I’m sometimes sympathetic to Rawls’ idea of public reason—that the public square should rely on discourse morally apprehensible to diverse persons. At the least, it’s aspirational. But in practice, no one reasons from a contextless or “neutral” sphere, and the requirement that I sacrifice my “comprehensive doctrines” for the sake of public neutrality, I think, betrays a fundamental principle of political justice—that persons are owed the ability to reason according
to the canons of reasonableness that form them—even if those standards are formed by moral traditions that supposedly belie “public reason.”
But then I come across a quote like this from a legendary bioethicist, Tristram Engelhardt, that reminds me that everyone reasons from somewhere: “Reasonableness and rationality, to have moral force or content, to be more than merely formal notions, must be partisan to one among a number of competing accounts of reasonableness and rationality in morality and political relations.” Engelhardt, in his work, dismissed too strongly the idea that a secular society could reason together because of its ideological polarization. But I think that still betrays the reality that, owing to common grace, society can, in principle, identify certain norms that all reasonable people could hypothetically accept. That many people may be unreasonable does not end the possibility that common decency may persist among many, allowing otherwise reasonable people to form common moral principles.
And this leads me to a very provocative point I read recently by James Rachels that connects the relevance of such fields as bioethics to the natural law tradition (without naming it as such):
“All people have the same basic needs—food, warmth, friendship, protection from danger, meaningful work, to name only a few […] Perhaps, then, we may hope for an ethical theory that will specify norms acceptable to all reasonable people. Justifying such a theory, however, will not be easy. (But then, why should it be? Why should justifying a general theory in ethics be easier than justifying a general theory in, say, physics or psychology?). The process will include assessing our intuitions about particular cases; looking at a host of arguments about individual behavior and social policy; identifying and evaluating midlevel principles; bringing to bear what we know about human nature and human social systems; considering the claims of religion; and then trying to fit it all together in one unified scheme of understanding. If there is indeed one best overall ethical theory, it is likely to appear as many lines of inquiry converge. The fact that there is still so much disagreement among ethical theorists may be due not to the impossibility of the project, but to its complexity and to the fact that secular ethical theory is still a young subject” (The Legacy of Socrates: Essays in Moral Philosophy by James Rachels, 216-18).
Honestly, I find Rachels’ comments here breathtaking. He seems to be speaking about what the natural law tradition offers without naming that tradition in particular. For one, the natural law tradition opens the possibility of a non-sectarian bioethics that offers more robustness than the “secular morality” that Engelhardt believes a non-religious population will default to.
Second, his account posits the need for what secular ethics seems unable to provide on its own: a coherent, objective account of moral first principles that provide more—though not determinative in every area—opportunity for clear norms and limits in its application. This is why I remain optimistic that natural law offers an attractive path forward for people of goodwill who can reason charitably.
Nonetheless, it would be better if everyone just acknowledged that everyone reasons from a position of circular commitment. The Christian does it. The atheist does it, et al. It’s a function of the human mind: We reason from stated or unstated first principles because the whole operation of reason assumes some self-evident starting point or baseline by which reason becomes reasonable—that’s what Aquinas meant by the “First Principle of Practical Reason.”
