00:01:14.880But as more as suggesting, this is one of those things that was more easily said than done because it is huge.
00:01:21.000And I do think that on this podcast, we try to take these traditions seriously while disagreeing with them.
00:01:30.440And that's one thing when you're doing a social phenomenon that's like 40 years old.
00:01:36.820It's another if it's like it goes back to the pre-Socratics, basically, which is also to say, like, please don't use this in lieu of an actual kind of there are books called Introduction to Natural Law Theory and that kind of stuff.
00:01:48.820If it's really important to you, please pick those up.
00:01:53.360It's just like unbelievable how much there is to read.
00:01:56.180And I don't think I've like fully scratched the surface in researching this.
00:02:00.280I love it when like at the beginning of our podcast, Adrian, the erudite, very meticulous,
00:02:06.680very conscientious, thorough researcher and professor gives a content warning.0.98
00:02:12.820It's like, please remember while you're listening that I am a dumbass.0.74
00:02:16.200And like, it's just a podcast, y'all.0.95
00:02:18.400And then me, I've like read three tweets on the matter and I'm like, I'm going to talk for two hours.
00:02:26.020Well, I'm happy to cede some ground to you because like I'm, yeah, really, I think one of the things that became clear to me in researching this is that we're really talking about several traditions sort of at the same time when we think about natural law.
00:02:42.120But of course, there is a kind of invocation of natural law at the present moment that you're going to get.
00:02:49.120And then there are other things that have just fully fallen by the wayside, right?
00:02:52.660There are people who call themselves the new natural law theorists, and they tend to be quite conservative.
00:02:58.880One of them is the PhD advisor for one Neil Gorsuch.
00:03:02.140So this stuff really does make its way into current jurisprudence.
00:03:06.300But I think it's important to note that the legal tradition of natural law, right, like both in how we apply or adjudicate or interpret laws and in what we understand the law to be in general, right, is only one thing that we're talking about when we talk about natural law tradition.
00:03:23.220There's also the idea of natural law as a kind of foundational practice and way of founding sort of theories of ethics, theories of politics, or theories of religious morality.
00:03:35.940That's not the same thing necessarily.
00:03:38.640But then there is probably the first thing that listeners will have flashed back to, which is what the feminist scholar Christine Pierce in the 70s called natural law language.
00:03:50.300When we talk about natural law, we're talking about a series of ethical, legal, and for our purposes, gendered ideas that use as their foundation this reflex to an authority in nature or claims of an innate human nature that sort of precedes social organization or revelation or anything like that.
00:04:12.580Yes, we are talking about some recourse to nature, although what's meant by nature is already kind of tricky.
00:04:17.420And there are some really interesting kind of shadings that I think we'll have to apply.
00:04:22.100It is also, very importantly, a recourse, at least, and this is already what we're going to split between what is sort of a natural law tradition in religious philosophy and what Pierce calls natural law language.
00:04:36.100Because there's the appeal to nature as something obvious that's almost like a substitute for revelation.
00:04:41.540Well, it turns out Christian natural law traditions largely didn't think of nature that way.
00:04:46.660They thought of it as a mode of reasoning, right?
00:04:50.680You could say, hey, we can probably figure out what God wants from us by looking how nature is constituted.
00:04:56.460It's not the same as saying like, oh, we all know this to be true.
00:04:59.900Sometimes it really required quite a bit of work, but they're like, you can do the work and God wants you to be able to find this, right?0.68
00:05:05.840It's just slightly different from like, you know, I've never seen a gay lion, so therefore there can't be no gay people.0.87
00:05:11.020right? Like that is what Pierce calls natural law language. It's not really what St. Thomas
00:05:15.220Aquinas is up to. Okay. So to maybe start with just examples of this natural law language first,
00:05:21.020because I think that's the stuff that people are going to be most familiar with. In a 1977
00:05:25.980essay, Natural Law Language and Women, that Pierce wrote, she gives a couple of examples
00:05:32.540that I think are great because like, A, I think they make very clear why she's so interested in
00:05:37.700this question of nature, why feminists in the 70s were extremely suspicious of this language of
00:05:44.300natural law. And also, this is something I would very much encourage our listeners to sort of
00:05:49.160think about when you've last heard this, and the answer may be last week, which is that a lot of
00:05:54.640these people have not updated their talking points. Yeah. So here are her examples. She puts
00:05:59.440these bullet points at the beginning just to be like, what the hell am I talking about here,
00:06:02.400right? First bullet point. In 1872, Myra Bradwell was refused admission to the Illinois Bar by the
00:06:09.300state Supreme Court, even though she had passed the bar entrance examination. Her suit, based upon
00:06:13.740the supposed right of every person, man or woman, to engage in any lawful employment for a livelihood
00:06:18.420was denied. Justice Bradley, in his concurring opinion, opposed the idea that women might be0.96
00:06:23.340attorneys on grounds that both God and nature disapprove. Quote, the civil law, as well as0.96
00:06:28.860nature herself has always recognized the wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies
00:06:33.120of man and woman that just kind of sounds like it's always been this way man and therefore it
00:06:38.900may not be otherwise in the future something about natural laws that it involves this like
00:06:42.980sort of recourse to the past as a limiting factor about like what's possible in the future or in the
00:06:51.180present yeah yeah another way of putting this is often a concern about proper spheres and then it's
00:10:26.500Anyway, so she has one further bullet point with a, not a friend of the pod, but a walk-on cameo of the pod, let's say.
00:10:34.540Basing his remarks on Danielle Crittenden's book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, newspaper columnist George Will recently asserted that, quote,
00:10:46.080Feminism's androgyny project fails for an intractable reason. It is unnatural. Today's feminism aspires to rid life of its necessity. Feminism's grand dream is to escape the bonds of anatomy and refute the idea that biology is, in any sense, destiny. End quote.
00:11:02.520Yes, the keratin treatments and gel sets and high heels and BBLs of heterosexual femininity are entirely natural.1.00
00:11:12.480Yeah, they're not trying to escape shit.1.00
00:11:14.320Feminists are defying their nature by not removing their body hair.1.00
00:11:29.040I mean, she couldn't have known this when she wrote this in 1978, but the fact that George Will, who is still alive, has been on this shit since before I was born is really kind of remarkable.0.69
00:11:41.700Like, this is something, this language of natural laws or naturally ordained spheres is extremely old, and it's kind of an evergreen.0.70
00:11:50.880Like, people barely bother to update these in order to, like, attack a new perversion, allegedly.
00:11:58.020Like, oh, the perversion I was yelling about 40 years ago is actually okay, right?1.00
00:12:01.340You can now not shave your armpits, but transgender is bad.1.00
00:12:05.860No, they still get mad about the armpit thing.1.00
00:12:08.880Will is still like, he's still banned from his local pool because they're like, you have to stop yelling at the young ladies.
00:12:14.880Just walking around Bushwick having a meltdown.
00:12:20.300But yeah, so the point here is that there is this language and then there are these actual traditions.
00:12:25.240And I think initially when we were talking about this episode, I thought we were going to talk about this kind of natural law language.
00:12:30.900But then I got really interested in these traditions that these people do kind of refer back to, but that are in the end stranger and a little bit more interesting than this stuff.
00:12:42.120And so I didn't want to sort of just point out like, they trot this out every 20 years.
00:12:46.560They never update their talking points.1.00
00:12:50.580The one thing you can't say about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he was lazy.1.00
00:12:53.580There's a really interesting tradition here. I don't think I agree with pretty much anyone that we're going to talk about today, but I like some of this and I think it's fun and people might get a kick out of it. And above all, I think if you want to see sizzling intellect in modern natural law theorizing, look in the footnotes.
00:16:30.380Which is indeed something that in the early Enlightenment, a lot of people are saying in order to not run afile of the Catholic Church, right?
00:16:36.580They're like saying, I'm not an atheist.
00:16:38.840I'm just reading God's language and nature.
00:16:41.520So it does not have contempt for the worldly concerns as a mere distraction from the divine and the afterlife.
00:16:47.480It calls its adherence to inquiry about the world and to engagement with the world.
00:16:54.160Exactly. And it tells us that human beings are endowed with faculties that allow us to understand nature in this way, right? This is completely ahistorical, but listeners can think of like sort of the opposite of this being the Cartesian demon, right? Like a benevolent God would not endow us with faculties that then have no purchase in understanding the world, right?
00:17:20.180So it's really important for natural law reasoning as a style that these precepts are accessible to us through our intellectual effort, which also means that these precepts are not drawn from the Bible.
00:17:33.720I mean, to give you an example, we know that we're not supposed to have any gods beside the one God because God told us so, right?0.98
00:19:40.860Although the typologists sort of ruined this later by being like, well, the whole thing was actually a anticipation of the sacrifice of Christ.
00:19:47.640It's about reciprocity and, you know, the gesture that Abraham makes is that avenge and na-na-na-na-na.
00:19:52.800But, like, if you want to keep the good reading, you don't have to deal with the New Testament.
00:19:57.320Well, doesn't Simone Weil read the entire crucifixion that way?
00:20:00.880She's like, it is a gift that is so mind-warpingly bizarre and messed up and brutal and sadistic and unnecessary that like, I think this is in Pensanteur et la Grasse, Gravity and Grace, where it's like, that is what grace is.
00:20:22.860Yeah, it's actually a little bit of a, that's a white elephant, right?1.00
00:20:26.620It's the gift of the crucifixion is a gift where you're like, shit.1.00
00:20:29.460Yeah. It's basically the Christmas party where everyone shows up with like movie tickets and God gives someone a house. You just made it super weird, man. Why? Don't ask why. But you're right. Natural law comes out of a different idea.0.99
00:20:46.920That is to say, we are impelled, we are called upon to understand the world and to ask why.
00:20:54.720And then it's also accessible to reason.
00:20:56.700We're supposed to base it on our natural sensation, on the way we naturally arrange our lives, on the way human beings tend to live together.
00:21:04.720And this is where we get this kind of natural law language, right, where it's like, what have we tended to do in the past, right?
00:21:11.640And as Hamlet would say, there's the rub.
00:21:16.340Are you just referring to precedent or is this a place where like sensuality is brought into the realm of reason?
00:21:21.440Like, oh, preference or desires or comforts are brought into conversation with something like reason or harnessed for the purposes of a reason.
00:25:14.840More often, I think it's really slippery.
00:25:17.620One example I thought of here, this is also a little bit old, but do you remember the idea of a wisdom of repugnance?
00:25:23.960This was an article that Leon Kass wrote during the Bush years, I think.
00:25:29.300No, but it sounds like similar to what you were alluding to with transphobia and like opposition to interracial marriage, right?
00:25:35.200Like the idea that repugnance has in it the kernel of a self-protective instinct or of kind of other perhaps unconscious information that is reliable and righteous.
00:25:47.200Exactly. And the reason why the Cass article was really interesting is because it was written during the whole gay marriage debate, but that's not what he was talking about. He was talking about human cloning. He said we have an inherent repugnance against human cloning, which should tell us, like he was on the presidential committee for bioethics, I think.
00:26:09.160He's like, our impulse to reject this on like a pre-rational visceral level should warn us to a moral hazard.
00:26:42.040This is the uncanny feeling of repugnance and endangerment that I feel every day in San Francisco, California.
00:26:50.420Like when I first saw Waymo, I was immediately repulsed.
00:26:53.440You know, I have been conditioned into acceptance of the Waymos, but I was really alarmed when I first saw a car that nobody was driving moving down the road.
00:27:01.260But of course, also, this is the kind of clip that in 20 years might be kind of interesting.
00:27:04.420And they're like, wow, now we all know how good it is or whatever, right?
00:27:55.200Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical.
00:27:58.240They set up ranks and orders of human beings.
00:28:00.380They are also inherently connected to restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct, which I think is a really good point, right?
00:28:08.460She's saying it's not that you might not feel disgust at something that is genuinely bad.
00:28:14.200It's that you probably, like with Waymo, feel disgust for things that aren't that big a deal.
00:28:19.940And if you start just like legislating on what grosses you out, it's just a bad form of recourse, right?
00:28:26.700It's hard to draw the line between this annoys me or this viscerally upsets me and, like, something deep within my person.
00:28:35.960Like, I think Nussbaum, I think, is enough of a natural law theorist to actually grant that to some extent.
00:28:40.980But she's saying, like, yeah, you have to be able to draw the line.
00:28:45.040And so then what you're going to do is just you keep vitiating your own worst impulses, hoping that they're actually not among your worst impulses, right?
00:28:51.820I do see this on Twitter. A lot of people sort of mistake things that are annoying for being evil, right?
00:28:59.000It's like, well, no, this is annoying and actually the stakes are lower.
00:29:01.140But she's proffering a, you know, she would say rational assessment of harms and like interests over a impulsive rejection of things that might not actually have legitimate moral stakes when rationally examined, but like are novel or disturbing in their difference.
00:29:24.540Yeah, I think Nussbaum would say you'd have to graft a utilitarianism on top of it and be like, well, how big a deal is this? How disgusted are you? How big a deal is this? Jonathan Haidt, I think, at some point sort of had a similar proposal. But I think her point, if I understand her correctly, is that that's actually really hard to do.
00:29:41.700And that it's probably better left with like things like torture, right? Like the moment you sort of expand from there, it just becomes an extremely difficult.
00:29:50.360Well, then where do you decide where the line is where things where repugnance is justified and things where repugnance is not justified? Like Nussbaum's proposed alternative standard also has its own subjective measures within it, yeah.
00:30:03.840No, no, I think she, so I think that's her point, right? She says you should be able to draw the line, but if you can't, then really, this is a bad guide because it sometimes indeed steers you correctly and sometimes it'll steer you wrong.
00:30:13.820So the more I looked into this topic, the more I realized that, like, on the one hand, this is something that has lived in progressive and more retrograde politics.
00:30:23.920It's been sort of deployed to conservative or revolutionary ends.
00:30:27.660At the same time, I do think it has its place on a podcast about right wing and conservative ideas, because I think there is a kind of conservative valence to it always to the appeal to nature.
00:30:39.740And natural law also actually cuts to the core of what conservatism even is.
00:30:45.500The question of natural law is at the heart of what we take conservatism to be.
00:30:49.640So for one thing, the question of like, is conservatism traditional or anti-traditional?
00:30:55.260So like we talked about the wisdom of repugnance, right?
00:30:57.300It can be used to argue against things that are new and unprecedented.
00:31:00.900It can naturalize and reify tradition.
00:31:03.640But Roger Scruton, famous conservative philosopher, in his book, Conservatism, uses natural law to argue that conservatism is at its heart a modern project.
00:31:13.940What he's saying is that natural law frequently acted as a check on royal or ecclesiastical authority.
00:31:20.720And here we may think of a very famous sentence that comes out of a natural law tradition.
00:31:24.800We hold these truths to be self-evident, right?
00:31:28.040Marshaled against the king, saying, look in your heart.
00:31:31.320Your heart tells you that that dude should not be running us.1.00
00:31:35.340There's the recourse to sort of a set of principles or an order of righteousness that predates or precedes existing structures can be wielded against hierarchies.
00:31:50.060It can be wielded against those currently in power, right?0.72
00:31:52.100Like, no, the king is not treating us well, and we have a standard of what good treatment is that goes beyond mere, you know, submission to a kingly authority.
00:32:09.100Like, Scruton is right, that that is something that we think of as a modern—this is the break that modernity stages with tradition, right?
00:32:16.580The kind of answer that in the stereotypical Enlightenment treatise you can no longer give is because the king says so, because the church says so, and because Aristotle said so, right?
00:32:40.400Natural law stages a break with tradition.
00:32:42.300It disrupts the way things have gradually grown and develop.
00:32:45.840It also breaks with the law as a coefficient of power, because I said so, right?
00:32:50.380So that makes it kind of profoundly modern in some way.
00:32:52.740So on the one hand, it can seem very traditionalist, and it often sort of is a form of traditionalism,
00:32:57.580but it also can be a profoundly modern project, at least in certain guises.
00:33:03.180The second question may be even more surprising, given that we've been going on about, you know,
00:33:07.220Christian conservatives all this time.
00:33:09.200Like, how Christian or non-Christian is this thing?
00:33:11.960Yeah, it seems like Christianity has, within its own tradition, sort of competing conversations between sort of trying to find God in nature and submitting to God as revealed in, you know, the divine word of the Bible, right?
00:33:26.940There's a kind of one impulse towards reason and engagement and one impulse towards sort of like submission.
00:33:33.160These are like different models of Christian faith.
00:33:35.620Yeah, well, I think it's even more complicated because we all flash back to saying Thomas Aquinas when we hear natural law, but of course Aquinas had to do all this work vindicating natural law because it wasn't obvious why human nature should furnish any kind of law for Christians.
00:35:02.300And they're nerds. They're like theology nerds, yeah.0.93
00:35:04.880They're theology nerds. They're also sort of, I'm going to use the wrong word for this, but like
00:35:09.760they were part of a move to anti-monasticism. I don't know. I'm sure there's a good word for it,
00:35:15.860But like there had been, you know, the Benedictines, for instance, were very much centered on these monasteries as nexuses of learning.
00:35:24.200And I believe the Dominicans sort of had this idea like we need to go out into the world and above all, I think, go out into the cities.
00:35:31.400The 13th century is a moment when actually European cities start growing for the first time in a long time and really have to engage with the lay folk.
00:35:40.480And my guess is that's exactly where the natural law also comes from as an idea, because it is this kind of, same as with the Enlightenment later on, it has a kind of how-to quality, right?
00:35:51.800Like, you too can try to reason this way, right?
00:35:54.760Whereas Benedictine learning often, I think, had a kind of revelatory quality.
00:35:59.520There was a lot of like, well, you know, I either had a horrible stomach flu
00:36:05.740or God spoke to me through an eight-headed serpent that also flew through the sky
00:36:11.700and it revealed to me this beautiful, weird painting I painted for you.
00:36:15.680What is it saying? I don't really know, right?
00:36:18.180And like, that's not the culture of which St. Thomas Aquinas is part.
00:36:23.080He writes this gigantic, unfinished magnum opus, the Summa Theologica,
00:36:27.040But he also has tons of disputations, right?
00:36:29.860There's just a lot of like, this guy's wrong about this scriptural passage.
00:36:55.240Of course, he is originally, as you could imagine, from a place called Aquino, that's in Lazio, so Italian by birth, but is also part of these kind of international systems and different political systems, right?
00:37:07.840Like Paris and Lazio and Cologne are all sitting in different political entities at this point, right?
00:37:13.440So there's also a little bit of a use gentium even there that is like, well, over there, they interpreted that way and we interpreted this way.
00:37:21.560So he's really part of this kind of effervescence and is hugely influential with that.
00:37:28.560I understand his work to be about sort of translating and re-habituating the classical philosophers for a medieval Christian Europe, right?
00:37:38.760Trying to integrate the sort of Christian thinking with this older tradition that was being revived.
00:37:45.520And the reason he had to do this is going to be immediately obvious to anyone who's even taken a single look at Genesis, which is to say, why the fuck would you turn to nature as your guide in a religion that tells us that all the nature we see around us is a result of the fall?0.99
00:38:02.860The only reason we are here having this conversation, having to clothe and feed ourselves, et cetera, et cetera, is because Adam and Eve done fucked up, right?0.98
00:38:11.620We could be in the garden naming animals, renaming animals, you know.0.93
00:38:32.300But also why the hell would we reason from something we've lost, right?0.98
00:38:37.440Like what we could have been if we'd left a damn apple on the tree.0.97
00:38:41.620I was thinking here of Isaiah chapter 40, verse 6.0.97
00:38:45.100All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is of the flower of the field.
00:38:48.640The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it.
00:38:53.400Surely the people is grass, but the word of God shall stand forever.
00:38:57.720So the idea is, if that is true, why be like, hey, I should really take the flower to be my guide of how to be?
00:39:04.080It's like, no, it is subject to God's wrath, and it is subject to the fall.
00:39:09.220There may have been a time when we could have done this, but why do it now?
00:39:12.740Yeah, this seems like the setup for the Christian tradition that you were identifying as, like, what natural law was responding to and sort of reacting against, right?0.97
00:39:22.800Let's just try to make as few sudden movements or, like, decisions as possible during our time on Earth so that we can have the best chance to die and go to the afterlife, which is what really matters.
00:39:38.180and what is real, what is divinely ordained, what is in the vision of God,
00:39:42.440and not this kind of like shitty substitute waiting room world that we're in right now.
00:40:19.580This is what's often called the telos, right?
00:40:22.340The essence of something is the way it will develop if unobstructed, right, is the idea.
00:40:28.540That is not to say that every exemplar of the form lives that way.
00:40:32.500It is to say that it is driving towards that telos.
00:40:35.600If that sounds extremely abstract, think of the famous determination of Aristotle's of the human being as the zuon politikon, right, the political animal.
00:40:44.000He's not saying there are no people who live by themselves.
00:40:47.500He's saying it is very obvious once you've seen people live together that that's what they're meant to do.
00:42:35.280What is the essence of our interaction?
00:42:37.340And here we can think about Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, from 1668.
00:42:41.920The final cause and or design of men who naturally love liberty and dominion over others,
00:42:47.360introduction of it restrained upon themselves, in which we see them live in commonwealths,
00:42:52.020is the foresight of their own preservation and of a more contented life thereby.
00:42:55.900That is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war, which is necessarily consequent, as has been shown, to the natural passions of men, when there is no visible power to keep them in awe and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants.
00:43:11.020So he's saying, look at human beings and you will know immediately why we need law, why we need a sovereign, why we need threats, frankly, threats of violence.0.98
00:43:24.600I don't know if you noticed, right?0.99
00:43:26.440Even though, like in some ways, the picture of humanity that St. Thomas Aquinas proceeded from is deeply negative.
00:43:38.820I don't think he would have, he would not have been interested in the human being as this purely imminent creature, right?
00:43:47.020Because part of its nature is also to have had the freedom to be endowed by God with this freedom that allowed the fallen to sin in the first place.
00:43:56.800So, like, human nature is both in this way.
00:44:00.060And with someone like Hobbes, you no longer get that.
00:44:02.840You get this foresight about your own preservation, not about what the telos of the human being is, but what human beings are like.
00:44:11.640And that also means, by the way, that for Aquinas, as for Aristotle, I believe what Hobbes calls the human commonwealth, the fact that we form communities, comes first.
00:44:32.260And there's a reason for this. Hobbes lived at the tail end of an era where people did, you know, awful things to each other over religious disagreements. So the natural law that was interesting to him and that could actually create a stable and peaceful commonwealth could not be religiously based.
00:45:40.060Like the nice stuff, maybe your God can tell you.
00:45:42.000But like, you know, obey the law probably has to come from something else.
00:45:45.560Because, like, you may be Catholic and your neighbor might be Protestant, and we can't have you going around being like, well, my religion says it's okay.
00:45:52.900No, this is where you get the state in order to have a monopoly on violence and organize violence and make violence nominally at least ordered and not arbitrary.
00:48:55.400Hobbes says it's in our nature to seek commonwealth only because our nature is shit.0.99
00:49:00.840Our whole thing is dog shit and we have to sort of flock together and like stop killing each other because otherwise life is short.0.99
00:49:07.940And Locke is sort of starting to say like, well, no, there are things that are true of human beings that you can base a political order on that we can deduce that have content.0.99
00:49:16.860That's, I think, what people mean when they say that the creator in the phrase endowed by their creator is actually load bearing, like which is something that I think those of us who are kind of more secular kind of tend to scoff at.
00:49:29.720That's what I'm guessing they have to hang their hat on.
00:49:32.080They have to say, look, it is not a Hobbesian document.1.00
00:49:35.060He's not saying the only way to survive in the Americas is to all band together, so fuck it, let's do it.0.96
00:49:40.200He's saying we are endowed by our creator, which says there is a human nature beyond our animality that we are basing our covenant on.0.99
00:49:53.160Yeah, it's a higher aspiration than mere survival.
00:49:55.380Yeah, but also drawing on a higher resource, if it makes sense, right?
00:50:01.840He's justifying his, at the time, seemingly kind of suicidal defiance of monarchical authority with this recourse to something that is greater than and preceding the king, right?
00:50:15.160It aspires to compliance with a higher law and it aspires to a better kind of life.
00:50:21.140That's why it's a beautiful document to read.
00:50:23.060Yeah, yeah. And at the same time, I do think, and again, I'm ambling into like decades of debate here. It's clear that Locke doesn't base that content religiously. So like, it's also, we're kind of right back where we started. It's also possible to sort of anchor these rights in, you know, just the observation of humans, for instance, or in our capacity for reason, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:50:46.520So, like, it's not clear that this has to be religious, right?
00:50:50.220There is this kind of Schmittian kind of secularization thesis sometimes in these where it's like, oh, it's all theology that's just getting secularized.
00:50:57.840Like, well, no, not necessarily, right?
00:50:59.340Like, there's new content being found here.
00:51:01.680And I think Locke is explicit in that that's his project.
00:51:05.380And so the language of natural law or natural rights is everywhere around the American Revolution, around all the revolutions, right?
00:56:52.880All this stuff sort of comes in through the back door again.
00:56:55.580And meanwhile, it declares sort of nugatory, it declares ancillary, less than, all these things that sort of mysteriously were left off your list of basic goods.
00:57:16.840Like it's this really interesting kind of like stacking of the deck where you get a lot of this jurisprudential reasoning now of like certain right wing judges in the United States.
00:57:27.220Yes, it is self-evidently desirable to have more babies and therefore we should be, you know, compelling teenagers to have them.
00:57:35.820It's deployed in a lot of anti-abortion jurisprudence, right?
00:57:40.160This notion that is self-evidently desirable to have more and more public expressions of Christian faith has been used to dismantle the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
00:57:51.520You see this, like, deployed for really, like, pretty egregious socially conservative ends in a lot of the federal judiciary these days.0.56
00:57:59.080Exactly. And I think, like, I'm not even sure if it's the glue that Christine Pierce is talking about.
00:58:04.520It's really kind of all the things she says mashed together, right?
00:58:09.220One moment is this, one moment is that, one moment is this, right?
00:58:12.120Sometimes it's an explanation, supposedly.
00:58:13.940Sometimes it's offered as a recommendation.
00:58:15.760Sometimes it is about determinism.1.00
00:58:17.060That's just what women are like, you know?1.00
00:58:18.920Sometimes it is just a metaphysical glue, right?0.99
00:58:21.560But, like, I read a bunch of these texts and I was really kind of shocked by how little attention they paid to what exactly the structure of their argument was.
00:58:31.340Like, what exactly they were trying to even do here.
00:58:34.600So the question, like, what do we mean by nature, they can sort of sidestep.
00:58:37.460because they're like, well, we don't know, but we can talk about orientation to it, right?
00:59:04.900And so the idea is like, well, we don't know what nature is.
00:59:06.900Like, yes, that's complicated. And of course, the biologists would seem to do a much better job at explaining to us what nature does than would seem natural theology. Well, then why don't we do it through this kind of shortcut of orientation, orientatedness towards these goods?
00:59:23.700But at the same time, that makes the nature of the appeal, pardon the pun, way more ambiguous.
00:59:32.020It's like, well, nature tells us that we should walk more and work out.
00:59:37.780Yeah, that seems like a recommendation.
00:59:42.120You see this a ton of stuff in health prescriptions, by the way.
00:59:44.660This notion of, like, what your body naturally wants, what is natural, what is pre-social,
00:59:50.040this imagined past combined with an appeal to the authority of nature.
00:59:53.080Yeah. And I mean, this is something our friends over at Maintenance Face always point out that like a lot of things that appear to just be about our bodies and about health are deeply moralized and are deeply sort of imbued with these latter day religious ideas.
01:00:07.200Yes, and given very prescriptive forms.
01:00:09.320Exactly. And this is the exact same thing in reverse, right? Like in some way, its goods are just a point of indistinction between a moral understanding of the universe and a theory of the natural world, right?
01:00:24.460Yeah, so that is our long-awaited, long-gestating walk through or rush through a long, long tradition.
01:00:34.400I hope I've been able to sort of not do too much disservice to all these thinkers.
01:00:38.980I don't care so much about the new natural law guys because, like, honestly, I didn't find this stuff very interesting or compelling.
01:00:44.520But Thomas Hobbes is going to get you.