Martin Štěpán is a senior fellow of the Natural Law Institute and specializes in integrating insights from the rest of the internet right into the Institute’s work.
I have given a presentation on the topic at our Boston conference and I do not seek to simply repeat what I already said there but in short, natural law is a term we use due to historical associations, particularly to Thomas Aquinas (who was surprisingly correct on this topic, given the paradigm he had to work in), but isn’t really a single law of nature but an entire set of laws of nature pertaining to human behavior or more generally to behavior of social animals. If the term wasn’t already established, we may have been speaking about behavioral, social or moral laws. We may also speak specifically about one particular natural law, such as of reciprocity, or about institution of rule of law which applies natural law for the benefit of a particular population.
Theory
Natural law can’t be expressed mathematically like physical laws because people aren’t perfectly predictable marginally indifferent units other than at very large scales in specific domains (which is what economics attempts to study) but that doesn’t mean we don’t observe any causal patterns with directional effects. Let’s use the example of reciprocity most familiar to our followers. Law of reciprocity states that people are inclined to retaliate against or punish interactions (exchanges) that are involuntary, unproductive, insufficiently informed of every relevant cost and risk and lacking warranty against likely negative outcomes a given party is responsible over. This doesn’t mean retaliation will definitely occur every time an irreciprocal interaction occurs or anything as definite, only a general trend. It certainly doesn’t imply people cannot behave irreciprocally any more than a law of gravity implies objects cannot get up in the air, only that they will be incentivized by likely retaliation to correct their behavior just like objects in the air will be pushed back down by the force of gravity. And in the same way energy can be spent to stay up in the air, so too can it be expended to remove oneself from consequences by hiding irreciprocity (directly or by manipulating perception), escaping retaliation or producing defense against it. This is indeed how our elites keep themselves relatively safe while producing conditions that, at least if understood, make a lot of people want to kill them.
Our concept of natural law fits within the framework of evolutionary computation where individuals and populations seek stable equilibria with their environments and one another (not necessarily consciously, stable equilibria simply being what survives). The causal chain begins with individuals seeking greatest return in shortest time with least effort, greatest certainty and lowest risk, as is true for any organism. In some cases, it may appear some humans seek something that is contrary to this but that means either they’re seeking some reward that isn’t obvious or obviously worthwhile to us or that they’re erring but all of human behavior can be described as acquisition.
Individuals cooperate to increase their returns on time, reduce risks and unlock new opportunities and outcompete other groups, to forming norms (traditions) of ethics (property) that establish consistent rules for cooperation as well as for interfacing with the outside world, to then developing altruistic punishment for defectors from those norms (criminals, traitors, free-riders). This then feeds back as an additional evolutionary selection pressure determining types of individuals that persist as members of the given group. This explanation is contrary to the proponents of state of nature of war of all against all (Hobbes, Rousseau) as the necessity to live in cooperative tribes goes very far back into our history as primates and perhaps even further, there was never a time of individual humans living independently of such tribes and surviving.
The concept of group evolutionary strategy where differences in particulars manifest will be examined in the future but the above serves as an example why there is necessarily some level of convergence across the world, thus why there’s such a thing as human universals even after tens to hundreds of thousands of years of relative reproductive isolation, in the same way that massive objects necessarily converge on a spherical shape without any interaction.
Another example of natural law is marriage, a union of a man and one or more women for production and insurance of next generation during dependence and optionally insurance of polity from the dependent offspring, preservation of wealth within a family and formation of family alliances. This is a solution to intersexual relations and family formation that all of humanity has converged on until the modern Western regimes started changing definitions, beginning with changing the purpose of marriage to love in its most primitive sense (eros), then making it easy to claim the sex of participants and reproductive viability is irrelevant to the arrangement. (As Eli Harman says, it was easy to push gay marriage when straight people have been getting gay married for decades.) Given the way things are presently going in the West, this has done more to reinforce our definition as the correct one than to falsify it.
These examples may not be anything groundbreaking but they demonstrate the contrast with conservatives, who tend to ignore the causality in favor of some a priori religious explanation of God making it so, and to universalists (i.e. the left and libertarians) who outright deny parts or whole of it, particularly tribal competition as a causal principle for cooperation.
Application
The first use is simply as knowledge, having an accurate world model, understanding why things are the way they are, making better decision based on that understanding and being able to more easily detect when somebody’s lying about them to get away with theft of some sort.
The second use is extension of the first into an institutional application in legislative and judicial branches of government. One one hand, we can punish lying about this in public speech, on the other hand, we can decide what results we want our system to produce and our understanding of causal principles tells us how to get there, or the other way around, tells where we’re likely going to end up given what we’re doing. Presumably, most of us would want a system that ensures persistence and improvement of our particular people over time with some sense of meaning and prosperity on top, unfortunately a goal diametrically opposed to the one of the present Western regimes.
Misuse of the term
Some libertarians tend to invoke natural law to justify their own utopian system with associated natural rights which, they posit, are somehow inherent to the universe (sometimes veiled in the language of the founders as endowed by a creator), and don’t require a constant investment from a population that wants to produce and maintain them. This apparently implies that we’re in possession of those rights regardless of whether a single other person respects them, i.e. they’re Platonic ideal forms that have nothing to do with reality. Likewise, they use natural law to justify maximization of freedom (including to be a degenerate and commit fraud) or their notion of property that involves privatization of everything without regard for majority of people relying on commons and in general letting individuals act without any responsibility to a group they spring from and rely on. Libertarianism will likely require its own series of articles.
Conservatives who misuse the term are either actually libertarians or believe it corresponds to everything their particular religion commands. This is only the case to the extent that the given religion adopted genuinely good precepts in light of causal principles of natural law. Religions that are still around indeed did indeed adopt enough to have chance at persistence but that doesn’t prove entirety of it correct. For instance “Though shalt not kill <ingroup members>” is a an obviously good precept, if missing exceptions for group members that impose on the group and can’t be corrected, but “Though shalt have no gods before me” is about Yahwist priests’ monopoly of control over the population and has at best questionable evolutionary benefits and probably significant costs and cannot be said to correspond to natural law.
In general, there is a tendency of the users towards universalism. But while natural law is universal, it is not universalistic. To once again use our analogy with law of gravity, if you want to get an object into specific position, there is no universalistic method to do so, its shape, mass, starting position and surrounding conditions and forces all have to be taken into account, even though we’re calculating with the same gravitational law. In the same way, different populations are composed of people with radically different distributions of mental and physical traits and abilities and are exposed to different environmental and competitive pressures and so while we would apply natural law in some way on all of them if we sought similar results, a single system that is optimal for everybody is a height of hubris.
Criticisms from the right
I’ve seen criticisms from the true right, namely Rurik Skywalker AKA Rolo Slavskiy and Mike of Imperium Press. I endorse both, derive a lot of value from their work and so these disagreements certainly aren’t coming from a place of hostility but are a matter of using different definitions while our goals at least aim in the same general direction. Note that some of these quotes are from behind paywall, a cost I consider worth paying.
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