Conservatives: retreat into self-imposed isolation isn’t a responsible option...

Are Appeals to Natural Law 

and Right Reason Still Effective?

By Samuel Gregg

Recent months have witnessed an emerging debate among some American conservatives, especially religiously informed conservatives and, even more specifically, Catholic conservatives. This debate concerns how they can (and, in some cases, whether they should even attempt to) engage in a public square that seems ever more rooted in modern liberal presuppositions and preoccupations.

At the risk of oversimplification, in one corner are those perhaps best described as “MacIntyrians,” after the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and his seminal book After Virtue (1981). They suggest that modern liberalism’s advance in the academy and the wider culture (especially the media) is now so pronounced that it’s rendering any alternative shaping of the public square extremely difficult. Some even hold that aspects of the American experiment, by which they appear to mean a type of Lockean materialism, were bound to eventually marginalize alternative arguments.

In the other camp are those who might be called “Murrayites.” Named after the Jesuit philosopher John Courtney Murray and his equally important text We Hold These Truths (1960), this group readily acknowledges that American intellectual and popular culture is in very bad shape. They aren’t, however, convinced that the American experiment is either down-and-out or irredeemably flawed. Instead, they maintain that much of the American Founding continues to provide a sound general context for religious conservatives to make and advance their political, social, economic, and national security positions.

The significance of this discussion, however, goes far beyond the world of Catholic conservatives. Its wider importance—not just for Catholics but also other conservative-minded Christians, Jews, and those of a secular bent—is this big question: will natural law and appeals to right reason remain a salient element in American conservative public argument?

After After Virtue

Some of this debate was prefigured in exchanges prompted by the publication of MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Enlightenment-influenced culture, MacIntyre suggested, has rendered expressions like virtue almost unintelligible to even the most sympathetic listener. Though MacIntyre qualified this historicist and moral particularist account in later works such as Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), there was no shortage of critics who argued that his approach ran the serious risk of relegating natural law to the status of “just another tradition.”

One such criticism of MacIntyre’s position was made by Robert P. George in aReview of Metaphysics article entitled, “Moral Particularism, Thomism and Traditions” (1989). He argued that natural law’s claim to be based upon “tradition-transcending, universal truth-attaining” practical reason could be inadvertently relativized by too heavily accenting cultural context.

Certainly, George acknowledged, it’s easier for people to grasp natural law if they live in a culture that affirms (1) there is truth beyond the empirical and (2) we can know it through the disciplined application of practical reason. There is also, George agreed, a recognizable tradition of natural law within which scholars have argued over the centuries as they continue clarifying its foundations and implications for politics, law, and the economy. But, George stressed, the very essence of natural law arguments is that right reason is intrinsic to who humans are. It follows that knowledge of some basic practical truths is universally available, notwithstanding the blockages caused by culture, ignorance, and rationalizations of wrongdoing that might prevent some people at particular times from grasping, for instance, that human sacrifice is always wrong.

In many respects, it’s arguable that self-identified American conservatives now face an analogous debate. Many conservatives seem to be edging towards withdrawing from what they see a hopelessly compromised American public square in which there is no God—except for a Teddy-Bear Deity whose main job is to hug me and affirm my feelings, with John Rawls as his prophet. While most such conservatives aren’t (yet) arguing for Amish-like responses to a troubled culture, they’re skeptical of the prospects of persuading people of the soundness of conservative arguments, given the prevailing context.

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