Relativism and natural law

Individual relativism and natural law ethics have something in common: both agree that the grounds of your ethical obligations are found in you. The disagreement, of course, is in how they are found. The relativist says that they are found in your subjectivity, in your beliefs and values that differ from person to person, while the natural lawyer thinks they are found in your human form, which is exactly like the human form of everyone else.

(Whether Kantianism shares this feature depends on how we read the metaphysics of rationality, namely whether our rationality as a genuine part of our selves, or as an abstraction.)

I think this commonality has some importance: it captures the idea that idea that we are in some sense morally beholden to ourselves rather than to something alien, something about which we could ask “Why should I listen to it?”

But I think in the end natural law does a better job being a non-alienating ethics. For we have good reason to think that my moral beliefs and values are etiologically largely the product of society around me and accidental features in my life. If these beliefs and values are what grounds my moral obligations, then my obligations are by and large the product of society and accident. (Think of the common philosophical observation that we do not choose our beliefs, but catch them like one catches a cold.) If I had lived in a different society with different accidental influences, I would have had different obligations on relativism. The obligations are, thus, largely the result of external and accidental influence on my cognition.

On the other hand, on natural law, my obligations are grounded in my individual human form which is my central and essential metaphysical constituent. Granted, I did not create this form for myself. But neither is it an accidental result of external influence—it defines me.

I think that as a society we feel that the variability of our individual beliefs and values makes us more autonomous if relativism is true. But once we realistically realize that this variability is largely due to external influence, our intuitions should shift. Natural law provides a more real autonomy.

Of course, on a theistic version of natural law, my form comes from God. Yes, but on orthodox Aristotelianism (which I am not sure I completely endorse) it is not an alien imposition, since I have no existence apart from that form.