely, we often feel those desires which we know are not good for us if we follow them. The anorexic clearly doesn’t feel the desire to eat, but the need itself is still there. Certain persons can feel healthy, though their body is riddled with cancer, and they have the need for health. The mere presence of a felt desire, or the lack of one, does not necessarily mean anything in itself. Therefore, we can draw a distinction between natural needs, which are sometimes conscious, sometimes not; and conscious desires, which are not natural. We can call the former needs and the latter wants. With this distinction in mind, let’s take a look at “Virtue.”
Virtue, in general, is a habitual disposition, a trained habit of the will, an over-all tendency of the entire being. The Cardinal virtues are traditionally known as Wisdom, Moderation, Courage and Justice. Wisdom involves the governance of desires towards the end of "a life made perfect by the possession in aggregate of all good things." Moderation is just that, moderating desires. Courage is sticking it out when certain desires (which include aversions) become inordinate. And last, Justice. But before I get to a definition of Justice, I think it would be instructive to note a dilemma, which Plato touched on, called the Ring of Gyges.
To keep it short, the Ring of Gyges dilemma boils down to this, If I can get away with anything – even by the help of a magic ring which can make me invisible – , why should I be just towards other people? The answer, as Mortimer Adler notes, is that justice is harmony of the soul, it is the outcome of mastering desires, of quieting their conflicts, through the other virtues, which makes justice existentially inseparable from them. Tuning yourself, so to speak, to desire what is truly good for you will prevent any desire, which would seek to harm -- which would be out of tune. Since we have to train our desires in order to quiet them, and since we share an identical (though distinct) essential nature with other human beings, then we cannot act against another without also acting against ourselves. Violating justice reveals warring desires, not inner harmony naturally tending us towards the good (again the common good is inescapable, because our common nature is just that – common). In so far as we’re equal, we must keep our individual natures aligned and tending towards the common good.
Let me explore this point a bit further, it’s critical. We can say this: I know that I am a human being seeking happiness; I cannot deny this, so that, neither can I deny that, since you are a human being, you also seek happiness (just like I cannot deny that a thinking substance assumes the principle of non-contradiction when thinking): there’s an implicit recognition – I am not essentially different from you, we are equal in nature, or essence. By virtue of this equality I possess a very real position of insight, which puts me in an inescapable relation to all human beings with whom I am equal. Now, part of my happiness lies in the practice of virtue, in the inner harmony regulating warring tendencies. [Therefore, my pursuit of happiness, even if I say I want to be a hermit and live completely isolated from society, friends, and family; my pursuit of happiness never the less assumes that virtue is a universal ingredient – it is part of what makes us equal. Now, it may be true that I can live on my own as a hermit completely isolated from all members of the human race with whom I am equal in nature; however, I cannot maintain that this practice is a universal ingredient of happiness, so it does not stem from my essential nature. Therefore, I cannot set it up, in itself, as the final good towards which I’m training myself in virtue; it may be a part of the pursuit, of the training process, but it can neither conflict with the end, nor be the end in itself.] You can look at it this way, Justice, which is harmony of the soul, which is a universal ingredient of happiness, reveals its absence in a person who is acting against another’s pursuit of happiness; this is the case simply because that person, by virtue of his rationality, is universally in all people due to his position of insight -- like the imaginary conscious acute triangle who excludes the obtuse triangle from the definition of triangle is revealing that he doesn’t understand his own nature--; thus, for a person to act against another’s pursuit is to act against his own, revealing true disharmony, despite what he may temporarily “feel”. The obvious conclusion to all of this is that, when we factor in our rational nature, we cannot escape the common good as the context of our pursuit of happiness.
Let me borrow a familiar illustration. If I am a (Euclidian) triangle -- one of those triangles we mentioned earlier -- then I share with my fellow triangles the properties that define me as such. I may be obtuse, and I may be green, but I can still objectively say of all my fellow acute, yellow triangles, and of all my fellow right, orange triangles, and all the rest of them, that they, in fact, must have -- despite all of our differences -- angles equal to the sum of 180 degrees. What I cannot say is only my family of obtuse, green triangles, which, for sake of illustration, we’ll say are the only triangles I ever knew; what I cannot say is that only obtuse, green triangles have angles equal to the sum of 180 degrees. That would be a false generalization. Likewise with ethics. If I am of a human nature which is obligated to pursue a happiness which is objectively and clearly definable to a certain extent, then by virtue of sharing that nature with all other human beings I can say, objectively speaking, that they too are obligated to pursue happiness in a definable way, to a certain extent.
In regards to homosexuality, the idea may be advanced that practicing homosexuals, so long as they are personally attaining inner growth, are, “by their fruit”, showing the practice to be in accord with the pursuit of happiness, that is, the common good. But again, we must be cautious here, for as we’ve noted the absence of a felt natural desire, or the presence of a felt unnatural desire, does not in itself mean anything. The position of insight we have --from within human nature, underneath the common good -- not only tells me what others “ought” to do, it gives me a point of reference to better understand myself, and my own lack of felt needs as well as deceptive desires. In this sense “No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"; nor should I “send to know” how my personal growth is doing apart from the standard of the common good, which is like fixed heavens over a vantage point we all share.
In sum, here’s how the argument progresses: Liberty depends on the common good which depends on justice which depends on equality, which depends on natural law. In order for me to say whether the Constitution is just, I must have a fixed standard – the Laws of Nature. Equality is the link between the Laws of Nature and justice, and the common good is the link between justice and liberty. Natural law = equality = justice = common good = liberty for all.
I think a denial of this model, tacitly or explicitly, is a default admission to the philosophy that might makes right. I also think that homosexual acts are contrary to the standard of the common good, and that people arguing their goodness have no basis for their view in natural law – certainly not for same sex marriage. The bottom line is that the nature of the common good, since it includes procreation and the stability of the family, conflicts with what would be the nature of homosexuality. The nature of the common good, reflecting our individual natures – our very core beings--, cannot be to have naturally sterile sex, plain and simple. To say it would, would be to say the common good reflects sterility as part of our individual natures. Obviously that is not true. The only other possibility would be to claim that the homosexual individual is somehow removed from the demands of the common good, from his link and obligation to it – thus to effectively claim inequality. But you simply cannot do that for justice (his need for harmony of the soul) and his position of insight as a rational being bind him to the universality of happiness, thus to the affirmation of the essential ingredients of the common good as such, which defines our pursuit. On the other hand, part of our rationality involves the use of reason to check our natural physical tendencies, through virtue, and that is the difference between choosing celibacy (self-control of a natural desire) and acting on an unnatural desire like the homosexual tendency.
END
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton
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