Reasoning on the Nature of Things; C. Carson

My friend was aware, of course, that there was hardly a shortage of Dr. Carson has written and taught extensively, spe cializing in American intellectual history. He is the author of several books and a frequent contributor to The Freeman and other scholarly journals. 94 talk about rights. Just about every sort of thing imaginable was, and is, being asserted and claimed as a right, ranging from the alleged right of women to abort unwanted pregnan cies to the right of prisoners to a pre cise number of cubic feet of space. Every session of the Supreme Court seems to bring forth a new crop of rights, if in no other way than by its refusal to entertain appeals from de cisions of lower courts which have elaborated some new set of rights. Even. acts of Congress sometimes contain provisions which take on the color of rights. He was not speaking of this new crop of rights, however, for he understood, I think, that however august the bodies which proclaim them they are but assertions of the will and power of men. These al leged rights have no more substan tial backing in right than do Federal Reserve notes now have in silver and gold. They are fiat rights much REASONING ON THE NATURE OF TH[NGS 95 in the same fashion as our money is fiat money.

Natural Rights The rights my friend had in mind were of much more ancient vintage and claimed something much more substantial for their authority. They were rights said to subsist in the na ture of things and to antedate gov ernments, courts, and constitutions even. The economic rights he had in mind consist of such things as the right of man to the fruits of his la bor, to exchange his goods freely with ot~r owners, to have, to hold, and to dispose of his property, and to be secure in his possessions without ar bitrary interference from any per son or governmental authority. The importance of his point has become much clearer to me in recent months. The election of Reagan to the presidency, the gaining of a Re publican majority in the Senate, and the increase of conservatives in the House, have been interpreted as a major change in the thrust of gov ernment. Also, Reagan has been most vigorous in promoting his economic program during the first six months or so in his term of office. There has been considerable talk of economic freedom, of freeing enterprise, of re moving government controls, and the like. But the justifications of these, so far as I am aware, have been made almost solely in utilitarian and pragmatic terms.

The justification for lowering taxes was not that! people have a right to the fruits of their labors but that it could result in more saving, capital formation, ltiore jobs, and increased production. Ip. short, the emphasis is wholly on tll-e social benefits to be obtained, not the vindication of the rights of individuals. Some of the weaknesses ~f this approach are al ready becom~ng apparent. It hinges everything pn good economic re sults, whicn mayor may not be forthcomingjshortly. Moreover, it is readily interpreted in the frame work of econ.omic planning, though different fro~ some that has pre ceded it. It makes it appear, too, that government 'is responsible for mak ing the ecop.omy perform well, a conception ~hat underlay the in creasing government intervention over the years. It is not my purpose, however, to make a criti1que of the Reagan pro grams. Rattier, I call attention to them only to make clear that there is something missing from the jus tifications bbing offered. Nor is it merely something incidental to them; it is critical" even essential to their justification land direction. The gap in the thin~ing of the Reagan peo ple, the omitted justification on the basis of righ~s, is not something pe culiar to tht)m, however. It is char acteristic Qfi our times. There is a gaping hole in modern thought.

Thinking In terms of the nature of 96 THE FREEMAN February things, which is essential to the dis covery and ascertainment of rights, while it occurs, is not in keeping with generally approved modes of thought. It is no less valid today than it ever was, but for many years now it has not been in keeping with intellectual fashion. It will be help ful, then, to examine how that came about and what was involved before giving some examples of how it works. The Natural Law Philosophy Reasoning on the nature of things was part and parcel of a complex of ideas which are sometimes referred to as the natural law philosophy. It needs, then, to be examined within that context. The natural law philosophy was largely abandoned in the course of the nineteenth century. Its aban donment signified a major shift in thought. Natural law doctrines had been a staple of Western thought since the time of the Roman Stoics, and its antecedents go back even further than that. Interest in it was not constant, of course; it waxed and waned over the centuries. But every revival of learning and renaissance (harking back to and rediscovering aspects of Ancient thought) brought renewed interest in natural law, up to and including the classical re vival of the seventeenth and eigh~ teenth centuries. Indeed, Otto Gierke declared that "The development of natural-law ideas ... attained its culmination at the end of the eigh teenth century. After that time," he continued, "we can begin to trace a process of collapse and disintegra tion in the natural-law system of thought. "1 I referred to it as a philosophy above, yet it was never quite that in an all-embracing sense. It did attain to the rank of a philosophy of law in ancient Rome, was revived as part of a more comprehensive scheme of law by Thomas Aquinas, and under girded the development of modern law from the Renaissance down through the eighteenth century.

Overall, though, it was more of a way of perceiving reality than a con sciously elaborated philosophy. As such, it was an offshoot of meta physics, from which it entered deci sively into the development of sci ence in the seventeenth century. Those who view it simply as a legal theory, or even more broadly, as a theory of society and the state, un derstate its claims and impact. In its varied applications it suffused thought in the eighteenth century, ranging from music and poetry to politics and science. The impact of the natural law idea is suggested in this summary by· a contemporary scholar: "It was a the ory which culminated in the Ameri can Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. It was a theory adorned by 1982 REASONING ON THE NATURE OF THINGS 97 many illustrious names-Hooker and Suarez; Althusius, Grotius and Pu fendorf; Milton and Sidney; Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau; Spinoza and Leibnitz; Thomasius and Wolff ...

Vico and Beccaria; Fichte and Kant."2 But if we examine the extended im pact of the concept, many more fa mous names should be included in the roll: Newton, Galileo, and Franklin; Haydn, Mozart, and Vi valdi; Jefferson, Adams, and Paine; Blackstone; Hume, Smith, Turgot, and Ricardo; Pope, Addison and Steele. Perhaps, the natural law theory can be best understood in terms of certain doctrines developed out of it. Underlying these doctrines was the belief that this is an orderly uni verse, that there is an underlying natural order that makes it so, that there is a law for man and a law for things,· that everything has its own nature imbedded in it, that these things account for perceived regu larities, and that there is a remark able harmony pervading all of Cre ation. The following are some of the natural law doctrines: state of na ture, the laws of nations, social con tract, and natural rights.

Natural Law Doctrines The key to the natural law doc trines is that they come into view when we focus our attention on the enduring features of reality. They are discovered by an act of the mind in stripping away all that changes, that is ephemeral, that is cultural, that is a result pf history, that is pe culiar to each ihdividual thing. It is in this fashion that we discover the nature of things, the laws that gov ern or pertain to them, the way they are and can bef For example, if we would know the nature of man, we must remove everything that is ac cidental to any particular man (or woman) in any particular time or age: dress, language, size, girth, how hairy he is, color, and what have you. Then, we.ask what the distinc tive features of his kind are. What are the potentinlities of his being? By such methods and with such questions we may come to a grasp of the nature of man. Much was lost, as I say, by the abandonment of the natural law concept by so many thinkers in the nineteenth century. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that it has been entirely aband9ned or that relics from it are notstill around. The nat ural law theories have been kept alive by some Catholic scholars, particularly Thomists. Such think ers as Joseph Wood Krutch, Leo Strauss, and Erlc Voegelin have kept some of the basic concepts alive in our time. And, so long as the United States Constitution or classical eco nomics, to take two examples, re main, something of the natural law natural rights' doctrines will re main.

98 THE FREEMAN February But from the early nineteenth century onward there was a decided shift away from the mode of think ing that nurtured the natural law concepts. Romantics continued to admire nature, indeed, many of them venerated it, but they concentrated on nature in the concrete rather than the abstract. They emphasized the particular and the unique rather than the general, the abstract, and the universal. One of the offshoots of romanticism was historicism, a movement to locate reality within the uniqueness of·.particular historical events. G. W. F. Hegel provided the philosophical ballast for locating reality within historical develop ment. The evolutionary theories of the nineteenth century had residues of natural law, but they were changed into laws of historical de velopment, and natural law became driving force rather than underly ing order. The outlook had shifted from a focus on the enduring to the placing of the whole attention on the changing. History had largely re placed philosophy.