References
- Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13. One cannot help but notice the striking similarities between Hobbes's account of life in the state of nature and the frequent descriptions of biological life's constant struggle for existence in On the Origin of Species. As we shall see, the key difference between Hobbes and Darwin on this point centers around the fact that Hobbes speaks of this war in terms of its effect on the individual, whereas Darwin addresses it in terms of its effect on the species.
- For an illustration of how political life brings speeches and deeds together according to Aristotle, see book II of the Politics. See also Mary Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 153–80.
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1154b16-30. See also Aristide Tessitore's discussion of this theme in Reading Aristotle's Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 62–72.
- St. Thomas Aquinas's argument on this point is perfectly expressed by Dickens's spokesman for natural law, nephew Fred, in A Christmas Carol. Speaking of his uncle Ebenezer's vicious ways, Fred states that "his offenses carry their own punishment."
- For an insightful discussion of this problem and its implications on St. Thomas's natural law teaching, see Ernest Fortin's essay "Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Problem of Natural Law," in Classical Christianity and the Political Order, 199–222.
- Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 8. Strauss does not directly offer a solution to this modern dilemma in either this work or in his other works. Rather, he indirectly treats this question through a series of profound reflections on the crucial relationship between modern natural science's dogmatic rejection of teleology and the moral and political "crisis of modernity." "Modern natural science could be the foundation of the means of the victory of the Enlightenment over orthodoxy only as long as the old concept of truth, which the Enlightenment had already destroyed, still ruled. … But this was a delusion. One was forced to ascertain that the 'goal and value-free' nature of modern natural science could tell man nothing about 'ends and values: If, therefore, modern natural science is unmistakable, then the question must be posed whether, on the contrary, the modern ideal is in truth not the ground of a modern natural science, and whether it is not also precisely a new belief rather than a new knowledge that justified the Enlightenment" (Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Fred Bauman [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987], 15). See also Natural Right and History, esp. chaps. 5 and 6; Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); On Tyranny (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and "Preface to the English Edition" of Spinoza's Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965).
- See, for example, Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); "Human Nature is Here to Stay," New Atlantis, no. 2 (Summer 2003); "Defending Natural Right," Interpretation, no. 27 (Spring 2000): 263–77; "Conservatives, Darwin, and Design: An Exchange," First Things, no. 107 (November 2000): 23–31; and "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals," American Journal of Political Science 38 (2): 464–85.
- This point, of course, also holds true for the human and metaphysical grounds of Marx's thought. Drawing on a thin and rather underdeveloped account of Hegel's teaching on history, Marx argued that human beings create themselves and their world in history. Man, for Marx, was not so much a natural being but a historical being. He claimed that history's goal was to reveal man's true historical nature. This revelation would allow man to see that he legitimately can throw off the alleged tyrannical yokes that nature and God impose on him. Marx claimed that once this has been achieved, the true human society, the society of free and materially equal human beings, could finally come into existence. History and the properly constructed social order jointly, then, would bring into existence a new human type. The radically new man who would inhabit Marx's perfect society, the species-man, would at last live the kind of life for which man was truly made.
- Larry Arnhart, "Natural Law and the Darwinian Conservatism of Sex Differences," Perspectives on Political Science 34, no. 3 (Summer 2005), 135.
- Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 245.
- Amhart, "Natural Law," 137.
- See my "The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law," Religion and Liberty, no. 11 (July/August, 2001).
- Arnhart, "Natural Law," 136.
- Despite Professor Arnhart's suggestions to the contrary, everyone who "belongs to one of the Biblical religions" and remains skeptical about the final truth of Darwinism is not by default an adherent to natural design theory. Although often popularly misunderstood or mischaracterized, the idea that the Catholic Church has consistently opposed, from Pius XII's nuanced encyclical Humani Generis to John Paul II's 1996 "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences," is not the idea of evolution per se but, rather, materialist theories that reduce man to the level of biological animality.
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.
- Darwin presents the theory of natural selection as including four key features: variation, inheritance, the ever-present struggle for continued existence, and the biological or natural selection of favored traits with the concomitant biological rejection of unfavorable traits.
- Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 82.
- Ibid., 441.
- Ibid., 344. Along similar lines, Darwin observes that "the inhabitants of each successive period in the world's history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for the vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many paleontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed" (On the Origin of Species, 345).
- The subtitle of On the Origin of Species is Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6; see also Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 1.7.1.–1.10.
- Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps. 14, 197. See, also, Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, Ep. Ded., 1, 7. Locke strikes a similar chord, though one that attempts outwardly to soften Hobbes's teaching by claiming that man's primary natural right is the right to comfortable self-preservation. According to Locke, "no man or society of men having a power to deliver up their preservation, and consequently the means of it, to the absolute will and arbitrary dominion of another, whenever anyone shall go about to bring them into such a slavish condition, they will always have a right to preserve what they have not a power to part with, and to rid themselves of those who invade this fundamental, sacred, and unalterable law of self-preservation for which they entered into society" (Second Treatise, no. 149).
- The fundamental tension caused by Hobbes's formulation is perfectly illustrated in Cesare Beccaria's An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. Beccaria tried to resolve the problem to which Hobbes's reaching gives rise, namely, that although the state contractually has the right to put criminals to death, the criminal himself has a natural right to kill his executioner. Beccaria's proposed solution was that the state ought to renounce its right to capital punishment. But this solution, if enacted, would prove to be the very undoing of the state as Hobbes understood it. For in Hobbes's view, the state primarily comes into existence to force an end to the war of all against all that characterizes life in the state of nature. Consequently, if the state were to give up its right to exercise capital punishment, it would, in effect, no longer be able to prevent civil society from lapsing back into the state of nature. For a lucid discussion of this fundamental tension in Hobbes's thought, see Hadley Arkes, First Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 206–31.
- I say in many ways because in the Ethics Aristotle appears to offer two related but finally separate discussions of the peak of moral virtue: the treatment of magnanimity in book IV and the treatment of justice in book V. Part of the reason for this is that Aristotle in these cases examines moral virtue from two related perspectives, namely, moral virtue in terms of the citizen (book IV) and moral virtue in terms of the city (book V).
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 1129b25–30. It should be noted that Aristotle in book V of the Ethics treats justice both as complete virtue and as one species of virtue. Consequently, he treats both complete or perfect justice and particular justice. The fact, however, that Aristotle suggests that justice is complete virtue draws attention to the fact that man is, partly with nature's help, ordered to a kind of perfection that is foreign to Darwinian biology.
- Ibid., 1134b18-19.
- Ibid., 1134b29-35.
- Aristotle, The Politics, 1252b29-30.
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1126b11-12.
- See Leo Strauss, "On Natural Law," in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas Pangle, 140 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b14.
- Ibid., 1141a20–25.
- See James V. Schall, "Transcendent Man in the Limited City," in Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs, 146-47 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, 90–108.
- St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX.21.
- For a brief but illuminating overview of the tumultuous history of natural law theory, see Ernest L. Fortin, "Natural Law and Social Justice," in Classical Christianity and the Political Order, ed. J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 223–41.
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, 91, a. 2.
- Ibid., 94, a. 2.
- Ibid., 91, a. 2.
- Ibid., 90, a. 2.
- Ibid., 100, a. 1.
- Ibid., 94, a. 3.
- Arnhart, "Natural Law," 135.
- For a fuller analysis of this problem, see Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Rise and Fall of Sociobiology," New Atlantis, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 85.
- Darwin anticipated that his theory would allow for such a conception of human moral and social life. Near the end of On the Origin of Species, he notes that "in the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (488). Such a "new foundation" is, in some ways, present in Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents," There, Freud argues that the discontents of civilization arise because civil society requires man to suppress what is most natural to him, namely, the unconscious low that grows out of his primordial urges and desires.
- Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen, trans. Robin Dick (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 203–17.
- Arnhart, "Natural Law," 142.
- For an example of this kind of reflection, see Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul (New York: Free Press, 1994).
- John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1988), 275–336.
- It should be noted that even here Darwinism does not speak with one voice. The principle of natural selection after all works for the survival of favored species. It therefore works both to preserve and transform individual species. Consequently, although it seeks to keep a given species in existence, it simultaneously can work to bring about the existence of a newer and more favored species.