Vincent J. Curtis
31 Dec 2015
Natural law as understood today is an outgrowth of
Scholasticism, and in particular in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Natural law undergirds written law, for
Natural law is the basis of our understanding of Justice.
The first principle of Natural Law is that “good is to be
done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.”
All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this. The received understanding of this principle
is that it is self-evident that whenever we act, we pursue something that we
take to be good in some way, or avoid what we take to be in some way evil. Aristotle made the same point in his Nichomachean Ethics, and offered it as
something self-evident in that thin sense of good being a subjective
perception.
The first posit of Natural Law is thus a self-evident truth. Now things start to get a little
philosophical. In the
Aristotelean-Scholastic tradition, human beings have various ends and
capabilities the fulfilment of which is good and the frustration of which is
evil. (Which, as we learned in a
previous posting, is the privation of good.)
It doesn’t take more than a few common examples to persuade one of the
general application of this precept.
Humans need food, water, friendship, the society of others, knowledge,
etc. Hence a rational person will pursue
the attainment of these goods, or avoid their frustration as the case may
be. A normal, rational person will thus pursue
what the intellect perceives as good,
and what the intellect perceives as good in a rational person is what is in fact good.
In one sense, good action is the pursuit of that which is in
accord with reason. Hence, doing good is
simply the rational way of fulfilling human nature. Knowledge of human nature and rationality thus
thicken the sense of subjective perception of what is good for human beings.
To give a particular example, consider the human intellect
and the unique capacity of human beings (as compared with all other animals on
earth) to learn and to reason and the grasp the truth of things. The human capacity to learn, to reason, and
to grasp truth is enormous, starting from infancy. Thus, learning, reasoning, and grasping truth
is a fulfillment of human nature; they are the most human things we do, since
rationality is what distinguishes human beings from any other animal on
earth. It follows then that it is good
for human beings to pursue truth and to avoid its opposite, error, and rational human beings will do so.
This takes us to the difference between absolute good and
relative good. All human beings need the
absolute goods: food, water, shelter, friendships, companionship, love,
knowledge, and the like. Brain surgery
is not an absolute good because brain surgery is not in the nature of human
beings to require. However, individual
human beings may need brain surgery to save their lives from a cancerous
tumor. In these cases, brain surgery is
a relative good, because it is a good relative to them. What would ordinarily be considered an evil
is a good in these cases because undergoing an evil preserves a greater good,
namely their lives.
The equivalent precept in Islam to the Aristotlean-Thomistic
“do good and avoid evil” is to command
the good, and to forbid evil. Though roughly similar rhetorically, the
Islamic formulation of the first principle of natural law leads to radically different
conclusions.
In the first place, there is obviously nothing in the
Islamic formulation that requires that the person commanding and forbidding
actually to do good and avoid evil himself.
A master commanding his servants to work is under no
obligation to work himself. At best, between
absolute and relative good, the master can command that absolute good be done
because he has knowledge of human nature, but he cannot command that relative good
be done when he does not know what is good relative to a particular individual. The master could easily deny a servant needed
brain surgery by requiring the servant instead to tend to the relative goods of
the master.
Islam, by commanding rather than doing, makes a complete
hash of the relative goods understanding of natural law. But what about the absolute good
understanding?
Islam has a peculiar understanding of what is absolutely
good. Islam is incapable of looking at
human beings from outside of its theological ontology. In Islam, what is absolutely good is for the
world and the human beings in it to submit to Islam and to Allah. Knowledge of the Koran and
the Hadiths is all one really requires; all other knowledge not supportive of
this is superfluous or dangerous. Hence
the absolute good of knowledge has severe limits in the Islamic
understanding. Trying something new, or
innovating, is frowned upon in Islam as being dangerous, and this outlook is
crippling of the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the intellect of
Muslims. Knowledge, of any kind, ought to be an absolute good, and in Islam it is not.
Islam also makes a clear and sharp distinction between “believers”
and “infidels” in respect of human condition.
There is no equality possible between them, and hence what is good for a
believer may need to be denied to an infidel if the Islamic order is to be
preserved. There is no innate equality of
human beings in the eyes of “Allah” as there is in Christianity. There is no sense of reciprocal duties in
virtue of the likeness of the specific natures and the identity of the ends of
human beings in Islam, as there is in Christianity and secular humanism. There may be reciprocal duties between two
believers, but not between believer and infidel. Hence, there is nothing in Islam which
forbids the injuring of the moral dignity or forbidding the lawful exercise of
the free will of an infidel. And Islamic
law is often contrived to deny choice to the free will of the infidel.
Because there is no equivalent in Islam to the precept of
loving one’s neighbor, it is perfectly moral in Islam to do violence to the
intellects of others by deceit, or of leading others (particularly infidels)
into error.
Hence, Islam makes a hash of the concept of absolute good by
its arbitrary division of humanity into believers and infidels, and by the
precept for Muslims to command rather than to do.
For more evidence of the hash Islam has made of natural law,
consider the oft-quoted precept of Islam that to kill one human being is as to
kill the entire human race.
Superficially, this may sound like moral condemnation of the act of
killing. Many Muslims act as if it
did. But the merest analysis of the
statement shows that it is intellectually empty.
If to kill one person is as to kill all humanity, what then is
the evil in killing all humanity? The
only possible answer is that it is equal in evil to killing one person. The moral inflation of an evil results in a
circular argument. There is nothing but
show in the precept that to kill one is as if to kill all humanity. Therefore, it can offer no rational guidance
on the subject of killing, as Aristotlean-Thomistic philosophy can.
The apparent correlation between the western concept “doing
good and avoiding evil” and the Islamic concept of “commanding good and
forbidding evil” is superficial, and given the different ontological
assumptions results in radically different conclusions.
Islam has no “natural law” in the sense understood by the
west because Islam cannot look upon human beings as such; it can only look upon
them as being either believers or infidels.
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