Liberalism and the five natural inclinations

By “liberalism” I don’t mean merely what goes under that label in the context of contemporary U.S. politics.  I mean the long political tradition, tracing back to Hobbes and Locke, from which modern liberalism grew.  By natural inclinations, I don’t mean tendencies that that are merely deep-seated or habitual.  I mean tendencies that are “natural” in the specific sense operative in classical natural law theory.  And by natural inclinations, I don’t mean tendencies that human beings are always conscious of or wish to pursue.  I mean the way that a faculty can of its nature “aim at” or be “directed toward” some end or goal whether or not an individual realizes it or wants to pursue that end -- teleology or final causality in the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) sense.

Aquinas famously identifies what he takes to be the basic human inclinations in Summa Theologiae I-II.94.2.  Commentators often summarize these in a list of five items.  For example, the Dominican moral theologian Servais Pinckaers lists them as follows:

1. The inclination to the good

2. The inclination to self-preservation

3. The inclination to sexual union and the rearing of offspring

4. The inclination to knowledge of the truth

5. The inclination to live in society

(See Pinckaers’s books Morality: The Catholic View, at pp. 97-109, and The Sources of Christian Ethics, chapter 17, for his detailed treatment of each of these.)

Some comments on each: Our inclination to the good is the most fundamental of the inclinations.  It is what Aquinas is talking about in his famous first principle of natural law, viz. that good is to be pursued and evil avoided.  The idea is that in acting we always pursue what we take to be good in some way or other.  Aquinas doesn’t mean that everyone always chooses to do what he thinks is morally good, or that everyone believes that there is such a thing as an objective standard of moral goodness in the first place.  He is well aware that people sometimes do what they know to be morally wrong, that there are people who reject the very idea of morality, etc.  His point is that even these people still regard the object of their action as good in the thin sense that it provides some benefit, would be worthwhile to pursue at least in some respects, etc.  Given this very rudimentary inclination to the good together with complete rationality and knowledge of what is in fact good, we would do what is morally right.  But of course, these latter conditions often do not hold.  (See my paper “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good” in Neo-Scholastic Essays for detailed discussion and defense of Aquinas’s first principle.) 

Pinckaers emphasizes that there is a special connection between this basic inclination and love, since to love something is, for the A-T tradition, to will the good of that something.  The less perfect is one’s orientation toward what is in fact good, the more deficient will be his love, as I noted in a recent post. 

The inclination to self-preservation is obvious enough, though some may think that the existence of suicidal people is counterevidence.  It is not, and Aquinas is of course well aware that there are such people.  A suicidal person is not someone who lacks this inclination, but rather someone who intentionally frustrates it.  (And even then, not perfectly.  Even a suicidal person will initially tend to duck if you fire a gun at him, will struggle if you try to drown him, etc.  He has to work to overcome these spontaneous tendencies.)  As always, we must keep in mind that by “inclinations” Aquinas does not primarily have in mind the conscious desires we happen to have, but rather the deeper level of natural teleology or final causality which exists below the level of consciousness.  To be sure, our conscious desires generally track that deeper level; we usually do consciously want to preserve ourselves.  But as with everything else in the world of changeable, material things, imperfections and disorders are bound to occur, and our conscious desires sometimes come apart from the natural teleology of our various faculties.

That is certainly true of the third natural inclination, toward sexual intercourse and the child-rearing that is its natural sequel.  In general, people want to have sexual intercourse with someone of the opposite sex, and also want to have children.  But of course, there are exceptions -- people with homosexual desires, people who lack any interest in sex, people who don’t want children, and so on.  That is not counterevidence to Aquinas’s claim, because, again, he isn’t in the first place making a claim about what people all consciously desire, but rather a claim about the natural ends of our faculties.  As with suicidal people, conscious desires in this case too can come apart from natural teleology.  (See my essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” also in Neo-Scholastic Essays, for detailed exposition and defense of the A-T account of the natural ends of our sexual faculties.  See also some relevant earlier blog posts.)

Similar remarks can be made about the natural inclination toward knowledge of the truth.  Here, though, it seems to me that it is even more difficult for natural teleology and conscious desire to come apart.  It might seem otherwise given that there are people who claim not to believe in objective truth, people who engage in even overt self-deception, and so forth.  But even cognitive relativists and other anti-realists about truth think that it really is the case that there is no such thing as objective truth and that those who suppose otherwise are mistaken.  (This is why such views at the end of the day simply cannot be coherently formulated.)  And someone who wants to avoid knowing certain truths, who won’t let himself dwell on uncomfortable evidence, etc. thinks that it really is the case that it would in some way be bad to know those truths or dwell on that evidence.  In these ways, our inclination toward truth is operative even in the very act of trying to frustrate it. 

Aquinas makes special note of knowledge of the truth about God as being among the ends of this fourth of our natural inclinations.  The idea is that as rational animals we are naturally oriented toward finding the explanations of things.  God qua First Cause, knowable by way of philosophical arguments, is the ultimate explanation of things, and thus knowledge of God and his nature is the ultimate fulfillment of our intellectual powers.

The fifth inclination is what Aristotle and Aquinas have in mind when they say that man is a social and political animal.  We are oriented by nature to organize into families, extended families, villages, and the like, and to set up institutions with the authority to govern these social organizations.  And for the A-T natural law tradition, this political authority derives not from any social contract but from the natural law itself, which preexists any contract.  Moreover, our social nature is not reducible to the herd behavior of non-rational animals, but participates in our rationality.  It is manifest in language, culture, religion, science, and the other social activities and institutions that other animals lack because they lack intellects.  The good we realize by virtue of being social animals is also a common good in the sense that it is not reducible to the sum of private goods of the individuals who make up society.  The good of one’s country (say) is not just the aggregate of the private good of this particular citizen, the private good of that particular citizen, etc.  Being an organic part of the larger social whole is itself a good over and above the private goods each individual could enjoy on his own.

The ordering of the five inclinations is not accidental.  At least in a rough way, the list moves from inclinations we share with many things to inclinations more specific to us.  The first inclination, toward the good, is one shared in a sense by all things.  For goodness or badness, on the A-T analysis, is defined in terms of how well or badly a thing manifests its nature, and everything manifests its nature to some extent (otherwise it wouldn’t be the kind of thing it is in the first place) and is in that sense and to that extent good.  The second inclination, toward self-preservation, is found in living things specifically, and thus also in man as one living thing among others.  The third, toward sex and child-rearing, is even more specific, limited to certain kinds of animals.  The fourth, toward truth, is (among animals, as opposed to angels, who are incorporeal) limited to us as rational animals, where rational animality is our essence.  The fifth, toward sociality of the higher, rational sort we exhibit involves a property or proper accident that flows from our essence as rational animals (in the A-T sense of the word “property”).

Because they are natural to us, these five inclinations cannot be extinguished.  They are always present in human beings and always manifest themselves in some way and to some extent.  However, and as has already been indicated, their manifestation can be frustrated and distorted in various ways.  Intellectual error can lead us to deny one or more of them, and moral vice can make us reluctant to affirm or consistently to pursue one or more of them.  Historical and cultural circumstances can also obscure our view of them and distort their manifestation.

This brings us to liberalism -- again, in the broad sense of the tradition extending back to Hobbes and Locke and represented today by positions as diverse as the egalitarian liberalism of Rawls, the classical liberalism or libertarianism of Nozick, and so forth.  The characteristic thesis of liberalism is that society and government are not natural to us, but artificial.  They arise out of a contract or agreement of some sort (what sort depending on what version of liberalism we’re talking about), between individuals who do not have any preexisting obligations to one another or to any larger social whole.  Indeed, there is no social whole of which the individuals are naturally a part, and thus no common good.  There are only the private goods of the individuals, and if they decide to form some larger whole it is only for the sake of facilitating those private goods.  Moreover, for the liberal, unless the individuals in some way consent to there being a political authority (via a Lockean social contract, bargaining in Rawls’s original position, an initial group of clients signing on with a Nozickian dominant protective agency, or what have you) then there simply cannot be such an authority, and the individuals have no obligation whatsoever to recognize any purported authority.

In short, liberalism essentially rejects the fifth of the basic natural inclinations and is therefore to that extent fundamentally at odds with the A-T natural law tradition.

To forestall misunderstandings, note that I am not here talking about questions such as whether it can be legitimate to resist or overthrow an unjust government, whether popular elections are the least bad way to determine who holds office, etc.  An A-T natural law theorist certainly could answer (and many A-T theorists in fact have answered) such questions in the affirmative.  But those are essentially questions about which specific persons get to exercise political authority, who gets to hold office and how to determine that, etc.  What is at issue here is the more fundamental question of whether the consent of the individuals is the ultimate foundation of there being any such thing as political authority, any such thing as offices of government, in the first place.  The liberal tradition says Yes, the A-T natural law tradition says No.  Again, for the A-T tradition, society is natural to us rather than artificial and political authority (as a general, background condition of the existence of society, as distinct from some particular concrete form that that authority might take) derives from natural law rather than consent. 

Nor is its rejection of the idea that man is a social animal (as A-T understands that claim) the only characteristic feature of liberalism.  The other characteristic feature is its insistence not only on the distinction between church and state (which Christianity has always affirmed) but on a sharp separation in principle between church and state, so that the state can in no way favor or be influenced by the doctrine of any particular religious body.   (Traditional Christian doctrine holds that such a rigid separation cannot be absolutely required as a matter of principle, even if it is sometimes necessary or advisable in practice.)  In Locke, this separation did not rule out a generic philosophical theism as something the state ought to favor, but the subsequent liberal tradition has tended to exclude even this.  (I discussed the nature of the traditional Christian view of the relation between Church and state and how liberalism departed from it in some detail in an earlier post.) 

Associated in the liberal tradition with this exclusion of religion from politics has been a tendency toward skepticism about the possibility of genuine knowledge where theological matters are concerned.  For if we really could have such knowledge, it would seem unreasonable for government not to take account of it in setting policy, any more than it would be reasonable for government to ignore scientific knowledge.  Locke’s contemporary Jonas Proast noted the skeptical implications of Locke’s doctrine of religious toleration.  A more thoroughgoing and emphatic skepticism about the possibility of religious knowledge has become ever more deeply ingrained in the liberal tradition in the centuries since, to the point where contemporary liberals tend to think it self-evident that religion as such is a matter of “faith” understood as an irrational commitment, which for that reason ought to have no influence whatsoever on public policy.  (I discuss Locke’s position and Proast’s criticisms of it in chapter 5 of my book Locke.) 

Now, as I’ve noted, Aquinas held that knowledge of God was the ultimate fulfillment of our natural inclination toward knowledge of the truth.  To the extent that liberalism presupposes skepticism about the possibility of theological knowledge -- and indeed tends to promote such skepticism as a way of making sure that religion will be kept out of politics -- it is incompatible with the fourth of our natural inclinations.

There is another respect in which liberalism is at least in tension with this fourth inclination.  Hobbes had an extremely “thin” conception of the moral law.  In Hobbes’s state of nature, everyone is at liberty to do whatever he likes, not only legally but morally.  It is the chaos that this inevitably generates that leads individuals in the state of nature to give up their absolute liberty and form civil society.  The tendency of Hobbesian contractarian thinking about morality, though, is in a decidedly libertine and minimalist direction.  If the individual does not consent to some restriction on his liberty of action -- not just a legal restriction, but even a moral restriction -- then he cannot be bound by such a restriction.  Locke’s conception of morality is much “thicker,” even if not nearly as thick as the A-T conception.  In Locke’s state of nature, we are not at liberty to do whatever we like.  Even if we are not yet obliged to submit to any government, we are still obliged even in the state of nature to submit to a moral law that is in no way the product of human convention or contract and is knowable by reason apart from special divine revelation.  Hence, though Locke would not permit any but the most generic religious belief to influence government policy, there is nothing in Lockeanism per se that rules out letting various moral considerations influence government policy.  For example, there is nothing in Lockeanism per se that would prevent the outlawing of abortion.

However, the liberal tradition has tended over the centuries to follow Hobbes rather than Locke on this particular matter (even if it has of course preferred Locke’s limited state to Hobbes’s absolutist state).  That is to say, just as the liberal tradition has over the centuries tended toward increasing skepticism about the possibility of theological knowledge, it has also tended toward increasing skepticism about the possibility of moral knowledge of anything more than a very ”thin” or minimalist “live and let live” sort.  That is why it has tended increasingly to insist that matters of “personal morality” (e.g. concerning abortion, homosexuality, etc.) not be allowed to influence public policy.  It is why Rawls will not only not permit any sort of religious doctrine to influence the basic structure of society, but will not permit any other “comprehensive doctrine” (of even a secular moral or philosophical sort) to do so. 

As in the case of religion, the skepticism and the attitude toward public policy go hand in hand.  If it were admitted that we really could have genuine knowledge where “personal morality” is concerned, then it would be hard to justify letting government ignore this knowledge any more than it could ignore scientific knowledge.  Hence, just as the liberal has a strong incentive to insist that theological claims are merely matters of irrational commitment, so too does he have a strong incentive to insist that beliefs about “personal morality” are matters of taste, subjective emotional reaction, etc.

In this way too, then, liberalism, at least in its dominant contemporary manifestations, is at odds with the fourth of our fundamental natural inclinations, as it is understood in the A-T tradition.  For of course, the A-T natural law tradition holds that there is a great deal of genuine knowledge to be had where matters of “personal morality” are concerned.

Now, the matters of “personal morality” about which contemporary liberalism exhibits such skepticism have largely to do with sex, so that there is an obvious sense in which liberalism tends to be at odds also with the third of our natural inclinations as A-T natural law theorists understand it.  But there is another and more specific source of tension between liberalism and this third natural inclination.  The family is the most obviously natural form of social organization.  It is also the context within which we are most obviously obliged to submit to an authority we never consented to, viz. parental authority.  Accordingly, the family sits uneasily with the core liberal ideas that society is artificial and that there can be no authority over an individual to which he has not in some sense consented.   There is thus bound to be a strong temptation in liberalism to extent its analysis of society on the large scale to the small scale case of the family.  The modern attitude toward marriage and family as essentially about individual personal fulfillment, toward the having of children as an option which a couple may or may not wish to exercise (rather than the reason why the institution of marriage exists in the first place), easy divorce in the name of personal fulfillment, the redefinition of marriage to fit current attitudes about homosexuality, etc. all clearly reflect this tendency to try to make of family something approximating an artificial and contractual arrangement.

The current push for the legalization of assisted suicide indicates that liberalism is not fully consistent even with the second of the five natural inclinations.  And the prevalence within liberal societies of moral minimalism, moral skepticism, subjectivism about value, and moral relativism is evidence that liberalism sits poorly even with the first and most basic of the natural inclinations.

This is not to say that all forms of liberalism are in every way, and to the same extent in the case of each inclination, at odds with the five on the list.  Much less is it to say that all individual liberals are personally hostile to the general conception of moral life summarized in the A-T account of the five inclinations.  All the same, liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy has over the centuries been taken in increasingly extreme directions, in ways increasingly at odds with the A-T understanding of the five inclinations.

In recent decades, some Catholics have thought that concepts like “human rights” and the “dignity of the human person” might provide conceptual common ground between liberalism and Catholic moral thinking (the latter having, of course, been deeply influenced by the A-T natural law tradition).  This is naïve, because such expressions bear radically different meanings in the minds of liberals on the one hand and Catholic and A-T natural law theorists on the other.  For the latter, our dignity lies precisely in our capacity as rational animals to pursue the five natural inclinations, and the function of rights is to safeguard the possibility of pursuing them.  For contemporary liberalism, by contrast, our “dignity” and “rights” entail that we may if we wish be indifferent to these inclinations or even opposed to them.