How Do We Learn to Identify Natural Law and Ethics?

How Do We Learn to Identify Natural Law and Ethics?

Naturalist ethics could not have devised such a convoluted law as that "father's rights" legislation that makes him claim responsibility for a pregnancy before the pregnancy is known--if he wants any rights.

"Natural law" is based on what are posited to be the characteristics of human nature qua human nature. The fundamentals are applicable to any tribe or any modern civilization that aspires to that standard. It is the details above and beyond the fundamentals that are ever-changeable and which are designed by a civilization specifically for that civilization.

As "the study of the origin and meaning of ethical concepts," we are necessarily brought to the subject of what is right, meaning "good." Is something good for its own sake (inherent); good by some subjective standard (perspective); or good by an objective standard? Aristotle formulated the idea that things are good which are good for the species involved, (species qua species,) so therefor they are not inherent and not subjective, but objective. What is poison to a human is, in some cases, very nutritious for certain flora and fauna, like rotting meat. It's a great fertilizer and some birds won't eat meat until it is good and rotting. So in that case, the "good" is good by an objective standard.

Which bring us back to "right and wrong." For the same reason as objective standards in "good," they exist in "right and wrong," but now it comes down to "context." If you shoot a good guy, the context is wrong because you shot the wrong guy and that is not is not good for the survival of the species, to be shooting the good guys. But if you shoot the bad guy, then shooting is not wrong, it is right. Every thing is objective, but sometimes the objective is contextual.

Lysander Spooner, nineteenth-century lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur, legal theorist and political radical, was elegant on the subject; elegant, yet as clear and as black-and-white as any individual could be on the nature of what constitutes the "good" and the "just" for the species Man, which means he found, in contextual terms as uniquely American as the Founding Fathers' concept of "individual sovereignty."

Natural law, according to Spooner in his work, "Natural Law,": "is the science of all human rights; of all a man's rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..." [and] "which alone can tell any man what he can, and cannot, do; what he can, and cannot, have; what he can, and cannot, say, without infringing the rights of any other person."

These are the political standards of Man qua Man, and are the fundamentals which ought to be codified, and nothing less than this will do as a basis. But it becomes the terrible duty of any legislative or judicial body to determine what those are. I say it is terrible because, to continue with Spooner:

"[F]irst, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.

"The second condition is, that each man shall abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids him to do; as, for example, that he shall abstain from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another."

The terrible duty of legislatures and judicial bodies is be certain that individual sovereignty is found in every letter of the law, because it is only in the protection of every man's sovereignty that he is protected in his political ability to give up some of his sovereignty to the common sovereignty. It is common sovereignty which gives us the practical means to implement "government by the consent of the governed." The consent comes when all individuals who wish to be Citizens relinquish their right to be judge and jury, or to make law without being elected to do so, or to do anything which a just and limited government is duty-bound to do for the protection of all "man's rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," while at the same time preventing him from infringing in any way upon the rights of any other person.

How is any ethical decision made in a society as large, and technical, as educated and progressive and advanced in knowlege as ours is? When it gets away from the fundamentals that are required as the standard for the just protection of Man qua Man, and instead becomes the bullying IRS or the Patriot Act that can jail American citizens for telling their parents or children or neighbors that the government is investigating them, in other words, for taking advantage of the First Amendment;

when a government instead becomes the possessor of every individuals right to his rights as is the case with the Fourteenth Amendment creation of a new legal entity, the "citizen of the United States," a citizen entirely beholding to the Federal government for whatever "privileges and immunities" he or she is "allowed,"

then, such a government is not natural, is not the protector of individual sovereignty, and is in effect endowed with the first "right of refusal" when it comes to taking or allowing privileges and immunites. The first "right of refusal" justly belongs to the individual, who before the Fourteenth Amendment was a Citizen. Not since the passage of that Amendment has any American been a Citizen. We have all been citizens. The word is no longer capitalized except by those who do not know the history of the usage of the word in this great nation.

We have been demoted from Citizen to citizen, by law, by an Amendment, and it because our Citizenship has been taken from us and given to the Federal Government, which makes the Government of the United States of America the defacto National Government of the United States of America.

No longer are we the United States of a nation called America. Where once we were States united under a common government by the consent of the States, and which were States by the consent of the governed Citizens of those States, we are now one large government like a hollow oak tree with so many large branches that it can no longer support its own weight.

The socialistic nationalism of the mortgage markets and the banks that control them; the federal funds needed for a mis-managed "war on terror,"--necessary but mis-named and thus mis-managed--and the budget necessary for FEMA, Social Security, medical welfare, food stamps, and other federally funded infringements of individual sovereignty, are the indicators of an un-natural state of affairs in the ethics and the laws of the Citizens of the United States of the nation called America.

We now know what "natural law and ethics" is not. It is for tomorrow's blog to determine what "natural" is.

Note: I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC

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