From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 21:41:37 MDT
Zero Powers writes
> According to Fukuyama, conservatives tend to have the mindset that our
> natures are influenced more by genetics than environment, while liberals
> tend to focus more heavily on environmental conditions.
Yes, but I don't see the connection to "natural law". That, above,
is pretty well known and is almost traditional.
> But I would think that the idea of natural law [is]
> the concept that the kind of social obligations we
> impose on ourselves should be based on the kinds of
> creatures we are.
That sounds so innocent, the way that you phrase it. But on
reflection, (helped out by http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/natlaw.htm
which has more than I want to know about natural moral law
and natural legal law), it's not so innocent.
I suggest that ordinary science, natural law, history, and
the rest of what we've learned can serve mainly to suggest
what won't *work* as law. In other words, a necessary test
for a law is whether it might fly in the face of human
nature, or be unworkable for other discoverable reasons.
But I'll submit that science, "natural law", genetics,
anthropology, etc., cannot suggest laws. To do so would
come close to violating the is/ought boundary, in which
I along with most people, believe. (Notable exceptions
are E. O. Wilson and Jacob Bronkowski.) Laws can and should
only arise from experience: a culture gradually evolves
laws that work for it, especially in fostering the success
of the culture memetically and financially.
> natural law moral theory is the claim that standards
> of morality are in some sense derived from, or entailed
> by, the nature of the world and the nature of human beings.
That (little though I know about it) makes more sense. The
evolution of humankind explains a great deal of what we
generally take for moral. And even in SF scenarios, I
think that we should simply try to generalize in a
consistent manner what we already take as moral.
Lee
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