In ethics, we seek a theory of obligation whose predictions match our best intuitions.
Suppose that explorers on the moon find a booklet with pages of platinum that contains an elegant collection of moral precepts that match our best intuitions to an incredible degree, better than anything that has been seen before. When we apply the precepts to hard cases, we find solutions that, to people we think of as decent, seem just right, and the easy cases all work correctly. And every apparently right action either follows from the precepts, or turns out to be a sham on deeper reflection.
This would give us good reason to think the precepts of the booklet in fact do sum up obligations. But now imagine Euthyphro came along and gave us this metaethical theory:
- What makes an action right is that it follows from the content of this booklet.
Euthyphro would be wrong. For even though (1) correctly gives a correct account of what actions are in fact right, the right action isn’t right because it’s written in the booklet. (Is it written in the booklet because it’s right? Probably: the best theory of the booklet’s composition would be that it was written by some ethical genius who wrote what was right because it was right.)
Why not? What’s wrong with (1)? It seems to me that (1) is just too extrinsic to us. There is no connection between the booklet and our actions, besides the fact that the actions required by the booklet are exactly the right ones.
What if instead the booklet were an intrinsic feature of human beings? What if ethics were literally written in the human heart, so that microscopic examination of a dissected human heart found miniature words spelling out precepts that we have very good reason to think sum up the theory of the right? Again, we should not go for a Euthyphro-style theory that equates the right with what is literally written in the heart. Yet on this theory the grounds of the right would be literally intrinsic to us—and they could be essential to us, if we wish: further examination could show that it is an essential feature of human DNA that it generates this inscription. This would give us reason to think that human beings were designed by an ethical genius, but not that the ground of the right is the writing in the heart.
The lesson is this, I think. We want the grounds of the right to be of the correct sort. Being metaphysically intrinsic to us is a necessary condition for this, but it is not sufficient. We want the grounds of the right to be “close to us”: closer than our physical hearts, as it were.
But we also don’t want the grounds of the right to be too close to us. We don’t want the right to be grounded in the actual content of our desires or beliefs. We are looking for grounds that exercise some sort of a dominion over us, but not an alien dominion.
The more I think about this, the more I see the human form—understood as an actual metaphysical component intrinsic and essential to the human being—as having the exactly right balance of standoffish dominion and closeness to provide these grounds. In other words, Natural Law provides the right metaethics.
And the line of thought I gave above can also be repeated for epistemological normativity. So we have reason to think the Natural Law provides the right metaepistemology as well.
