Natural Law
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) was widely considered the greatest theologian and philosopher of the High Middle Ages. He expanded on the idea of natural law. He stated, “the light of reason is placed by nature (and thus by God) in every man to guide him in his acts.” Therefore, according to Aquinas, people use reason to lead their lives. He believed that this was naturally known to everyone. Natural law is a body of unchanging moral principles regarded as the basis for all human conduct. Some would consider this the voice in your head that tells you what is right and what is wrong. Everyone can agree that we have some form of conscience. I bring this term up because this concept directs us toward the definition of natural guides. With the understanding of modern science natural law doesn’t actually seem feasible as a law that is a lock-step mechanism to the way we function.
What is the reason that people feel some things are right and others are wrong? What mechanism put them there? Some deists may propose that God gave us this moral compass. This raises several questions. Because if this is true, when and where could this have happened? Where is this information stored? Where is this information transmitted and how? Is it wireless? These questions may sound silly. However, to assume everything is magic’ed in is just intellectually lazy. Therefore, without having to create novel mechanisms like wirelessly transmitted ethics to explain the root of why Natural Law has some intuitive truth to it, mechanisms in genetics and biology seem to line up with the idea that evolutionary processes put some form of natural law in place. I have not identified any such mechanisms in modern science that accurately depict this, so I developed the idea of natural guides. For the deists out there, I am not just disregarding any possibility for deities providing ethics outright, but I will look for established claims that have been rigorously tested first. Science is capable of providing these claims with a solid foundation that brings clarity and insight to these ideas. However, in later posts, I will discuss the psychology of the belief in God, apologetic discussions, and the validity and problems of an ontological God.
Natural Guides
Intuitively but not accurately, we have established that the core mechanism of Natural Law lines up with genetics, biology, psychology, etc… But there is one problem. One of the characteristics of natural law is that it cannot be changed. What we feel is right and wrong not only changes slightly from person to person but also from culture to culture. Even more drastic changes are evident as we study cultures from the past. Therefore, this mechanism cannot be referred to as Natural Law because of its changeability. I decided this good/bad mechanism could be more appropriately called Natural Guides. This not only makes more sense but is more accurate in the description of its function. Changing the term also sheds much of the unnecessary and unscientific dogma that was attached to it.
Natural guides are the heuristics and teleologies that direct our behavior through evaluation and intuition. Many of the Natural Guides let us know if something is right or wrong by attaching feelings to the experience. There are thousands of natural guides given to us at birth like a scaffolding structure that wants to be filled in. Natural guide programming is enriched by the experience and fills in many of the gaps to direct us in the right direction. Natural guides are neither true nor false. The wise man who invests years into his structure will be able to make better choices, while the foolish man who absorbs toxicity into it will fall to ruin.
There are no moral phenomena, there are only moral interpretations of phenomena
Frederich Nietzsche
To be clear, natural guides reside in biological and subjective discourses. Natural guides are discourse-based and not religion or spiritual-based. Thomas Aquinas attributed this human attribute to God’s bestowing of ethics. He was on the right track in his identification. However, he did not have modern science to mitigate his understanding and the reasons why it intuitively feels accurate. We experience Natural guides in action as we live our lives. This means that they are mechanisms that influence our decisions. The part of natural guides that are limited to subjectivity are such that they only function as we experience or imagine things in this world. The natural guides that develop throughout our lives are actually an aspect of our personality because they are intertwined with how we react or respond to the world. Natural guides are evolutionarily designed by teleologies which are the biological directives that saw a great benefit in fusing emotional meaning to our experiences. I would like to clarify that teleologies are more of a biological discourse in that they do not require subjectivity to function (eg. bacteria looking for food). Natural guides may have some overlap in the biological discourse – but this will have to be explored at a future time.
There actually is another law aspect in natural guides which may be why philosophers came to the conclusion of natural law being feasible as a law in the first place. When we observe the permanence and consistency in reality and the human ethical relation to it, we feel that a hard and unsympathetic universe has formed laws that reflect what is right and wrong but more like what works and what doesn’t in how life plays out. Plato came to this conclusion in the idea of forms in which ideas like justice and beauty are an aspect of the universe that life accesses from the perfect form of that ideal like “beauty” to create these attributes in the world, but I will discuss the problem of forms in another article. This consistency and permanence is the experience itself. As we experience life, we record this consistency and permanence. This occurrence that is recorded is what I call incidental law.
Incidental Law
Now that we have established that genetics and biology contain natural guides, that does not explain why these guides are there in the first place. A mere label of evolution and survival of the fittest does not seem adequate. When cause and effect happen to a living thing, the data is recorded and processed. What life taps into in this data collection process is called Incidental Law. What happens in the world is an unending effect of incidence that occurs with time moving forward in which what has occurred and cannot be undone. This consistency in reality is why the word law is applied. The data recorded by living organisms are considered facts, which then serve as the basis for predicting the most appropriate actions to take. There are a few effects that are a consequence of Incidental Law, such as:
- After the data is recorded, it is stored as experience. As time moves forward, that experience cannot be undone.
- Over time, the data might permanently alter the DNA code in the genome.
- Conditioning and learning are used to program natural guides.
- Conditioning and learning were programmed by early natural guides. These proto-natural guides are more teleological in nature.
The term “incidental law” implies that what is recorded would be emphatically accurate. Because as far as the life form is concerned, it is accurate because the data we receive is factual information. The outcome of what incidental law dictates would be to what is true or not true. However, this does not mean that the culmination of ideas that were synthesized and collected are correct in their conclusions. There are distortions and limited insights that lead natural guides to come to inaccurate conclusions. There are many distortions such as illusions, modifications during reevaluations, and the heuristics that modify it as it is being processed. The other problem is limited insight, which is the burden that all intelligence has since what we are unaware of is practically unlimited. Limits to knowledge lead to inaccurate conclusions. It is fitting to call it law because the permanence that experiences make is an indelible mark on all of us that changes our lives.
This leads to another point. Natural guides are called natural because of incidental law. According to the data recorded from incidental law, biology programs the natural guides organically. So really what I did was separate the natural law idea into two parts that parse more accurately and provide new insight into how the mechanism of natural guides processes incidental law from reality. Incidental law itself is not a process, it is just a term to identify where the data is being received from in the natural guides process.
Biological or Subjective data collected from the senses are used to program the natural guides. It is essential to remember that biological, subjective, and intersubjective discourses are primarily informational discourses.
Subjectivity is not necessary for natural guides and incidental law to function. There are also biological natural guides in the form of teleologies like eating and sleeping. These directives are less in the ethical spectrum and do not require subjectivity for them to function. The process of natural guides could be considered a generalization or an extension of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It is important to uncouple the idea of natural guides from genetics as only a biological discourse. Darwin didn’t really separate subjectivity and biology since his focus was a biological one. I see natural guides and their recording of incidental law as observing the dynamic that develops algorithms in genetics. This dynamic is not something you can point at and say it exists. It is a way to provide insight into the relationship between different discourses. This is a data-oriented dynamic and therefore only relates to data-based discourses which I will discuss in a future post.