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3/14/2016 6:09 pm  #1


Scholastic Natural Law

Scholastic natural law, especially regarding justice, seems really stupid to the point of ridicule. No offense is intended, but this is just how I see it. If you could explain it in a way that makes sense, it would be really appreciated.

Here is how I see scholastic natural law philosophy: a murderer kills someone, causing a "disturbance in the force," which results in the need for the state to mete out equal retribution, thereby putting "the force" in balance again. Of course, if murder doesn't actually cause a "disturbance in the force," then no such retribution is needed, and one could simply make judicial sentences a matter of preventing the perpetrator from harming others

 

3/14/2016 6:15 pm  #2


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

I have no idea why you came to such a conclusion about Scholastic natural law theory. Natural law theory is necessary for grounding rationally why we, e.g., think murder or harming others is wrong in the first place and by what right and rationale it can be prevented by authority. It justifies basic ethics and allows us to distinguish between what is arbitrary and tyrannical and what is justifiable. How does one adjudicate between contradictory notions of justice? If they cannot be settled in principle, then we at best end up with a might is right concept of law and justice or otherwise out-and-out anarchy.


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3/14/2016 6:35 pm  #3


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

But do we actually need justice to achieve a functional society? What's wrong with taking a murderer, putting him in a livable prison with enough amenities for him to continue living and possibly even producing something where he's not able to murder people or harm society? The murderer can continue living his life, and society is safe.

 

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3/14/2016 7:06 pm  #4


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

But do we actually need justice to achieve a functional society? What's wrong with taking a murderer, putting him in a livable prison with enough amenities for him to continue living and possibly even producing something where he's not able to murder people or harm society? The murderer can continue living his life, and society is safe.

 

The point, Tomislav, is that you will have to argue that is just. Why not just cut the murder's head off and be done with it? Or enslave him? Or make him President?
 


"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).

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3/14/2016 7:29 pm  #5


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

I am basing this decision on Pareto efficiency. The only thing we need to do is protect the rights of everyone. It is not Pareto efficient to either let a murderer go off scott-free nor to execute him, but it is Pareto efficient to imprison him in a way that allows him to live his life while being sufficiently supervised to keep him from harming others.

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3/14/2016 7:45 pm  #6


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

The only thing we need to do is protect the rights of everyone.

1. What are the rights of everyone?

2. How do we arrive at them and on what principles are they based?

Pareto Efficeny is really more of a practical tool for allocating State resources to certain ends, not a way of deciding which ends to pursue or what way a State should pursue them.

I myself am neither a Natural Law theorist nor approve of state sanctioned death penalties, at least in normal cases, but I don't think the principle behind the NL case is hard to grasp or even requires something as specific as NL to back it up. The Principle of Proportionality arguably follows from the nature of justice in as much as if justice in anyway involves maintaining a sense of moral equilibrium then punishment should not exceed the nature of the crime. As it happens even on the NL account the State is not morally obliged to carry out the death penalty only admit that the person is worthy of it ('many that live deserve death but it is not for us to give it to them'). It may elect to follow a differing cause of action based on other moral considerations e.g. mercy, setting an example of the virtue of mercy, avoiding encouraging the vice of bloodlust and so forth.

Last edited by DanielCC (3/14/2016 7:53 pm)

 

3/14/2016 8:05 pm  #7


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

I'm also with Daniel insofar as I've never been very charmed by natural law, but your post is so grossly false as an account that posting it here borders on being disrespectful and trollish. It's on the same level of rigor as the old backwoods evangelical:

Evolution means-

1. There were monkeys.
2. Time made magic happen.
3. Then a monkey gave birth to a human being.

I mean, "the force" dude? What are you talking about? Can I smoke what you're on?


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3/14/2016 8:12 pm  #8


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

I am basing this decision on Pareto efficiency. The only thing we need to do is protect the rights of everyone. It is not Pareto efficient to either let a murderer go off scott-free nor to execute him, but it is Pareto efficient to imprison him in a way that allows him to live his life while being sufficiently supervised to keep him from harming others.

Uh-oh, you're in the econometric libertarian trap wherein you simply pretend that "market utility" is utility as such and that utility as such is the determinant of justice. Just because one has some kind of conceptual scheme whereby one can determine "optimal play" in some game we all participate in this simply does not entail that either this result is just nor even that the game itself is just. Market fundamentalists make this error all the time: wherein they assume that the maximization of market utility results in the optimal society. That relies on at least 3 quick equivocations, and doesn't wash.

At least people like Hayek (though not Rothbard, the loon) were aware that their arguments were radical departures.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

3/14/2016 8:17 pm  #9


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

iwpoe wrote:

I'm also with Daniel insofar as I've never been very charmed by natural law, but your post is so grossly false as an account that posting it here borders on being disrespectful and trollish. It's on the same level of rigor as the old backwoods evangelical:

Evolution means-

1. There were monkeys.
2. Time made magic happen.
3. Then a monkey gave birth to a human being.

I mean, "the force" dude? What are you talking about? Can I smoke what you're on?

I think, iwpoe, the logic of natural law becomes more apparent when one realizes the limits of any given finite nature coupled with the interchangeability between being and goodness. Like so many famous Scholastic beliefs, it's not that we really doubt or deny their truth but misunderstand them.

To give an example, I am personally alarmed by transhumanism insofar as it actually is a desire to not be human. It is not a desire for non-existence that animates transhumanism but to be more, as it were, fully or maximally being. We would not want a new evolution of the human as per necessity that would involve its not being human anymore. Cyborgs will not make us happier if being a cyborg means not being human; for we cannot be happy (let alone happier) if we do not exist.

Last edited by Timocrates (3/14/2016 8:18 pm)


"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).

Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
 

3/14/2016 8:38 pm  #10


Re: Scholastic Natural Law

Timocrates wrote:

[
I think, iwpoe, the logic of natural law becomes more apparent when one realizes the limits of any given finite nature coupled with the interchangeability between being and goodness. Like so many famous Scholastic beliefs, it's not that we really doubt or deny their truth but misunderstand them.

To give an example, I am personally alarmed by transhumanism insofar as it actually is a desire to not be human. It is not a desire for non-existence that animates transhumanism but to be more, as it were, fully or maximally being. We would not want a new evolution of the human as per necessity that would involve its not being human anymore. Cyborgs will not make us happier if being a cyborg means not being human; for we cannot be happy (let alone happier) if we do not exist.

On a tangent (I too find Trans-Humanism and the Neo-Eugenicists incredibly worrying, far more so than the social issues religious conservatives tend to obsess over) I think one might object by asking what it means to be human e.g. biologically we would not be human if we had a completely different digestive system or if our blood contained copper in place of iron, yet we would still be responsible moral agents. I recall Oderberg gets round this by arguing that any rational animal is metaphysically human (in which case he is using the term 'human' as I would 'person') even if they are not metaphysically homo sapiens.

With this in mind I don't think one an argue that body augmentation is itself immoral, rather it's the ideology behind it all which is monstrous. To proclaim that the only good thing is to survive* and the only reason to survive is to find more effective reasons to survive - does not this sound hauntingly like the Nietzschean claim that the only end is power and power is nothing but more power?

*Of course this has to be hedged about with a lot of black t-shirt speeches about how there is no ultimate meaning or objective morality. Not that this ever stopped a nihilist moralising in the very next sentence. 

 

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