The Unnecessary Science (Chapter 4)

Last time, I looked at Chapter 3, which is the one that had the most overlap with my own analysis.  This time I’m looking at Chapter 4, which takes a tack that is much less interesting and, ultimately, one that I have repeatedly argued in the past is actually a very weak form of philosophical argument.  In response to Feser’s claims that modern morality is deficient, Laird is going to argue that Feser’s natural law ethics is at least as deficient if not more so.

Let me start with the reasons why this is not a very strong argument.  The problem is that there are far too many ways to avoid such arguments.  The first broad category is that the moral system is being misinterpreted, either by the person criticizing it or by the people who decided to use it justify what we think are horrible things.  The other broad category is to essentially bite the bullet and admit that it does justify those things that we think are horrible but ultimately those things really are correct.  The only time, then, that such arguments can really work is when you take something that the person advocating for the theory would find acceptable and show that the view instead actually supports it, and so argue that that person should reject their own theory.  But that’s a personal appeal, not a universal philosophical one.  More importantly, it doesn’t actually prove the theory wrong, and so the theory could still be right.  When you make such an appeal, you would need to appeal to a universal wrong that everyone accepts, and even then biting the bullet would blunt that attack.

Laird relies on two main attacks:  arguing that certain philosophical systems that Feser would not approve of — Nazism and Communism in particular — have links to his natural law theory, meaning here Plato and Aristotle specifically, and also arguing that Aristotle explicitly justifies slavery.  However, to make this entire point pointless, at the end Laird has to admit that all of his arguments are historical and that Feser would not be amiss in demanding that Laird give philosophical arguments to show that the system is indeed false.  Since this is in line with my argument above, it makes the entire chapter pretty much pointless.  Laird says that he will try to give those philosophical arguments in the next chapter, meaning that this one isn’t doing anything other than associating the view with slavery, Nazis and Communism, which is pretty much an argument ad hominem, unless his historical arguments actually work.  So let me take a quick look at them.

The link to Nazis and Communism is pretty much the first sort:  Laird notes that the Nazis used Plato explicitly and that Marx didn’t repudiate Aristolean ideas, but these arguments are pretty weak.  That Marx didn’t explicitly repudiate it doesn’t mean that he used it either, and so it’s hard to see the direct link that Laird would need from Aristotle to Marx, so that we can see that Aristotle when interpreted properly will lead to Communism.  And while he can show the Nazis using Plato directly, it’s way, way too easy to argue that they misinterpreted it and so that, again, Plato properly understood does not allow for their interpretation and so doesn’t justify their philosophical ideas.  The most he can and has made in the chapter is that the ideas could lead to those interpretations, but no one with any philosophical experience at all denies this, especially if we allow for people to misinterpret the ideas as Laird needs to here to make his point.  So he doesn’t make the direct link he needs for this to even work as a historical argument, let alone one we should take seriously philosophically.  And his link from Thomism to similar issues is even weaker, since all he has there is a supposition that it could be used that way, which is far too weak to support any real counter to Feser at all.  He would have been better served, I think, to spend the time he spent on these arguments to showing how the negatives Feser points to are not objectively negatives — ie that Feser calls things negative only because he thinks they’re negative and not because they actually are — or that the negatives that he and Feser agree on are misinterpretations of his preferred moral system.  That would provide a philosophically interesting discussion, which these arguments don’t really manage (admittedly, by Laird’s own admission).

There is one philosophically interesting argument here, which is the argument that Aristotle directly supported slavery.  Unfortunately, Laird’s take on it ends up seeming shallow when he talks about Aristotle’s actual philosophical justification for that stance.  It becomes obvious that Laird pulls that out because he believes that such a thing is so obviously and clearly objectively wrong that any moral system that could possibly allow for it must be wrong.  However, Aristotle’s view didn’t justify slavery in and of itself, but instead justified slavery for those whose natures were such that they had to be slaves by nature.  The first reason this blunts Laird’s argument here is that Aristotleans can argue that the view only justifies slavery if it is true that people can have a nature that demands that they be slaves, and no such people exist, so it’s an irrelevant argument.  It would be like Aristotle’s view advocates that if people can fly by their own power they must follow the same rules for ships for when they are flying.  No matter what you think of such a moral position, it’s irrelevant since no one can do it.

But it’s the second reason that’s more philosophically interesting, because we can ask if the idea that if there were people who had a nature such that slavery was demanded would it be morally wrong in that case?  The example I was pondering was that of the Atans in David Eddings’ ‘The Tamuli”.  These were a race whose sexual selection ended up selecting for maximum strength, size and aggression.  However, the problem with that was that the aggression ended up being completely out of control, and so if left to their own devices they were constantly fighting with each other, in a way that risked wiping out the race.  So one of their kings, seeing the problem, decided to sell the entire race into slavery to the not-very-aggressive Tamuls, who turned them into an army but, more importantly, curbed their aggressive tendencies by, well, not giving them the permission to indulge them in harmful ways, which the book credits with saving their race from extinction.

Let’s put aside for the moment that idea that there might well have been other solutions that would have worked and simply assume here that that king was right and at that point the Atans had the nature of slaves, and the only options for them were to become slaves or be wiped out.  Could we really say that it would be necessarily immoral to treat them as slaves and, in fact, to enslave them?  Given most of the moral systems out there, about the only one that could out-and-out reject it is Kant’s deontological view, and even in his view it isn’t clear that it would be wrong, since it wouldn’t necessarily be people treated anyone else or themselves merely as means and not as ends in themselves (after all, they are taking their nature into account) and the idea that people should be enslaved if their nature dictates that and at no other time and for no other reason actually is universalizable.  To use my own preferred Stoic model, it’s hard to argue that it is vicious to treat someone in line with their actual nature, even if that nature is for them to be a slave.  So while creating people who have slavery as their nature may be immoral, treating such people according to their nature and enslaving them isn’t clearly immoral.  And so that Aristotle’s moral system could come to this conclusion doesn’t actually count against it, and in fact his view seems to handle this sort of situation in a reasonable way and provides a better justification for what we might all agree is the moral move than the others might.

From these two arguments, the charge of justifying slavery against Aristotle has no teeth.  For all practical purposes, it doesn’t, and in the only case where it does it really looks like he might have a point.

This chapter is one that I don’t really think serves much purpose.  If Laird has philosophical arguments and not historical ones against natural law theory, he would have been better off to simply go straight to them and not bother with this as a lead-in, especially since philosophically the most philosophical of his arguments falls completely flat.  But next time we’ll actually look at the more philosophical arguments expressed in Chapter 5.

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