Episode 4, Aquinas' Natural Law (Part I)

Hello, and welcome to our fourth reading of "Cooking with Pooh". Just kidding, this is episode 4 of the Pancycast, where we'll be focusing on St Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law. St Thomas Aquinas lived in the 13th century and was one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His output was, as we shall see, astonishing, not merely in the sheer number of words that he produced, but in the range of topics that he discussed. When asked at the end of his life what the greatest gift God had given him, he replied that he had never read a page that he did not once understand. Natural Law has its foundations in the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle and the Stoics. The Stoics believed that there was a divine spark which guided human beings to their ultimate purpose. Aristotle also proposed this idea of there being a purpose or tell us, and he believed that all things aimed to fulfill their tell us. For human beings, this tell us is you diamond ear. This is translated as happiness, but a more nuanced view sees it as human flourishing. Please refer back to our episode 2 on Aristotle on teleology, although we'll be covering it at the start of this episode today. Right, so in part 1 we're going to be looking at teleology. In part 2 we're going to look at the four tiers of law. In part 3 we're going to look at the precepts and in part 4 we're going to open it up to a further discussion and analysis of natural law in general. Thank you again to everyone who's gotten in touch with us and subscribed to us on our iTunes. We've had heaps of feedback. We've had absolutely a massive overwhelm response from the community. So far so thank you all so much for that we love hearing from you, so make sure you tweet us at the Pancykist. Thanks, THEPAMPSYCHISD, you can find all the reading from all the shows, find our backout log, our previous three episodes, all at www.thepancykist.com/pancycast. Thank you again for listening, I hope you enjoy the show, don't philosophise and drive. It's fine, alright, okay, hello, I'm Jack Symes, I'm joined again by Andrew Horne, hello Andy, and Oli Marley as well, how do you do Oli? How'd you do? Super, thank you, okay, so the last time we said that our next episode will be out on the 28th of August, go into my calendar, it's the 10th of September, I'm recording that, I think that's close enough. Yeah, it's a little bit late, we could say about, didn't we? Yeah, no promises made, no, we don't make any promises, and yeah, so from now on we're going to do two episodes a month, so every fortnight there'll be a new episode, and that's hopefully how we're going to plan it. If you need to know when the episodes are going to come out, follow us at the Pancykist on Twitter. Cool, thank you all, all our news. New subscribers, we've got heaps of new people, we won't tell you exactly how many, so you feel special, like we're just talking to you. 10,000, it's blown one, as of recording this, but we only care about you, the person listening to this, all the rest of them, they can go to Aquinas' hell. Let's do it, okay, I'm not, from the offset, I don't think any of us are harboring any deep lover affection for Aquinas. No, well, seeing as we are people who disagree, I think fundamentally with Aquinas' philosophy and ideas, so if you are listening to this, please be aware of that, we're going to try and be objective as possible, obviously we need to do the strengths and weaknesses of Aquinas' natural moral law, but we do have not a fairly strong, but a fairly, we're going to abandon our views at the start. Yes. We're going to abandon all of our preconceptions about natural law, and see if Aquinas can sway us with these arguments, essentially. Well, I think it's unfair to say that, like, well, I might disagree with what Aquinas is saying, but actually what he has done with natural law is actually quite impressive, and I suppose we'll get to that, the way in which it's written and how he's used a lot of ideas to kind of synthesize reason and faith, I mean, at the time was pretty groundbreaking so to write him off entirely as a philosopher I think it's probably unfair. Yeah, we should really say a bit more on who he actually was. Yeah, so who was, in terms of Aquinas' Jack? You two don't know that question straight at me, so it's just a little bit on the introduction there, but he was a, Andy, what was he? Dominicans. Yes, a Dominican. So he became a Dominican friar, but at the time, so the Dominicans and the Franciscans were seen as potentially, like, almost like a cult, so what he was joining there was quite radical. Certainly, a removal from the established Catholic church at the time, because, well, the idea was perhaps the Catholic church were becoming a bit too powerful, maybe a bit too wealthy, and that these groups were designed to kind of strip back, maybe get Christianity back to its core, but that was obviously seen as a threat to the established authority, and Aquinas was certainly part of that movement. Yeah, he went to, so his tutor was St. Albert the Great, and when St. Albert went to the University of Paris Aquinas' Faldem to study for his degree in Master of the Arts, I think you know this already, don't you Andy, but Oli, how many words was your Master's dissertation? Oh, good question, around 16,000. Do you want to have a guess at how many words Aquinas wrote for his? It's either going to be really low or really high, I'm going to go with 50,000. Okay, let's try a bit higher. The 100,000? Higher. 150,000. Okay. You know, you will be here for quite a long time, and this is very slow, well, it's not a slow increase, so 50,000 is a lot of jump by 1,750,000 words. It definitely didn't have Microsoft Word in those days, Reddit, and did they? I don't know how he wrote that. How long has it taken to write that? Well, he moved when he was, I don't know when he moved, but he was, he didn't complete it, he did complete it before he was 30, so I think that's quicker, well that's a good question. So the only person that could grant him the degree of Master was the Pope. Well? Well, I'll further play to him. So I'm assuming that's fast, if the Pope was the only one that could say, yeah, you wrote a million, so 150,000 words. Did anyone, did anyone, did anyone? He'd be free to read that stuff. He'd be like, yeah, there's a spelling error on page 1203, imagine the revision, so no word over the word count a little bit. It's almost, you seem like a highly intelligent man. I'm going to assume each one of these a million words is fantastic. Yeah. And this is kind of famous, I guess, for just the quantity of work he produced in his lifetime. I mean, he pretty much slept eight, did his monk thing and wrote, and that was pretty much what he did through his whole life. Sixty. But, you know, some of those are ridiculously long, so. Yes. Even though, like the passage is looking at some of the original reading for some of the logic in anticipation for this, it's hard text as well, to follow, it's not an easy piece of writing to read. Okay, so, anything else on Aquinas, who he was, any other interesting facts or myths about who he was? Parents, well, not a myth, it happened, his parents locked him up in a tower for two years. After, so, once they realized they had joined this cult as they believed, they tried to almost indoctrinate him back by locking him in a tower. Now, the weather myths come in as apparently they tried to seduce him with some sexy ladies in the tower. Now, I'm not sure if that's necessarily true, but I like to believe that it probably is. That's not going to work, but he overcame the design and stuck to his principles. But during this time, he presumably read a lot of Aristotle and sort of developing his ideas for what he would write in the future. Yep, that's a lovely transition to part 1, Aquinas and Tealiology. First inquiry question we're going to be looking at is, what is the role of Tealiology in Aquinas' natural law? Okay, so, we did quite a lot on this on our second episode. We do. Check out the second episode on the Panpsikus, it is on Aristotle and he's based at Frossus on it and we did a lot on Tealiology throughout a lot of examples there. But we're just going to give you a quick recap if you can't be bothered and you're already lying in bed or doing something which you don't have to do. If you're masturbating right now, we can just say lying in bed, Jack, just say if you're busy, just say if you're busy. We can see, well, we can get to masturbation later when we're talking about that. Can we, can we, when we're looking at the secondary precepts built on the primary precept of reproduction? Oh, you're right. I'm jumping again a little bit. Stop masturbating. Aquinas said so. It's not your purpose. Okay, right, so what is Tealiology? Well, let's start with that word, tell us, so to tell us coming from this sort of Greek term of end or purpose. So Tealiology would be the sort of looking at what, what is the end or purpose for anything in this world? Yep. The philosophical study of nature that attempts to describe things in terms of the apparent purpose, directive principle or goal, everything in nature has a purpose. So the thing is Tealogical, it's explanation via purpose. So the example we used, we perform, we'll use it again as the coffee cup. The tell us of the coffee cup is to hold coffee and keep it warm so you can drink it. You've also got other examples as well. So obviously the purpose of a book is to make it easy for you to open it and read it and carry it, I guess, and the purpose of a phone or mobile phone or a cell phone for all our American viewers out there is obviously communication, messaging, obviously being able to talk to people, obviously apps and games and things like that, if you are so inclined. But what is the purpose or supreme purpose of a human being? We said that was you diamond it, didn't we? That human flourishing, what's the other translation? Happiness? Yeah, so the, I think the basic understanding of it would be happiness, but yeah, I think there's flourishing because it's a bit more, you know, it's not quite as definitive our notion of happiness is quite, you know, you know, you're happy, we went over this haven't we? Yeah, it could be interpreted as more hedonistic and that you could be like fulfilling your happiness by simply just taking lots of drugs, which I don't believe Aristotle would be a huge fan of. I don't think you would have been a fan of that. So he says, yeah, so the ultimate human purpose as well as you diamond it was the aura, which was theoretical contemplation, wasn't it? So what makes you distinctive in your soul or we said you could use the word life force instead of souls? What makes you a life force different if you're a human? You should aim towards your end, your tell us, which would be theoretical contemplation, i.e. philosophy or the study of things in general, these early science. Yeah, and with the prime mover is pretty central to this as well, isn't it? The prime mover, which looked at an episode too as well, so the prime mover? So the thing in which all things move towards, so if we can look at human beings and obviously animals and even plants and we can look at what their purpose is and fulfilling, but what that's getting to is that everything is moving towards something, so if human beings are moving towards you diamond, you know, well they're also moving towards this idea of their prime mover, they're fulfilling their purpose in that regard. We made a mistake in the last episode, which our listeners were really keen to point out to us, that Aristotle wasn't the first person to use theological think, he wasn't the founder of teleology, there's a lot of teleological thinkers that come before him. He was the first one, the first known one, not to incorporate some kind of religiousness to teleological thinking, so he's saying it's the prime mover, which is a non-religious entity, just something which is constantly locked in self-contemplation that every single thing aims towards ultimately. So we're all moving towards that end, we use the example of the world being an arrow and the prime mover being the arrow bought the targets in that analogy. It's pretty radical for the time as well, really, when you think about it, considering we're doing a quietness which is how many years later and we're going all the way back to the religious element as well. Yeah, and well, I know, just jumping the gun away about that idea that sort of the world in the universe had always existed through the prime mover, was also quite controversial when we're talking about the Christian idea of creation, a lot of people at the time struggled to accept that idea because the Genesis account clearly shows a start of creation, so there's a bit of logical hoop jumping that needs to be done there, but we'll get to that later. So how's Aquinas is teleology different from. Every obviously takes Aristotle's teleology, doesn't he? He takes a lot from Aristotle. Yeah, it is worth saying, yeah, when we were talking about Aquinas, he did take a lot of things from Aristotle. We're not going to call him a thief because we're not nasty. No, and that would be, I guess, kind of wrong. The time, at the time during, while he was writing, there was this huge intellectual movement where Aristotle was being rediscovered, but rediscovered in the West. And they were starting to build ideas off that. Now, at the time working with Aristotle in a Christian environment didn't fit the established Church certainly didn't like this idea and going back to what we just said about the idea of creation. That's one of the reasons why they would have issues with the way Aristotle kind of looks at things. So is this big movement and Aquinas is sort of at the heart of this movement and obviously is now considered to be the most highly regarded person within this time frame. So Aquinas was picking up the works of Aristotle and using this. But he wasn't disregarding the kind of the established sort of Augustinean view of like using Plato as an established part of the kind of Christian theology. So he's taking the good parts of Plato and Augustine, but he's also bringing in Aristotle as well. But we're kind of wrong to say that he's completely rejecting the old way of things. He's kind of trying to make the best of both worlds. Yeah. Okay. Nice little link here. Rachel's in her book. Do you remember the name of the book? On something like Elements of Moral Philosophy. Page 54, she says, "Only one thing was missing. God was needed to make the picture complete. So God was not needed by Aristotle, but Aquinas is bringing God into Aristotle's teleology. So how does he do that? How does he incorporate God into teleology?" Well, because for Aquinas, obviously being a Christian, the idea of Udimonia being the absolute purpose just couldn't be true. There had to be something more like a higher purpose. So when you're looking at it and comparing it with Aristotle, you can kind of, if you replace Udimonia with perfection in the eyes of God or within God, then that's your aim. Because Aquinas would have said, "Well, a man is made in the image of God, and therefore our purpose should be to fulfill this image of God." But he didn't say that this was something that could be physically achieved in this lifetime. You would be reunited with God after death. That would be the ultimate aim and purpose of human existence. I think it's really important to facilitate the whole discussion we're going to have today. So Aquinas, Aristotle and Aquinas are both saying this is how the world is. It's teleological, everything goes towards an end or a purpose. For Aristotle, that's the prime mover for Aquinas that's going to be God. Now, they're explaining the laws of nature. And the laws of nature not only describe how things are, but how things ought to be. So what Aquinas is going to do and what natural laws are going to do is say, "Look, this is how the world works, so this is what you ought to do, you should live in accordance with the laws of nature." And when we say nature, we're not thinking like the natural world, we're not talking about trees and animals and things like that, and we're talking about the nature of humans or human nature. And the reason why we have this particular nature is because of our God-given reason. And that's perhaps a slight distinction that you can make between Aquinas and Aristotle again, is the reason is a gift from God, and it allows us to understand our purpose. The reason why animals can't do the same is because that reason that makes human beings unique. So that's what guides us towards our end. Yeah, as a listener, you probably start thinking evolution, these things are highly controversial and we can reject them. But we'll get onto that in part four, again, we're trying to reserve our criticisms. But Aristotle's going to say that we have this life force in us that's different from animals, it makes us distinct, and Aquinas is adopting that too, isn't he? Aristotle's known for virtue ethics, which we can find in his Nickemachine ethics book, which we've looked at a little bit already, but not his ethical theory, we'll do a future podcast on virtue ethics, wouldn't we? But how does that play a role in Aquinas' natural moral law? For Aristotle then, the virtues, what he separates them, doesn't he? You have their intellectual virtues that you can be taught and you can learn, but you also have the kind of, well, I guess what we could refer to as moral virtues, do you know how particularly he phrases that? Is it cardinal virtues? But for him, these are things that have to be established through habits and typically through a young age, so you kind of develop those virtues through perhaps your parents and your general upbringing and stuff like that, and it's through these virtues that allow you to act in a sort of eudaimonia, to achieve that end. For the Aquinas, how he would use them, he would just say that you would use these virtues to fulfill the purpose of being with God as well, so if you're acting in a virtuous way, then you are acting towards that end. You're going towards the tell us of God, again, I'm not used to the primary, but okay, so T-logy, everything's got a purpose, everything's got an end, everything's got a tell us. That's how things are, so that's how we ought to act, so Oli, what's the purpose of sex? Well, if you're Roman Catholic, it would be to have children. I don't know if it's actually true, but I think I've heard dolphins as well, but that's just me, possibly making that out of the wrong spot. Yeah, so for happiness, for pleasure as well, as children. Yeah, okay, so natural law, this is one example, we'll bring it to light again in the next two sections. The purpose of sex is reproduction, so that's a rule or a precept, isn't that, but we'll go into that in a second. So all these things, all their actions, they all serve some kind of end, and those ends are governed by the laws of nature, so thus we ought to do, ought to do that because that's how things are. Christians are teleology, we looked at some last time, didn't we? Yes, I mean, I disagree with it completely, because I don't think it's true, because there's no evidence for it, there's no evidence for there being an ultimate purpose for our existence, or the existence of the world, the universe, I mean, I like the idea of just kind of gaining knowledge, and that is our own purpose, but there's no evidence for that kind of idea. Yeah, there's too much to be said with that you can fulfill what you think is your purpose, and you can't, and it's with both Aristotle and Aquinas, you're saying that you're saying that there's a human nature that everyone shares in some way, and even that is very hard to say for certain if there actually is, so if we're relying on this idea of there's a human nature and we're all trying to fulfill this, then there's too much to be said about different cultures and different life styles, and what we want our life that could go very much against that idea. To blanket like theory of how every human works, or how everything works, and obviously we know we're massively unique in that our brain structure is massively unique, I guess, you can't say that every six billion humans fulfill the same, well, this isn't really Chris's minute. I'll signal that a little buzzard. You could say that what if your purpose is contradict each other as well, so if my purpose is to, well, I feel my purpose is to kill people, or I don't know, rebel against a system, or something like that, that infringes on the purpose of other people when you get into equity. Yeah, so natural law, or teleology isn't the case, because we have different ends. Yeah, that's it, so the teleology, teleology relies on this idea of human nature, and we can argue whether or not there is even any type of human nature at all. If there is, we can't possibly say that we all share in that there's too much variance. Okay. So if teleology does not hold, are the moral views of the Catholic church built on sand? Someone else can take this one. Well, they know, well, depends on how you're looking at it, I suppose. So they don't entirely rely on the idea of natural law, because they could look at the divine law and the eternal law of God and say that those things are, you know, concrete and it doesn't really matter if you don't feel like your human purpose is supposed to fit with it because God has said, yes, they do. So ultimately it comes down with a lot of this stuff if you're building a theory of ethics on any faith, is that if God exists, and the Christian that God exists, then yeah, it works. If the Christian God doesn't exist, then no, you're absolutely right, the quick sand would quickly consume this idea of God doesn't exist. It doesn't really know if it would work at all really well. No, exactly. No, at the point. It's a very God reliant theory. Absolutely. I just want to deal with a quick misconception, which is often flung around that the medieval period wasn't very illuminating in the progress of thought whatsoever, and there's this big gap between the ancient Greeks, which we looked at already, between them and, you know, the 15th, 16th century thoughts. When we've referenced William Abokham, a considerable amount, haven't we in the last couple of episodes? Who's 13th century? I thought you were going to say new things. Oh yeah, yeah. And this whole idea that people thought that the earth was flat, the myth of the flat earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the middle ages in Europe saw the earth as flat and set as spherical. During the middle ages virtually all scholars maintain this spherical viewpoint, first expressed by the ancient Greeks. So I think that just gives it context in that these people weren't ignorant of how the world was, how it worked, their deep, complicated and, you know, true theories in many respects about how the world works. It's a period of time where thought really did develop. For the rest of anything else on Teorgy, go back to episode two on Aristotle, because we go into it in a bit more depth there and some more illuminating examples, but your main point to take from that is that Aquinas has taken Teorological thinking from Aristotle, which the prime mover forgot, and he's going to use this as the basis for his ethical theory. Part two, the four tiers of law. What are the four tiers of law in Aquinas' natural law? Four tiers of law start with the eternal law. The eternal law could be described as essentially the identical to the mind of God is the will of God, and human beings cannot understand this fully. We just can't access that. It's not something that our reason can fully comprehend, but God has allowed through the next two parts of the law for us to be able to get a concept of what our purpose is and therefore for us to be able to achieve our ends. The next part of the law is divine law in Aquinas' case. This is the Holy Bible, and this gives us rules and tells us about God and allows us to follow those. We have the natural law, which is what we've just established, which is human beings' concept of what our nature is through our use of reason and being able to, so everybody can figure this out. You don't need to have a Bible in front of you to be able to do that. Is it just using reason to understand teleology, essentially? Yes, so it's our ability to see the, like, yeah, to see our purpose. The final one is human law, which is what ideally would be human beings using the natural law and divine law to be able to create societies. However, not everything is going to be that case, so not every human law is going to be in line with the eternal law of God, as it were. Can we see these as a hierarchy? As an eternal law, I got at the top, divine law, the Bible, scripture, natural law, the way the world is and human law being, you know, practices within our societies, is that a hierarchal thing? I would say, like, almost, but maybe the divine law and natural law are almost odds at times, so, of course, the eternal law is certainly at the top, that is the will of God, that is what we're supposed to be aiming towards in the first place. What's quite interesting about natural law and why I would almost say that it's potentially more important than divine law is that it's supposed to be this idea that if you didn't have access to the Bible if you're a heathen like yourselves, that you would still know God's law that you, it is written into the hearts of man, so even if you don't believe in the Bible, actually God is put within you what he wants you to do in the first place, so even with a society that doesn't follow the Christian God, actually, you are going to follow God's law whether or not, or you should be following God's law whether or not you want to or not, so that's why I'd say that would perhaps, it feels even more binding, but what you could say about the divine law is that it gives a much more direct insight into the will of God because he is God's divine word written, so if you want a true insight and you can do, issue with that is that you would want to be a Christian to get a full understanding of that is your faith in God, God's grace guiding you through those words, if you were to read the Bible and you didn't believe in God, then I don't think a quietness would say there would be much value in that, you might be able to discover certain ideas, but if you didn't believe in it, then what use would that be? Corrects me if I'm wrong, so if the eternal law is only known by God and it's the principles that control the universe and the divine law reflects these, so we see this in Scripture, we see this in Holy text, the Bible, that the eternal laws of God are reflected in the Bible. Natural law being exactly what we've discussed, with Aristotle and Aquinas' interpretation of that, how the world works in a theological way for the lack of the bad word, and human laws just like, you know, laws we have. Is that essentially it? Am I missing something there? Right, so just rephrase that last bit, sorry, so. So human laws just the laws we have, like don't step on the grass, they don't have to be subscribed to the pan-psychost? Yeah, so human laws can be described as the everyday rules that govern our lives from the legal system at one end, right down to the notices that say wet paint do not touch, so it's all of the human laws that we create, and as I mentioned earlier, those might not be reflective of the natural law or of the divine law if you care to kind of move yourself away from those, but ideally for Aquinas we would have a society that did reflect those because that would mean that everyone would be moving towards their purpose. If you have a society that is very much just interested in like setting up nightclubs and, you know, not, not actually developing norms, yeah, like if it was just this huge, like, hedonistic kind of utopia that would probably go against what he would hope than the human law should be, but that's, that's regardless, there is a human law that we make up, ideally guided by God, but most of the time we fail at doing that. Finishing it off with a really negative statement. I did the time we failed. I did the uniseminar once, it's like, I think I talked about something that's went because humans are fundamentally flawed. Oh yeah, and well, I think, but that links into Christianity anyway. Oh yeah, full sin. Yeah. God loves a sinner. This should have been a t-shirt. Should we, if he exists and break it? Should we look it? Sorry, gone. I was going to say we could potentially at least just break down the divine law slightly. Andy, is divine law a literal interpretation of the Bible? For Aquinas, for at least my understanding of it is that largely yes, there is a literal interpretation to it. Now, there are certain nuances to that. For Aquinas, and as what many Christians now would also accept is that there is a separation between the divine law of the old law and the new law. So, as far as what I would focus on when talking about the old law, the simplest terms would be the ten commandments. So, Ollie, what is a good example of a ten commandments that we could mention? Do not kill. Do not kill. Now, that one would be still morally binding according to Aquinas anyway, because that, so it's a moral precept, isn't it? It do not kill, and that would be with reflecting upon the natural law, still something that Christians today would have to follow. If you looked at rules and ceremonial and judicial laws in the Old Testament in Exodus, then stuff like kosher within the Jewish tradition is not something that Aquinas would say is actually morally binding to Christians today. So, that might be why we have that separation. Why might Aquinas say that that wouldn't be binding now? What's happened? So, we have the old law. What follows? Oh, this guy, the big JC. I believe that's what we are looking for. Yeah, so Jesus kind of rewrites the law, doesn't he? He would come to fulfil it actually Andrew, his way came to do. True, but he kind of comes in and he says that there are so many of these practices, perhaps like doing work on Sunday, and he sort of looks at the Jewish authorities and says, no, this doesn't make sense, and this sets apart a new law. As far as what you would want to look at for the new law, as far as, again, let's stick to the moral things, maybe it's stuff like the sermon on the Mounts and expressing this kind of idea of, you know, probably love and blessed other sort of meek and stuff like that. And also, the Lord's prayer would be another example of the new law. Yeah, I mean, you could say for Jesus as well, he's much more focused on helping people the poor than, you know, if you go to the depths of Leviticus, where you're not allowed to wear clothes of mixed cloth, you know, Jesus would probably say that's not as important as helping poor people and, you know, fully coming close with God. That's more important, you should be focusing on that. And I think Aquinas would probably follow that teaching. We haven't given it like a bang on definition of what natural law was, a beat around the bush with it and the introduction a bit. But here he says, the moral law of God, which has been built into human nature. So I think that really exemplifies exactly what natural law is. It's saying, this is how the work, again, this is how the world is, and this is what we ought to do. It's, you know, held up by the eternal law and the divine law. Well, we said they clash, well, they compete slightly, don't they, the divine and natural law, but they held it by the eternal law. I wouldn't necessarily, sorry, maybe I phrase it a little bit wrong. I maybe they don't compete. Why was arguing there is that if we were looking at this hierarchy, that the reason why I would argue that natural law could be as equal to divine law is that it speaks to the hearts of everybody, like you said. So it's part of human nature requires you to have no access to the text that everyone can access that, which I think is quite important really if you're building. But if you don't say if you weren't Christian, if you could, if you weren't going to access the texts, or if you weren't able to access the texts, you know, in practice, you don't actually have to believe in God or be a Christian, to see that teleology is a thing. I'll go on as for to argue. So, you know, and that you should fulfill your end, you should live in accordance to natural law because it is how the world is until you ought to follow it. Yeah, your natural inclinations would be to follow this law because you wouldn't think of God if you didn't believe in God, but actually that is God. So, what you naturally are inclined to do for Aquinas is to actually do what God wants you to do, whether or not you believe that or not. Can I ask a question? So, I'm presuming that Aquinas is saying it's kind of quite difficult to follow natural law because even if you are Christian, even like in the creation story of Adam and Eve, they don't really follow their natural law because they only have one law to follow, and they break it. So, they tried the best. Yeah, I mean, that juicy fruit. Well, yes, you're absolutely right. It's really hard to do this, and why is it hard to do it? Well, so Aquinas would say that everybody is fundamentally, we can use reason, but human beings are really bad at doing that. So, we reason wrongly. Right reason would be to obviously go along the line of our tell us, to reason wrongly would be to justify your actions, thinking that you're doing right. And maybe not even justify, just think without even deeply about what you're doing and just acting a life that you think you're fulfilling your good life. So, you could even argue that most evil people to ever live thought they were doing the right thing, but that's the wrong reason. If they were to actually apply reason properly, then they would all actually act good. So, Aquinas says that everybody aims to achieve good and avoid bad. No one thinks they're the bad guy, and not even the most villainous of people. They just somehow understand the nature of the world. They can't use the reason correctly, they can't see their end and that they should follow natural law. Yeah. So, no one thinks they're not, everyone thinks they're fulfilling their purpose, but they're not. That links nicely to a criticism we have later on in Part 4, which we'll get to. But for now, so we've done the Part 1 telelogy and Part 2, the 40's of law, which really underpin natural law, haven't we? So, we haven't actually said what natural law says about ethics. But it's important to know those two underpinning, you know, you have to know where Aquinas is coming from before we can say what is definitely ethically right? Cool. In terms of the 40's of law, are there any problems with that in and of itself? The eternal law. Are they young? Are they in competition with each other? Yeah. So, we can say, if there is a clear hierarchy that it might not be completely obvious. Well, we have the problems with tell us already that we've said, so maybe the natural law doesn't actually seem to make sense. And then there's the fundamental issue of just if you aren't religious, if you don't believe God exists, then the eternal law that is supposed to be the guiding force for everything ceases to exist, as we said before. And that if the divine law, Aquinas is saying that it's the word of God, well, if it's just written by authors in their own cultural context and perhaps with certain agendas and whatnot that that ceases to be the word of God and therefore can't be a morally guiding principle. And so you could pick a part of it all day and once you take one thing out of the system and it ceases to work. But all three, apart from the human law, could all be said to be non-existent and therefore the whole system doesn't work. Yeah, even with divine law, even if you look at just the new law with the New Testament, I mean, the New Testament has got the book of Revelation in it, which has got some very interesting ideas about what you would call natural law in it as well. Right from the Summer Theological, the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law. What does Aquinas mean by that? So what you said is that the natural law is human beings' understanding of their purpose and their purpose is to fulfill God's will and to be with God. So that's it really. The eternal law is the will of God and what God's plan for the universe in particular human beings is and natural law is just our understanding of that. Now, the reason why we can't fully understand God, but it's God's way of at least guiding us towards that principle. Okay. It does work with like the sites of the time, doesn't it? Natural law. But do you think there's a problem? Well, I'm going to give you a leading question. Aristotle's using theological thinking for the first time without using some kind of God-like entity, you could argue that it is slightly God-like entity, but it's not religious as it. So he's praised for having this non-religious, not this aposteriori, i.e. an empirical way of looking at the world. Is Aquinas going against the whole idea of Aristotle? He's taken his ideas, but he's going back to what Aristotle was trying to avoid. He's trying to say, "This is how the world is. We can see this how the world is." Yet, Aquinas is just taking that and going back to what Aristotle could arguably be reacting against. I think, presumably, the way that Aquinas would see it is that Aristotle is touched upon something here that is fundamentally correct, but Aristotle did have it wrong. But no, there is, there fundamentally is a God. If there is supposed to be a purpose and something that everything is aiming towards, then it has to be God. So I imagine that Aristotle wouldn't appreciate that, but for Aquinas, it's not necessarily regressive. He thinks he's actually moving it forward to what it should be. I guess if we've got the rise of Christianity, is this kind of very strong, grew very, very quickly and became incredibly influential, then if that's like the dominant paradigm, then incorporating Aristotle's thinking into the dominant paradigm, you'd be like, "Well, we're taking some of these older ideas and updating them, revising them and bringing them further forward." He's trying to unite the church with Aristotle's reason, essentially, isn't it? What we touched on at the start that they contradicted he's trying to bring them together. And that's why he was such a massively influential philosopher. Part three, the precepts. An inquiry question for this section is what are the primary and secondary precepts? So we're actually getting into what natural law is, rather than the underlying principles, that support the theory. So the five primary precepts, the preservation of life, reproduction, the nurture and education of the young, living peacefully in society and to worship God. So how does Aquinas come to the understanding that these should be five primary precepts? What do we mean by? What's a precept as well? I suppose we'll swap that with what is a precept. I would just, if you simplify it, a precept is a rule or a law for another word. So when you see the primary precepts, you're just thinking of what are the primary rules in which you must follow. Before we jump into what the five are, Thomas Aquinas said there was one underlining inclination that all human beings follow. And we actually mentioned this before, but just repeating again, as we jump into the precepts, is that human beings have the inclination to achieve good and avoid evil. And we mentioned that if everyone feels like they are doing the good as opposed to evil. So no one knowingly or willingly does evil, they think what they do is morally good. But they would be following what are apparent goods. So an apparent good could be, oh, I'm going to lie, so I'd get out of trouble in a particular situation. That might feel an apparent good, but that's not actually a true good because it goes against the inclinations of the primary precepts. Primary precepts, then, anybody care to say exactly what those are. So, yeah, the preservation of life, which I presume is pretty straightforward. We're talking about preserving, looking after and caring for human life. What about animal life as well? Animal life would not take the same level of importance, but a quietness would still feel that the mistreatment of animals would be potentially a negative thing, but not even close to the same extent, particularly if we're looking at the idea of a soul that animals would not have a soul. Yeah, you've got reproduction, which, you know, I mean, you've got your famous Bible quote, which is Goforth and Multiply, which God said to Adam and Eve. This one links in quite I see, for the example we did earlier, wasn't it when I actually what the purpose of sex was? So, tealologically, the purpose is reproduction. So, if you follow that to its end, then you have reproductions of primary precept only. That's the purpose of the activity of sex. So, that's the rule which should be followed. That's the way the world is. So, that's what you ought to do. You should use sex as a method of reproduction, and you're not allowed to enjoy it. It's like enjoying it. I think you are allowed to enjoy it just now. Nope, but it's purely for reproduction. No enjoyment needed. This connects with, kind of, Roman Catholic views about contraception as well. So, obviously, the Roman Catholic church, where it teaches that there are certain forms of contraception that are unacceptable, unnatural in the bird commas forms. So, this definitely connects with their idea that you should be procreating, reproducing. This is your purpose. This is one of your tell us or tell-eye. The next one then is living in a peaceful society, or you could say a living in an ordered society. Now, I can't remember which. There is a book out there that sort of mentions just living in society, which, isn't this one, isn't this, to watch out for it? Yeah, it's not just about living in society. It's about living in a society which is ordered. So, that would be perhaps having laws about things like theft. If you had a society that theft was acceptable, then, of course, wouldn't be ordered because you could just take whatever you wanted. So, find out under that umbrella one, isn't there a reason to human law a bit there? Yeah, so, to live in the peaceful society, you have to implement proper human law. Yeah, and there's responsibility to kind of follow, and it may be enforced that law, as well, when it needs to be enforced. And final one, possibly way. Which one have we missed? Oh, sorry, the nurture and education of the young is one that- Why would you want to do that? Yeah, remember with with any of these so far, that these are supposed to be like objectively true sort of inclinations that all human beings arrive to. So, the preservation of life, the reproduction, the nurture and education of the young, living in peaceful society, and for Aquinas, the worship of God, are all things that you just naturally come to, and through use of reason, we know why we have to do it, and then eventually how we can follow these. So, that's why when you see natural law being discussed as an absolutist theory, it's because for Thomas, these are absolutes. Can we call them in Thomas from now? Just calling him Thomas. Tommy Boy. T.A. It's my buddy. Yeah, so they are absolutes. They're all absolute laws. They should follow them in all situations. We'll get into the particular details later, but as far as how natural law is seen, no matter where you are in the world, these are binding. These are perception of the will of God. So, we using the Ten Commandments again, that will show not kill. It doesn't matter what society you are in, whether or not it's around Moses when these laws are first introduced, or if you're in society right now in the UK, that is a absolute that's a moral wrong. So, in practice, how do these work, I guess, this leads us to the secondary precepts, doesn't it? So, what are the second, what is the secondary precept, and what's the purpose of them? Secondary precepts are rules derived from the primary precepts using practical reason. So, if we have, let's just take the preservation of life, because I suppose that's the most obvious one. It's about setting a rule based on this inclination. So, if we all feel that murdering each other would be wrong, then what is a rule that we could set, and let's say if we're applying it to human law now, what's a rule that we could set that prevents that from happening? Do you not kill? Yeah, and we could set up punishments and sanctions for anybody who does attempt or does achieve that end. So, that would be the secondary precept. We know now that we can set a rule saying that it would be wrong to do that, and we can use our reason to get to that. So, we know that by killing one another, that causes pain, and that we also wouldn't want to be killed ourselves. So, reason dictates that we should not kill, and that's built into our inclination of what we would want to do to follow the will of God as well. So, we know that killing is wrong based on this unwritten law within us. So, therefore, we need to have a rule that says do not kill, so we can establish that that's exactly what we do. There's a link there, isn't it? It's not just reading the five primary precepts as a list of rules. It's applying practical wisdom to them to turn them into things that work like the rule you just can't do not kill there. You can't just take the preservation of life, and just say we should always preserve life. You need to apply that in a way which is going to work practically, because this is a normative ethical theory in that it's a theory of morality and ethics that we should actually follow in our day-to-day lives, and he's done something really interesting here, as he from the first two parts we've said, he's explained the way the world is. He's explained what reality is, how it works, mess physically, and then he's went to say this is how you ought to act, so you have to understand that to turn the primary precept into secondary precepts in a way, don't you? Yeah, sure, because you have, if you are presented with human nature and saying this is how you are supposed to behave, then is there anything that we do that can be considered morally right has to be in line with our nature, and if you do anything that is against our nature, so if we establish through what we mentioned earlier as well, if our nature of reproduction, if we narrow that down and say what the purpose of sex is reproduction, then we can say that or anything like masturbation or any type of sex that doesn't fulfill that particular thing, then that could be deemed unnatural and therefore morally acceptable. You can see with the secondary precepts as well, Aquinas is giving himself a bit of breathing room, so like you were saying, it's not completely like absolutism, like the secondary precepts allow for a bit of, you know, for example, I don't know, if you're infertile, you know, you can't reproduce, and it's going to be a lot harder to educate the young that you're not going to have, so you could argue that maybe he's got a bit of breathing room there with the secondary precepts. Yeah, there might be a bit of a misconception to think that the secondary precepts have to be completely absolutist. You see that word going thrown around quite a lot, but there is an emphasis on what could be the home does, practical wisdom, so if you're, and this could be developed through the cultivation of virtues, so if you practice being a good person, then these things will become more apparent to you, but if you're in a situation, as you said, if you can't physically reproduce for one reason or another, then it could be deemed using practical wisdom that sex could still be morally permissible, because preventing someone from doing that just because seems to be at odds with human flourishing, if you think of it that way. I love the committee that would set that up. How many times have you done it? How many babies have you had? Wait a minute, you're going to stop doing that. It's not to assume that every time you have sex, it produces a baby. Well, absolutely.