[Long thread] This article is a good example of a common misunderstanding of argument by natural law. Buckley argues that Hume "demolished" natural law arguments by showing you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is," ie. the "naturalistic fallacy." /1 https://lawliberty.org/why-i-am-not-a-natural-lawyer/

But this is not how natural law arguments work. Aristotelian/Thomistic natural law starts with asking what defines a thing, and then asking what are the attributes of that thing that by definition lead to its flourishing. Those are per se good things. /2

So the argument is that it is good to act in a way that contributes to a thing's flourishing, and bad to act in a way that hinders it. This assumes that things are "ordered" in a coherent way, which is shown per se by the nature of definitions of real objects. /3

The nature of definitions and order imply a God doing the ordering. And since humans are "rational animals" by definition, the existence of reason in them (which allows the discovery of order) implies a duty to follow goodness, which is to say, it implies law. /4

So natural law arguments move only in a sense from "is" to "ought," but it's more proper to say that natural lawyers believe the "ought" is discoverable in the nature of things, and so is already there. There is in fact no "movement" from one to the other. /5

When I converted from atheism to Christianity, I actually tussled with Hume in a way that convinced me that the existence of reason implied God because it revealed a non-natural teleology. I came to this conclusion in part based on Hume's arguments against inductive reasoning. /6

Hume argues that inductive reasoning, while intuitive, can never really prove an argument, but essentially only remains a probabilistic statement. For instance, Hume argues that we only know that gunpowder explodes through experience. /7

The problem is that it is possible that experience will not hold in the future. Chesterton has a great example where he playfully argues that it is possible the Sun only rises every morning because God is so pleased with his creation that he makes it rise again & again. /8

Compare this, though, to deontological reasoning, which proceeds via syllogism. If a deontological argument has no logical flaws, then the only way to challenge it is to challenge its premises. The is/ought problem is similar to the inductive/deontological problem. /9

Natural law arguments are primarily deontological in reasoning, & not inductive. It is not "people have always done these things, & so it is good they continue to do them that way," but "the definition of what it means to be a 'person' implies that certain actions are good." /10

Essentially, real challenges to natural law arguments have to challenge the natural lawyer's definition of the person or their attributes, or have to challenge the assumption that "persons" or their attributes are "real" or actually exist. /11

This is why it is difficult to be a "conservative" who also does not believe in natural law. Usually this requires ignoring obvious attributes of persons (like the nature of procreation), or an anti-realist or nominalist position or a radically skeptical position. /12

All of those positions would leave a "conservative" rather adrift in the world, with no firm principles to guide political thought. This is why "conservatives" who reject natural law are really either reactionaries, some kind of liberal/contractarian, or /13

are equipped only with revelation. The last kind, who only argues from revelation, has the firmest ground for principles, but can only argue for them on religious grounds. And because of the radically skeptical position that the person who argues only from revelation implies, /14

it is difficult to persuade another of the correctness of the position without either a Kierkegaardian leap of faith or an experience of conversion. Buckley seems to concede all this in his call for a "new conservativism" to be a mix between a defense of liberalism /15

and an "unprincipled" kind of Burkean muddling through via experience. While I agree that common sense experience is a better guide and is persuasive against progressivism, it is ultimately unpersuasive because it does not give any reason to act one way or the other. /16

Rather, Buckley's view reminds me of the "rough beast . . . slouching towards Bethlehem" waiting to be born in Yeats's great poem. /17

A society without a grounding goal for itself will ultimately produce something monstrous, perhaps more slowly than socialism and progressivism, but still nightmarish for the conservative. /end