Not merely morally good acts, but such substantive goods as self-preservation, the life and education of children, and knowledge. For Aquinas, however, natural law includes counsels as well as precepts. In forming this first precept practical reason performs its most basic task, for it simply determines that whatever it shall think about must at least be set on the way to somethingas it must be if reason is to be able to think of it practically. Moreover, the fact that the precepts of natural law are viewed as self-evident principles of practical reason excludes Maritains account of our knowledge of them. ODonoghue wishes to distinguish this from the first precept of natural law. Question: True or False According to Aquinas, the first precept of law states, "good is to be done and pursued , and evil is to be avoided," and all other precepts follow from this first precept. "Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided" is as axiomatic to practical reason as the laws of logic are to speculative reason. Precisely because man knows the intelligibility of end and the proportion of his work to end. E-Book Overview. Correct! In neither aspect is the end fundamental. Of course, if man can know that God will punish him if he does not act in approved ways, then it does follow that an effective threat can be deduced from the facts. Suitability of action is not to a static nature, but to the ends toward which nature inclines. Th., I-II, q. Natural Law, Thomismand Professor Nielsen,. Later in the same work Aquinas explicitly formulates the notion of the law of nature for the first time in his writings. Aquinas expresses the objective aspect of self-evidence by saying that the predicate of a self-evident principle belongs to the intelligibility of the subject, and he expresses the subjective aspect of self-evidence in the requirement that this intelligibility not be unknown. He concludes his argument by maintaining that the factor which differentiates practical discourse is the presence of decision within it. This transcendence of the goodness of the end over the goodness of moral action has its ultimate metaphysical foundation in this, that the end of each creatures action can be an end for it only by being a participation in divine goodness. Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. But something is called self-evident in two senses: in one way, objectively; in the other way, relative to us. In fact, it refers primarily to the end which is not limited to moral value. Obligation is a strictly derivative concept, with its origin in ends and the requirements set by ends. 79, a. One of these is that every active principle acts on account of an end. [17] In libros Posteriorum analyticorum Aristotelis, lib. The basic precepts of natural law are no less part of the minds original equipment than are the evident principles of theoretical knowledge. 5. An active principle is going to bring about something or other, or else it would not be an active principle at all. Podcast Episode Click here to listen to a podcast based on these book notes Made You Think 44: Virtue is a Habit. He does not notice that Aquinas uses quasi in referring to the principles themselves; they are in ratione naturali quasi per se nota. (S.T., 1-2, q. referring to pursuit subordinates it to the avoidance of evil: Perhaps Suarezs most personal and most characteristic formulation of the primary precept is given where he discusses the scope of natural law. Good is to be Pursued and Evil Avoided: How a Natural Law Approach to Christian Bioethics can Miss Both - 24 Hours access EUR 37.00 GBP 33.00 USD $40.00 Rental This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. These tendencies are not natural law; the tendencies indicate possible actions, and hence they provide reason with the point of departure it requires in order to propose ends. Only truths of reason are supposed to be necessary, but their necessity is attributed to meaning which is thought of as a quality inherent in ideas in the mind. A formula of the first judgment of practical reason might be That which is good, is good, desirable, or The good is that which is to be done, the evil is that which is to be avoided., Significant in these formulations are the that which (ce qui) and the double is, for these expressions mark the removal of gerundive force from the principal verb of the sentence. 1, a. We can be taught the joys of geometry, but that would be impossible if we did riot have natural curiosity that makes us appreciate the point of asking a question and getting an answer. By their motion and rest, moved objects participate in the perfection of agents, but a caused order participates in the exemplar of its perfection by form and the consequences of formconsequences such as inclination, reason, and the precepts of practical reason. at q. Aquinas on Content of Natural Law ST I-II, Q.94, A.2 The first principle of practical reason thus gives us a way of interpreting experience; it provides an outlook in terms of which subsequent precepts will be formed, for it lays down the requirement that every precept must prescribe, just as the first principle of theoretical reason is an awareness that every assent posits. It is not merely the meaning with which a word is used, for someone may use a word, such as rust, and use it correctly, without understanding all that is included in its intelligibility. Today, he says, we restrict the notion of law to strict obligations. note 18, at 142150, provides a compact and accurate treatment of the true sense of knowledge by connaturality in Aquinas; however, he unfortunately concludes his discussion by suggesting that the alternative to such knowledge is theoretical.) An object of consideration ordinarily belongs to the world of experience, and all the aspects of our knowledge of that object are grounded in that experience. Any other precept will add to this first one; other precepts determine precisely what die direction is and what the starting point must be if that direction is to be followed out. pp. Of course, good in the primary precept is not a transcendental expression denoting all things. Practical reason has its truth by anticipating the point at which something that is possible through human action will come into conformity with reason, and by directing effort toward that point. He does not accept the dichotomy between mind and material reality that is implicit in the analytic-synthetic distinction. at II.5.12. Sertillanges, for example, apparently was influenced by Lottin when he remarked that the good in the formulations of the first principle is a pure form, as Kant would say.[77] Stevens also seems to have come under the influence, as when he states, The first judgment, it may be noted, is first not as a first, explicit psychologically perceived judgment, but as the basic form of all practical judgments.[78]. 2, c. (Summa theologiae will hereafter be referred to as S.T.). His response is that since precepts oblige, they are concerned with duties, and duties derive from the requirements of an end. 3, ad 1) that the precept of charity is self-evident to human reason, either by nature or by faith, since a knowledge of God sufficient to form the natural law precept of charity can come from either natural knowledge or divine revelation. The intellect is not theoretical by nature and practical only by education. at 9092. Man and the State, 91. 3, c. Quasi need not carry the connotation of fiction which it has in our usage; it is appropriate in the theory of natural law where a vocabulary primarily developed for the discussion of theoretical knowledge is being adapted to the knowledge of practical reason.) [41] Among the ends toward which the precepts of the natural law direct, then, moral value has a place. The latter are principles of demonstration in systematic sciences such as geometry. However, Aquinas does not present natural law as if it were an object known or to be known; rather, he considers the precepts of practical reason themselves to be natural law. If the mind is to work toward unity with what it knows by conforming the known to itself rather than by conforming itself to the known, then the mind must think the known under the intelligibility of the good, for it is only as an object of tendency and as a possible object of action that what is to be through practical reason has any reality at all. [84] Yet mans ability to choose the ultimate concrete end for which he shall act does not arise from any absurdity in human nature and its situation. But over and above this objection, he insists that normative discourse, insofar as it is practical, simply cannot be derived from a mere consideration of facts. This point is precisely what Hume saw when he denied the possibility of deriving ought from is. Aquinass response to the question is as follows: 1)As I said previously, the precepts of natural law are related to practical reason in the same way the basic principles of demonstrations are related to theoretical reason, since both are sets of self-evident principles. Obviously no one could ask it who did not hold that natural law consists of precepts, and even those who took this position would not ask about the unity or multiplicity of precepts unless they saw some significance in responding one way or the other. The true understanding of the first principle of practical reason suggests on the contrary that the alternative to moral goodness is an arbitrary restriction upon the human goods which can be attained by reasonable direction of life. supra note 50, at 109. 3, c; q. But more important for our present purpose is that this distinction indicates that the good which is to be done and pursued should not be thought of as exclusively the good of moral action. The practical mind also crosses the bridge of the given, but it bears gifts into the realm of being, for practical knowledge contributes that whose possibility, being opportunity, requires human action for its realization. In sum, the mistaken interpretation of Aquinass theory of natural law supposes that the word good in the primary precept refers solely to moral good. The difference between the two points of view is no mystery. If practical reason were simply a conditional theoretical judgment together with verification of the antecedent by an act of appetite, then this position could be defended, but the first act of appetite would lack any rational principle. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Experience can be understood and truth can be known about the things of experience, but understanding and truth attain a dimension of reality that is not actually contained within experience, although experience touches the surface of the same reality. For this reason, too, the natural inclinations are not emphasized by Suarez as they are by Aquinas. Aquinas, on the contrary, understands human action not merely as a piece of behavior but as an object of choice. It is this later resolution that I am supposing here. Aquinas mentions this point in at least two places. If practical reason were simply a conditional theoretical judgment together with verification of the antecedent by an act of appetite, then this position could be defended, but the first act of appetite would lack any rational principle. Proverbs 4:15. This situation reveals the lowliness and the grandeur of human nature. [4] A position Aquinas develops in q. Show transcribed image text Expert Answer 100% (1 rating) 1.ANSWER-The statement is TRUE This is the first precept of law, that "good is to be done and pursued, 4, c. However, a horror of deduction and a tendency to confuse the process of rational derivation with the whole method of geometry has led some Thomistsnotably, Maritainto deny that in the natural law there are rationally deduced conclusions. [9] After giving this response to the issue, Aquinas answers briefly each of the three introductory arguments. Our minds use the data of experience as a bridge to cross into reality in order to grasp the more-than-given truth of things. A threat can be effective by circumventing choice and moving to nonrational impulse. The insane sometimes commit violations of both principles within otherwise rational contexts, but erroneous judgment and wrong decision need not always conflict with first principles. 17, a. So far as I have been able to discover, Aquinas was the first to formulate the primary precept of natural law as he did. Ibid. The rationalist, convinced that reality is unchangeable, imagines that the orientation present in an active principle must not refer to real change, and so he reduces this necessary condition of change to the status of something which stably is at a static moment in time. For practical reason, to know is to prescribe. a. identical with gluttony. At first it appears, he says, simply as a truth, a translation into moral language of the principle of identity. The theoretical character of the principle for Maritain is emphasized by his first formulation of it as a metaphysical principle applicable to all good and all action. Joseph Buckley, S.M., Mans Last End (St. Louis and London, 1950), 164210, shows that there is no natural determinate last end for man. The theory of law is permanently in danger of falling into the illusion that practical knowledge is merely theoretical knowledge plus force of will. nonconceptual, nonrational knowledge by inclination or connaturality. Of course, Aquinas holds that Gods will is prior to the natural law, since the natural law is an aspect of human existence and man is a free creation of God. b. the philosophy of achieving happiness through moderate pleasures and avoidance of pain. This point is merely lexicographical, yet it has caused some confusionfor instance, concerning the relationship between natural law and the law of nations, for sometimes Aquinas contradistinguishes the two while sometimes he includes the law of nations in natural law. In fact, Aquinas does not mention inclinations in connection with the derived precepts, which are the ones Maritain wants to explain. Yet to someone who does not know the intelligibility of the subject, such a proposition will not be self-evident. Questions 95 to 97 are concerned with man-made law. He does make a distinction: all virtuous acts as such belong to the law of nature, but particular virtuous acts may not, for they may depend upon human inquiry.[43]. No less subversive of human responsibility, which is based on purposiveand, therefore, rationalagency, is the existentialist notion that morally good and morally bad action are equally reasonable, and that a choice of one or the other is equally a matter of arational arbitrariness. The difference between the two formulations is only in the content considered, not at all in the mode of discourse. [72] I have tried above to explain how Aquinas understands tendency toward good and orientation toward end as a dimension of all action. Before intelligence enters, man acts by sense spontaneity and learns by sense experience. In the second paragraph of the response Aquinas clarifies the meaning of self-evident. His purpose is not to postulate a peculiar meaning for self-evident in terms of which the basic precepts of natural law might be self-evident although no one in fact knew them. The preservation of human life is certainly a human good. In this section, I propose three respects in which the primary principle of practical reason as Aquinas understands it is broader in scope than this false interpretation suggests. If the first principle of practical reason were Do morally good acts, then morally bad acts would fall outside the order of practical reason; if Do morally good acts nevertheless were the first precept of natural law, and morally bad acts fell within the order of practical reason, then there would be a domain of reason outside natural law. The aunt of Zara Aleena whose killer refused to leave his cell to attend his sentencing hearing and avoid facing his victim's family said they wanted him to know he 'completely destroyed' them. Among his formulations are: That which is to be done is to be done, and: The good is an end worth pursuing.. The prescription expressed in gerundive form, on the contrary, merely offers rational direction without promoting the execution of the work to which reason directs.[62]. Of course, so far as grammar alone is concerned, the gerundive form can be employed to express an imperative. Because the specific last end is not determined for him by nature, man is able to make the basic Commitment which orients his entire life. There are two ways of misunderstanding this principle that make nonsense of it. All rights reserved. 2, c; , a. Animals behave without law, for they live by instinct without thought and without freedom. The goodness of God is the absolutely ultimate final cause, just as the power of God is the absolutely ultimate efficient cause. See Farrell, op. 1. Rather, he means the principles of practical inquiry which also are the limits of practical argumenta set of underivable principles for practical reason. In the fourth paragraph he is pointing out that the need for practical reason, as an active principle, to think in terms of end implies that its first grasp on its objects will be of them as good, since any objective of action must first be an object of tendency. Nor is any operation of our own will presupposed by the first principles of practical reason. The first practical principle is like a basic tool which is inseparable from the job in which the tool is used; it is the implement for making all the other tools to be used on the job, but none of them is equivalent to it, and so the basic tool permeates all the work done in that job. Good in the first principle refers with priority to these underived ends, yet by itself the first principle cannot exclude ends presented in other practical judgments even if their derivation is unsound. 1, a. supra note 3, at 75, points out that Aquinas will add to the expression law of nature a further worde.g., preceptto express strict obligation. As I explained above, the primary principle is imposed by reason simply because as an active principle reason must direct according to the essential condition for any active principleit must direct toward an end. However, Aquinas explicitly distinguishes between an imperative and a precept expressed in gerundive form. The invocation of a metaphysics of divine causality and providence at this point is no help, since such a metaphysics also consists exclusively of theoretical truths from which reason can derive no practical consequences. Act according to the precepts of the state, and never against. In this section I wish to clarify this point, and the lack of prosequendum in the non-Thomistic formula is directly relevant. His position has undergone some development in its various presentations. at II.7.2. Even so accurate a commentator as Stevens introduces the inclination of the will as a ground for the prescriptive force of the first principle. 3, c; q. c. God is to be praised, and Satan is to be condemned. The first argument concludes that natural law must contain only a single precept on the grounds that law itself is a precept. Some interpreters mistakenly ask whether the word good in the first principle has a transcendental or an ethical sense. Any proposition may be called objectively self-evident if its predicate belongs to the intelligibility of its subject. For Aquinas, right reason is reason judging in accordance with the whole of the natural law. Although Bourke is right in noticing that Nielsens difficulties partly arise from his positivism, I think Bourke is mistaken in supposing that a more adequate metaphysics could bridge the gap between theory and practice. supra note 8, at 202205. 4, c. However, a horror of deduction and a tendency to confuse the process of rational derivation with the whole method of geometry has led some Thomistsnotably, Maritainto deny that in the natural law there are rationally deduced conclusions. It is important, however, to see the precise manner in which the principle, Good is to be done and pursued, still rules practical reason when it goes astray. Consequently, as Boethius says in his De hebdomadibus,[6] there are certain axioms or propositions which are generally self-evident to everyone. Yet the first principle of practical reason does provide a basic requirement for action merely by prescribing that it be intentional, and it is in the light of this requirement that the objects of all the inclinations are understood as human goods and established as objectives for rational pursuit. My main purpose is not to contribute to the history of natural law, but to clarify Aquinass idea of it for current thinking. 78, a. For Aquinas, there is no nonconceptual intellectual knowledge: De veritate, q. But our willing of ends requires knowledge of them, and the directive knowledge prior to the natural movements of our will is precisely the basic principles of practical reason. In his response he does not exclude virtuous acts which are beyond the call of duty. Practical principles do not become practical, although they do become more significant for us, if we believe that God wills them. [18], Now if practical reason is the mind functioning as a principle of action, it is subject to all the conditions necessary for every active principle. Thus to insure this fundamental point, it will be useful to examine the rest of the treatise on law in which the present issue arises. In his response he does not exclude virtuous acts which are beyond the call of duty. However, Aquinas actually says: Et ideo primum principium in ratione practica est quod fundatur supra rationem boni, quae est, c. Fr. Previously, however, he had given the principle in the formulation: Good is to be done and evil avoided. Ibid. It is not the inclinations but the quality of actions, a quality grounded on their own intrinsic character and immutable essence, which in no way depend upon any extrinsic cause or will, any more than does the essence of other things which in themselves involve no contradiction. (We see at the beginning of paragraph, that Suarez accepts this position as to its doctrine of the intrinsic goodness or turpitude of actions, and so as an account of the. Maritain attributes our knowledge of definite prescriptions of natural law to a nonconceptual, nonrational knowledge by inclination or connaturality. This orientation means that at the very beginning an action must have definite direction and that it must imply a definite limit.[19]. There is a constant tendency to reduce practical truth to the more familiar theoretical truth and to think of underivability as if it were simply a matter of conceptual identity. An active principle is going to bring about something or other, or else it would not be an active principle at all. He thinks that this is the guiding principle for all our decision making. He does not notice that Aquinas uses quasi in referring to the principles themselves; they are in ratione naturali quasi per se nota., 1-2, q. Desires are to be fulfilled, and pain is to be avoided. Not all outcomes are ones we want or enjoy. Rather, Aquinas relates the basic precepts to the inclinations and, as we have seen, he does this in a way which does not confuse inclination and knowledge or detract from the conceptual status or intelligible objectivity of the self-evident principles of practical reason. Only truths of fact are supposed to have any reference to real things, but all truths of fact are thought to be contingent, because it is assumed that all necessity is rational in character. cit. In accordance with this inclination, those things by which human life is preserved and by which threats to life are met fall under natural law. Now since any object of practical reason first must be understood as an object of tendency, practical reasons first step in effecting conformity with itself is to direct the doing of works in pursuit of an end. The rule of action binds; therefore, reason binds. Consequently, when Aquinas wishes to indicate strict obligation he often uses a special mode of expression to make this idea explicit. The important point to grasp from all this is that when Aquinas speaks of self-evident principles of natural law, he does not mean tautologies derived by mere conceptual analysisfor example: Stealing is wrong, where stealing means the unjust taking of anothers property. For example, both subject and predicate of the proposition, But in this discussion I have been using the word intelligibility (, It is not merely the meaning with which a word is used, for someone may use a word, such as rust, and use it correctly, without understanding all that is included in its intelligibility. [42] Ibid. The good which is the subject matter of practical reason is an objective possibility, and it could be contemplated. He considers the goodness and badness with which natural law is concerned to be the moral value of acts in comparison with human nature, and he thinks of the natural law itself as a divine precept that makes it possible for acts to have an additional value of conformity with the law. at 1718; cf. We easily form the mistaken generalization that all explicit judgments actually formed by us must meet such conditions. [50] A. G. Sertillanges, O.P., La philosophie morale de Saint Thomas dAquin (Paris, 1946), 109, seems to fall into this mistaken interpretation. cit. However, a full and accessible presentation along these general lines may be found in, Bonum est faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum., La loi naturelle et le droit naturel selon S. Thomas,. Since from this perspective the good is defined as an end to be pursued, while evil is defined as what is contrary to that end, reason naturally sees as good and therefore to be pursued all those things to which man has a natural inclination, while it sees the contraries of these things as evil and therefore to be avoided. There should be a fine line between what is good or evil, one that is not solely dependent on what an individual thinks is good or bad. Of course we do make judgments concerning means in accordance with the orientation of our intention toward the end. We may say that the will naturally desires happiness, but this is simply to say that man cannot but desire the attainment of that good, whatever it may be, for which he is acting as an ultimate end. 5, for the notion of first principles as instruments which the agent intellect employs in making what follows actually intelligible. Thus, the predicate belongs to the intelligibility of the subject does not mean that one element of a complex meaning is to be found among others within the complex. He maintains that there is no willing without prior apprehension. A first principle of practical reason that prescribes only the basic condition necessary for human action establishes an order of such flexibility that it can include not only the goods to which man is disposed by nature but even the good to which human nature is capable of being raised only by the aid of divine grace. 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