The Neo-Confucian sages taught that
when humans follow their essential nature, they follow what is ordained of
Heaven, a natural, moral law. This is also the teaching of the Roman Catholic
Church.
What did Aquinas teach regarding
natural law and the moral life? Law, Aquinas remarks, is a measure or rule of
human acts conceived by reason with a view to the common good. Aquinas wishes
to establish the moral and positive law on a theological foundation. He begins
with the idea of the eternal law of God. God’s eternal law does not, however,
suggest to him that all human law must depend on some particular command of
God. Rather, according to Aquinas, God creates all creatures with their specific essence, or end, and
the means of achieving those ends. And the divine wisdom, which moves all
things in the achievement of their ends, is the eternal law. “Accordingly, the
eternal law is nothing else than the exemplar of divine wisdom, as directing
all actions and movements of creatures.”
Creatures below the level of humanity
participate unconsciously in the eternal law, whereas humans can, by the
exercise of reason, discern the essential needs of their nature and determine
the natural moral law, that is, those commands of reason that promote human
good and avoid evil. These would include precepts of natural law having to do
with such things as self-preservation, the procreation and care of offspring
and so on.
Aquinas was confident that humans,
exercising their reason, could move from these general principles to discern
more particular precepts for their practical moral guidance. For example,
he taught that suicide is wrong and monogamy is right, not simple because God
prohibits or commands them. Rather, they are prohibited or commanded by God
because they are contrary to or in accord with natural moral law, hence divine,
eternal law. Suicide, Aquinas argues, is contrary to our natural inclination to
self-preservation; monogamy is required for the propagation and proper care of
children.
The catholic Church has followed rather faithfully Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on natural law as it applies to a vast range of subject from civil liberty and the relations of church and state to complex issues of biomedical ethics such as contraception.
The Roman Catholic teaching on birth control has been defended in a variety of ways, but most of these are based on inferences derived from natural law. A typical argument proceeds as follows:
- It is wrong to impede the procreative power of actions that are ordained by their natural to the generation of new human life.
- Contraception impedes the procreative power of actions that are ordained by their nature to the generation of new human life.
- Therefore, contraception is wrong. ( Livingston, 2009)
Works Cited
Livingston, James C. Anatomy of the Sacred Sixth
Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009.
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