(Page 10 of 21) - Young People, Relativism, and Natural Law authored by Alford, C..

sense that people seem to naturally desire them. Conversely, modes of
responsibility are ad hoc guidelines designed to avoid the consequences of the
incommensurability of basic goods—for example, that one might choose to
continue chatting with one’s friends rather than save a child’s life. There is, these
critics conclude, no escaping the need for a speculative philosophy of nature.

Other critics argue that the new natural law is “natural law without nature.”

Proper natural law derives moral norms from knowledge of humanity’s place in
nature. In fact, this criticism seems exaggerated, or rather misplaced. Finnis,
George and other new natural law theorists, assume a reasonably rich and
nuanced view of human nature, recognizing that without such a view, none of the
basic goods of human nature would make sense. The point of the new natural
law theorists is simply that one cannot derive the natural law from their view of
nature because one cannot derive anything from nature. Nature just is. “In
short, the proposition that our knowledge of basic human goods and moral norms
is not derived from prior knowledge of human nature does not deny the
proposition that morality has no grounding in human nature.” (George 1992, 35)

Morality is deeply grounded in our knowledge of human nature. The

relationship is simply not derivative, but narrative. Given that human beings are
like this, then this is what will make them happy, and this is the best they can do .
. .

Back to Informants

Among the significant minority of informants who treat the social contract as a
good in itself, there is little difference between their reasoning and that of Finnis
and George. One can enumerate the reasons that the social contract is good for
all concerned, but if someone just doesn’t get it, there is probably not much else
to be said or done. “The next steps are shunning, ostracism, and jail,” as one
informant put it. Robert George puts the argument this way.

Still, someone might object: is there not something unsatisfying about
appeals to self-evidence even at the level of the most basic premises of
moral arguments? After all, people can simply refuse to accept a claim
that something is self-evident . . . . It seems to me that . . . appeals to self-
evidence, when properly understood, do not fail to provide a solid
foundation for moral reasoning. In any event, they provide no less solid a
foundation than appeals to the facts of human nature . . . . Someone who
finds it baffling that anyone would pursue friendship just for friendship’s
sake is unlikely to understand the value of friendship any better by being
informed (or even persuaded) that man is by nature a social being. (1992,
37)

Interesting about the self-evidence of the social contract is that not

a single informant thought that the “defect strategy,” as it is called in game
theory, was worth arguing against, and not because they assumed it in advance.
They just didn’t think that way. What would happen, I asked if someone said, in
effect “let everybody else obey the social contract; that just means more
opportunity for me to lie, cheat, and steal.” (This question is implicit in several
questions, and explicit in question 9.) This is the position of Plato’s