The Sceptic as Natural Law Adherent?

Having said all this, can I go on to say that I am, or indeed Hume is, a natural law adherent, a believer in natural rights? That depends, as Hume carefully observes,⁶⁶ on the sense of ‘natural’.

If ‘natural law’ be meant⁶⁷ to signify some over-arching normative order and arrangement of nature — some set of moral laws — accessible to reason, or to connote universally valid grounds for morals and politics from which rights can be ‘deduced’ or ‘discovered’, or to indicate a logically necessary relation between human actions or attributes and appropriate conduct, or to cover theories anchored in theological world-views, or even to suggest an acceptance of ‘pre-existing’, underivative rights, then Hume is not a natural law adherent. Nor am I. Ours is not a morally well-ordered world featuring natural rights and duties. Any sense of ‘natural law’ which finds universal moral maxims outside or beyond human beings themselves — from God, in the causal world, in some non-causal world —■ or deduces them from logically necessary relations, or understands them in a noncontingent way, would be rejected by the Humean sceptic. After all, the external, observed causal world, and the evidence it provides, is the very foundation for Humean scepticism and for rejecting moral realism.

What is ‘natural’ can also refer, however, much more narrowly to human beings and aspects of human nature. A ‘natural law’ which alluded to characteristics present in human nature, to that which was normally or always evident, could be accepted by Hume and by me — albeit with the same caveats I mentioned at the end of the last section. Such a ‘natural law’ would be strictly contingent on exhibited behaviour. Nothing could be said a priori. These ‘natural laws’ would be no more than uniformities (i.e. what happens always to be observed) or near uniformities (J.e.

what happens usually or normally to be observed). Such regularities might be caused by instinct and evolution — and so ‘natural’ in this direct sense — or be the result of practices shaped by desires, causal reason and artifice — but nevertheless a product of ‘natural’ forces.⁶⁸ In this particular sense, of taking note of uniform human traits, responses and sentiments, where human nature directly exhibits or indirectly produces these uniformities, Hume is a natural law adherent.

Notice, however, that a moral realist too could start from human nature, posit universal traits, and purport to deduce, arrive at or discover basic, natural rights.⁶⁹ Is there a difference between the natural law of that type of moral realist and the natural law of a moral sceptic? They both begin with the empirical world, with observed human nature. And further, the sceptic would be prepared to admit that it is causal reason that ‘finds’ these uniformities in the species. The main difference between the two is much the same as that found in their methods of establishing criteria of ‘goodness’. For the sceptic the natural evidence that points occasionally to broad uniformities points just as clearly to a variety, indeed a myriad, of moral behaviours and institutions. More importantly, the sceptic is not prepared to rise above, somehow to transcend, the evidence and speak of universal human characteristics, unconditional standards of conduct and basic, fundamental laws. It seems to the sceptic more accurate to speak of uniformities and near uniformities and to emphasise their contingency. If this qualifies the sceptic as a natural law adherent then so she be; but an adherent she be only in a special sense without the connotations and metaphysical tenets normally associated with that adherence.

Let us now consider a device which might be said to make practical use of non-legal rights.

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Source: Allan James. A Sceptical Theory of Morality and Law. Peter Lang,1998. — 277 p.. 1998

The Sceptic as Natural Law Adherent?

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