Contra Consequentialismum: Relativism's Unrelative

RELATIVISM IS THE MOST COMMON FORM of moral skepticism about us. Personal relativism insists that there is no such thing as moral truths that extend beyond what is true for the individual. Since morality is a matter of individual opinion, of sentiment, then morality is subjective, about feeling, at best. Relativism also comes in other forms. For example, it can extend beyond personal relativism to cultural or social relativism, providing that morality is a cultural or social norm, and not necessarily a personal norm. But in whatever form it may be found, individualistic or socialistic, fundamentally all forms of relativism share "the central dogma that moral propositions, instead of having objective truth--truth for all people in all places at all times--are true relative to one standard but not another." Oderberg, MT, 16. In other words, relativists are relative or standardless about all things but one, the relativism of relativism. Relativism is, for them, the only thing unrelative. The relativist believes in no absolute dogma but one: all morality is relative. It would seem that relativism is inconsistent with itself ab initio, from its foundation.

And so it it is.

The foundational inconsistency of the relativists ethic shows up in the conundrums they are easily forced into. For example: If all morality is relative, subjective, personal, it follows that that morality ought not to be imposed upon anyone else. In other words, there is no warrant for me to force my views upon you, and you to force your views upon me. Tolerance, therefore, is the mandatum novum, the new commandment for the relativist. But isn't this prime virtue of relativism, tolerance, then, following relativism's own assumption that all is relative, subjective, a matter of opinion? What, then, of the man whose personal belief is that tolerance is wrong, that he has the right to impose his belief system on whomever he sees fit, by physical or legal coercion, even torture and violence if necessary? (Folks like this aren't too hard to find: look at the ranks of Al Qaida or the advocates of homosexual marriage. These folks insist we should see things their way and use rather forceful means to insist.) Must the relativist be tolerant of the intolerant? To be consistent with his principles, the relativist must be tolerant of the intolerant. This is then a collapse into a moral nihilism, as it will allow for anything. Am I to be tolerant of a pedophile who believes that pedophilia is the only proper expression of human sexuality, and that he has the right to indoctrinate children to his manner of thinking? Most relativists will not extend their dogma so far.

If the relativist, however, decides to be intolerant of the intolerant, then the relativist has violated his own principle. Against his central tenet, he has adopted an objective, absolute, exceptionless truth which requires him to adopt an objective moral law: intolerance is exceptionlessly, absolutely evil. On what basis do they found this? The relativist remains mum to the question. There is no basis, given the relativist's assumptions, to justify the dogmatic assumption of this one, exceptional principle. As W. V. Quine, the American analytic philosopher and himself a philosophical relativist, has conceded in the context of cultural relativism: "He [the cultural relativist] cannot proclaim cultural relativism without rising above it, and he cannot rise above it without giving it up." Oderberg, MT, 20 (quoting W. V. Quine, "On Empirically Equivalent Systems in the Word," Erkenntnis 9 (1975), 328-28).

Two other ethical theories reject the objective nature of the ethical realm. For these two schools of thought, the "world of ought" does not exist, and so they are foundationally skeptical like the relativist. The first such theory is expressivism or emotivism. This theory of morality also hales from Hume, who in his Treatise on Human Nature (III.I.II) concluded: "Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judged of." This thought was taken and ran with under the name emotivism by the likes of Ogden and Richards, A. J. Ayer, and C. L. Stevenson. The central core of these school of thought is that moral precepts are not really moral precepts at all, and certainly not descriptive of a fact of the moral realm, but rather expressions of deeply felt feelings of repugnance or attraction. So the statement, "Child abuse is wrong," is really nothing other than an expression of "Down with child abuse!" Affirmatively, the statement, "Promises ought to be kept," is really nothing but "Up with promise-keeping!" Oderberg, MT, 23. Moral statements are really nothing more than sophisticated "grunts and groans" of emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Morality is nothing other than discussion about boos and discussion about hurrahs, and so it may also be regarded as the "Boo-Hurrah" moral theory.

Prescriptivism, another moral theory that denies the factual reality of the moral realm, promotes moral statements from "grunts and groans" to mere prescriptions, that is, to imperatives or commands. A prescriptivist would therefore take the statement "Child abuse is wrong" to mean "Do not be a child abuser," and the statement, "Promises ought to be kept," as "Do keep your promises." In other words, moral oughts are really nothing other than efforts than one person trying to command another person, but have no real objective foundation.

The problem with such theories as emotivism and prescriptivism is that they run afoul of how men think, and how they use moral statements, and so are not satisfactory theories of the moral life of man.* We naturally use moral statements as the basis for reasoning. If moral statements were, in fact merely statements of emotion or statements of command disguised in other form, we would not be able to use them this way.

Both expressivism and prescriptivism equate the assertion of a moral proposition with something other than the statement of a fact: in one case an expression of emotion, in the other a command. However, one can do more with moral propositions than assert them: one can use them in the context of other more complex propositions, so the moral proposition that is a component of the more complex one is not asserted at all.

Oderberg, MT, 24. In other words, we use moral statements in a manner that is inconsistent with them being expressions of emotion or statements of command. We use them as statements of moral fact.

So, for example, from the moral statement "Prostitution is wrong," I can also say, "If Prostitution is wrong, then so is living off the earnings of prostitution." Using a form of syllogistic reason,** I can then reason that since Prostitution is wrong it necessarily follows that it is wrong to live of its earnings. Such reasoning cannot take place if the statement "Prostitution is wrong" is an expression or emotion or of command because it queers the syllogism.*** The term "Prostitution is wrong" must mean the same thing in the statement "Prostitution is wrong" as it does in the second statement "If Prostitution is wrong, then . . . ." or we have a fallacy.

Under the expressivist view, the first statement ("Prostitution is wrong") is nothing other than the statement "Down with Prostitution!" So the syllogism becomes: "Down with Prostitution!" If "Down with prostitution!" then "Down with living off its earnings!" Therefore, "Down with living of the earnings of prostitution!" In the prescriptivist view, the first statement ("Prostitution is wrong") is equivalent to "Do not be a prostitute." So the syllogism becomes "Do not be a prostitute." If "Do not be a prostitute," then "Do not live of its earnings." Therefore, "Do not live off the earnings of prostitution."

But the statements: "If 'Down with prostitution!' then 'Down with living off its earnings!'" and "If 'Do not be a prostitute' then 'Do not live off the earnings of prostitution'" are meaningless. So: (i) either they are wrong about moral statements being mere statements of emotion or statements of command (in which case they are wrong), or (ii) they are right about moral statements being nothing other than statements of emotion or statements of command, in which case any moral reasoning is made meaningless an nonsensical (because you can't take a command or expression of emotion and make and "if . . . then . . . " statement out of it) (which means they are wrong), or (iii) they use terms equivocally (to avoid the problems associated with "if . . . then . . . statements) and are guilty of the fallacy of equivocation (in which case they are wrong). Quartum non datur. No matter what, the result is "expressivism and prescriptivism are false." Oderberg, 25.

The fact is that, in reasoning about things in the realm of action, we use moral statements as if they were statements of fact related to a moral realm. We do not use moral statements as if they were in reality mere statements of command or expressions of emotions likes and dislikes. The emotivist and the prescriptivist simply do not describe what really happens among men. They fail to explain reality, and, in Oderberg's view "'ditch' reality." Oderberg, 26.

The fact is, man uses moral statements in a manner, not as expressions of command or feeling, but as statements of fact, as indicative statements. They are stated as if they are "being asserted as true or false," they are expressed in a manner where they can be "agreed or disagreed with," they are used "as premises in arguments."

[A moral statement] has the same indicative or fact-stating form as 'Grass is green.' As such, it can serve as a free-standing premise in an argument, such as the first premise [in a syllogism], as well as being embedded within a compound proposition, such as the 'if . . . then . . . ' proposition which [may be] the second premise of . . . [an] argument. . . . It is these arguments that we perfectly well understand, and which we assess for validity . . . , but which, if prescriptivism or expressivism were true, would turn out to be incomprehensible at worst, or implausibly have to be deemed invalid at best.

Oderberg, 25-26. But the prescriptivist and emotivist or expressivist do more than screw with, or misinterpret, moral reasoning, that is moral syllogistic reasoning. They also denude moral statements, restrict them, really dehumanize them. Man is fundamentally moral, and to wrest his moral utterances from a factual moral realm, in which he lives and moves and has his being, and put them into the realm of mere emotion or command, is to dehumanize him. "Moral propositions are not always asserted: they are embedded in unasserted contexts like 'if . . then . . . ' statements, but they are also assumed, wondered about, entertained, and the like. In all such contexts, treating them as commands or expressions produces nonsense." Oderberg, MT, 26-27.

Oderberg is clear. It is not that command or emotion have no role in moral reasoning or moral reality. Moral propositions--which are propositions of moral fact--can be used, and frequently are found, in commands. They can be formulated into law. Violation of moral propositions can also elicit disgust, disdain, anger, sorrow. But the real world of morality is not in command and not in emotion, the real world behind command and emotion is what the emotivist and the prescriptivist miss.

Expressivism and prescriptivism err by reversing the true order of explanation: it is the truth and falsehood of moral statements that justify the having of certain emotional responses and the issuing of commands.

Oderberg, MT, 27. The moral reality justifies the command and the emotion. And not vice versa. It is not the command and the emotion that justify the moral reality. The moral reality exists irrespective of command (command can err: laws can be unjust or vicious). The moral reality exists irrespective of emotion ("If it feels good, do it!" is a moral abomination).
______________________________________
*Oderberg attributes this argument to Peter Geach, who derived it from the German philosopher Gottlob Frege. Oderberg cites to two of Geach's papers: "Ascriptivism," Philosophical Review 69 (1960), pp. 221-5, reprinted in Peter Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 250-54, and "Assertion," Philosophical Review 74 (1965), pp. 449-65.
**modus ponens: If A, then B; A; therefore, B.
***It results in the fallacy called the "fallacy of equivocation." In other words it ascribes the same meaning to an expression in two propositions that in fact mean two different things.

Leo Strauss and Natural Right, Part 2: Does Natural Law Contradict History

BY "HISTORY" LEO STRAUSS means something a different from the connotations we would ordinarily associate with that word. He uses "history" short-hand to mean a specific school of philosophical thought, something he calls broadly "historicism," "the historical sense" or the "historical consciousness." Strauss, 10. This sort of jurisprudential and politico-philosophical thought was advanced by the likes of Gustav Hugo (1764-1844) or, more famously, by Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779-1861). Their banner was carried forward in Germany by the likes of G. F. Puchta (1798-1846), Karl Friedrich Eichhorn (1781-1854), Rudolf von Sohm (1841–1917), Otto von Gierke (1841-1921), and, in England, by the likes of James Bryce (1838–1922), Frederic W. Maitland (1850–1906), Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), and Paul Vinogradoff (1854–1925). Frequently, one hears from such authors words such as the "spirit" of a people, or the "genius" of their law.* It advanced tenuously from theoretical roots to a full-fledged radical or existential historicism.

Strauss distinguishes this sort of thinking from "conventionalism," and, of course, from the philosophy of natural law. Conventionalism is the philosophical view, "as old as political philosophy itself," that all right or justice is conventional, that is, that it is the result of agreement, tacit or otherwise, of a society. Strauss, 10. As a consequence, conventionalism holds that justice and right have no basis in nature. Since right and justice are a matter of convention or agreement, it follows that right and justice are relative, since an "agreement may produce peace but it cannot produce truth." Strauss, 11. But conventionalism in its original form did not reject nature entirely. In fact, it presupposed its existence because it opposed convention to nature, holding that the distinction between nature and convention was one of the most basic of philosophical distinctions relating to political and legal life. Importantly, it also recognized nature as having some sort of real, moral authority, and, in fact, frequently opposed the conventions of man to the truths of nature. In other words, conventionalism was limited to an explanation of human law, it was not intended to be a philosophical expression of the reality of the world at large. Conventionalism never suggested that nature was non-existent, unknowable, or false.

Those who advanced historicism beginning in the 19th century, however, departed rather starkly from the ordinary conventionalist view. They outright rejected nature as a normative restriction upon man's freedom. Either that or they defined nature, at least for man, to be freedom, thereby essentially erasing nature as any normative standard. For them, the view that there is a nature "out there" that somehow binds us is myth. According to those with a historicist view, nature is not of higher authority than man's own works derived from his own choice. The historicist rejects any distinction between convention and nature (because in man both are freedom), and so the distinction between nature and freedom collapses. In other words, man's free nature, not some nature of which freedom is but a part, is the norm of man's acting. It is man's nature to be free, and so freedom, whether as part of nature or opposed to it, is the determinant of right and wrong, which, of course, means there is no standard.

[T]hey conceive of man and his works, his varying notions of justice included, as equally natural as all other real things, or else they assert a basic dualism between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom or history.

Strauss, 11. For the historicist, the source of right and wrong, justice and injustice, is found in man's freedom. By erasing the distinction between nature and convention, the historical view essentially abandons the philosophical enterprise. They would force us back into Plato's cave to look at shadows. In a vivid image, borrowed from Plato, Strauss expresses it this way:

Philosophizing means to ascend from the cave to the light of the sun, that is, to the truth. . . . The fundamental premise of conventionalism is, then, nothing other than the idea of philosophy as the attempt to grasp the eternal. The modern opponents of natural right reject precisely this idea. According to them, all human thought is historical and hence unable to ever grasp anything eternal. Whereas, according to the ancients, philosophizing means to leave the cave, according to our contemporaries, all philosophizing essentially belongs to a "historical world," "culture," "civilization," "Weltanschaung," that is, to what Plato had called the cave.

Strauss, 11, 12. At the heart of the modern rejection of natural right is the "philosophic critique," a "critique of human thought as such," which provides that the knowability of natural right and certainly anything that could be characterized as a transcendent or eternal truth is impossible, a fool's errand at best. Though shrouded in the mists that generally hamper those who trace the genesis of ideas, historicism appears to arise in the 19th century as a reaction to the destructive French Revolution and the "natural right" doctrines that had animated it. At its heart, therefore, the historicists were, in a sense, conservative, even in a way traditionalists. They sought to preserve the traditions of their fathers, the ancien régime, from the radical threats of the French révolutionnaires, who predicated their break from tradition and the established order by invoking universal, rational principles of "natural right." But in rejecting the doctrines of the revolutionaries and in their haste to preserve what they could of the old order, the historicists were like a foolish man dashing into his burning house to save the oil portrait of his wife hanging in his study from the flames, forgetting all the while to save his wife who sleeps in the bedroom. They abandoned the more important to save the less important.

Some of it perhaps came from confusing theories of natural law or natural right. The "natural right" theories of the French revolutionary were not the same as the traditional theories of natural right or natural law. "Certainly, pre-modern natural right did not sanction reckless appeal from the established order, or from what was actual here and now, to the natural or rational order."** Strauss, 13. Of course, the revolutionary spirit of natural right, the droits de l'homme, was nothing but a reckless and sanguinary attack against the established order. The natural right advanced by the revolutionary, in fact, was novel, a grotesque mutation of the classical notions of natural law. It grew out of an effort "directed against all otherworldliness and transcendence," yet it ended up modifying or transforming, even replacing the classical transcendence associated with natural law with a sort of transcendent notion of "progress." Strauss, 15. Basically, it transferred the question from what was "best" (which is a referent to some transcendent value) or what was in accord with "nature" of man, to a question of what constituted the greatest "progress" in liberty and equality. It took the natural to be the individual, and the unnatural to be what was uniform or conventional. To be free, a human had to shed himself of any enforced order, and "pursue not just his happiness but his own version of happiness." Strauss, 14. But any appeal to universal, rational, transcendent, or ideal principles, whether conservative or revolutionary, responsible or irresponsible, right or wrong, even one that is ultimately based upon some sort of universal individualism or social "progress," unsettles the established social order.

The historicist school, then, constituted a conservative reaction against the abuse of natural law by the revolutionary elements then unsettling French, and indeed, European society. Distrustful of any appeal to universal principles which were obviously being abused by the revolutionists to justify their rebellion to the established order, these sought to find some sort of principle to overcome the hyper-individualism of the revolutionary ethos. In order to keep some semblance of order, check the potential unbridled individualism, keep the potential anarchy of the French revolutionary's political philosophy at bay, and (later) prevent the codification of their countries' laws a la code Napoleon, the historicist school "asserted that the local and temporal have a higher value than the universal." Strauss, 14-15. Accordingly, they focused on history and sought therein some sort of standard, rejecting the Vernunftsrecht (law of reason) of the revolutionary and replacing it with the Volksgeist (mind of the peoples). They emphasized historical study of such things as a people's particular genius for order (the Volksgeist) or the general laws of historical evolution. Howevere, this reliance on history, whether static or dynamic, as norm created a significant problem:

By denying the significance, if not the existence, of universal norms, the historical school destroyed the only solid basis of all efforts to transcend the actual. . . . [I]t depreciated universal principles in favor of historical principles. . . . History--history divorced from all dubious or metaphysical assumptions--became the highest authority.

Strauss, 15-16, 17. Ultimately, therefore, historicism became a form of positivism, rejecting metaphysical or theological knowledge, and relying on the knowledge of positive science or the empirical sciences. When all was said and done, the honest historicist would realize his "inability to derive any norms from history," leaving him without any objective norm. Strauss, 17.

Thus all standards suggested by history as such proved to be fundamentally ambiguous . . . . the meaningless web spun by what men did, produced, and thought, no more than by unmitigated chance--a tale told by an idiot. . . . Historicism culminated in nihilism. The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's becoming absolutely homeless.

Strauss, 17-18. Confronted with this obvious failure of historicism, one would have thought perhaps there would have been a return to classical thinking, and a search for universals. Instead of such intellectual repentance, however, the intellectual progeny of the first historicists engaged in a further act of intellectual recklessness. Despondent with the historical method's inability to provide norms, they simply assumed that the lack of norms was something that was part of man's predicament, that "all human thought depend[ed] ultimately on fickle and dark fate and not on evident principles accessible to man as man." Strauss, 19. This historicism smells less like skepticism, since its empirical analysis really does tell us what a particular culture or peoples believed to be right. Strauss, 20. It is perhaps a partial skepticism, carefully holding all other theories but its own as unknowable. In this sense, historicism "goes beyond skepticism. It assumes that philosophy, in the full and original sense of the term, namely, the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole, is not only incapable of reaching its goal, but absurd." Strauss, 30. However, historicism is not so absurd, as it escapes being devoured by the maws of skepticism.

But what historicism really turns out to be is a form of moral relativism, and a dogmatic one at that. To some degree, it appears to avoid the sin of dogmatism, and therefore historicism may be regarded as "an ally in our fight against dogmatism." Strauss, 22. But if it is an ally, it is a dangerous ally, because historicism itself may be nothing but dogmatism clothed in historicism's rags. "We are forced to suspect," says Strauss, "that historicism is the guise in which dogmatism likes to appear in our age." Strauss, 22. This is another way of saying that the relativism of historicism is the dogmatism of our age.

Historicism, however, contains the seeds of its own destruction because it is, at heart, built upon a contradiction. As Strauss explains it:

Historicism asserts that all human thoughts or beliefs are historical, and hence deservedly destined to perish; but historicism itself is a human thought; hence historicism can be of only temporary validity, or it cannot be simply true. To assert the historicist thesis means [in a sort of massive contradiction] to doubt it and thus to transcend it. . . . Historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis [is thus] self-contradictory or absurd.

Strauss, 25.

Confronted with this massive inconsistency, historicists either have to carve out a massive exception for their doctrine and regard historicism as the one "trans-historical" idea that has ever crossed the thought of man, or they must live with the absurdity of claiming that all is relative including their own theory. The historicist that refuses to grant an exception even to his own historicist thought is labeled by Strauss as the "radical historicist," one who adopts an "existentialist historicism." Strauss, 26, 32. The "radical historicist" therefore confronts a Nietzschean dilemma. If he denies the possibility of any comprehensive view, he is faced with a situation that would make human life impossible because human life requires some acceptance of a comprehensive view. "The theoretical analysis of life is noncommittal and fatal to commitment, but life means commitment." Strauss, 26. Burdened with a commitment to a noncommittal theory, and presumably a desire to keep on living (instead of committing suicide), what is the committed noncommittal man to do?

The first thing he can do is lose himself "in illusory security or in despair." Strauss, 27. To find illusory security, he can stuff his theory into the cask of esotericism, lock it up in some private place away from the masses sort of like one buries nuclear waste, and engage publicly in some sort of Platonic noble delusion, a magnificent myth, a noble lie so that life may go on under a commitment that the gnostic minority know is false. He will force a wan public intellectual smile of a man inwardly in despair.

If he chooses to face his despair with honesty, he must accept the fact that there is nothing that has any meaning, that all is flux and flux is all, and see himself as a pawn of life or bound to a fate that has no meaning, where choice is arbitrary, and no fundamental view of reality can ever be known. He will thus be like a pennant and simply wafts and waves in the winds that blow, and know not why or where there are winds, and why or where they blow, or even if they blow. Truth becomes as elusive, as ephemeral, as unable to be grasped as youthful beauty.

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.***

The last choice is to "choose in anguish the world view and the standards imposed [upon him] by fate." Strauss, 27. He can refuse to give in to his despair to ever grasp objective truth, and he will choose, not for any particular reason (for there is no reason to select one comprehensive view over another), but for choice's sake:

It is absolutely necessary to choose one [a comprehensive view]; neutrality or suspension of judgment is impossible. Our choice has no support but itself; it is not supported by any objective theoretical certainty; it is separated from nothingness, the complete absence of meaning, by nothing but our choice of it. Strictly speaking, we cannot choose among different views. a single comprehensive view is imposed on us by fate: the horizon within which all our understanding and orientation take place is produced by the fate of the individual or of his society.

Strauss, 27.

This is where the historical school, and its denial of ontological and teleological ethics, has led us. Where a comprehensive view is defined by will, by choice, by fate, and not by reason or by nature or by truth. In fact, it pretty much requires the rejection of reason, nature, and objective truth.

Historicism . . . stands or falls by the denial of the possibility of theoretical metaphysics and of philosophic ethics or natural right; it stands or falls by the denial of the solubility of fundamental riddles.

Strauss, 29. This, of course, is entirely opposed to doctrines of natural law:

All natural right doctrines claim that the fundamentals of justice are, in principle, accessible to man as man. They presuppose, therefore, that a most important truth can, in principle, be accessible to man as man.

Strauss, 28.

The historicist further puts himself in a highly idiosyncratic position. He insists in an extraordinary historical privilege, accorded him by fate, to have live in a "privileged moment in the historical process" where he recognizes that knowledge is based on fate. "[T]hanks to fate, it has been given to realized the radical dependence of thought on fate." It is a demonic aping of the Biblical "fullness of time," a secular perversion of the Pauline plenitudo temporis (cf. Gal. 4:4). And this "assumption of an absolute moment in history is essential to historicism." This absolute moment is one where the "fundamental delusion of the human mind has been dispelled," and the "insoluble character of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest," so that "no possible future change of orientation can legitimately make doubtful the decisive insight into the inescapable dependence of thought on fate." Strauss, 29. In short, we are privileged by an extraordinary felicitous boon of fate to live in a time where we have learned that there is no such thing as truth to which our choice must conform; rather, truth is what conforms to our choice.

The delusion of the historicist must be overcome, since if we accept its premises we cannot again accept a philosophy of natural law. By definition, a philosophy of natural law or natural right is nonhistoricist. For this reason, we must think not from current historicist premises, but we must be critical of historicist thought.

We need, in the first place, a nonhistoricist understanding of nonhistoricist philosophy. But we need no less urgently a nonhistoricist understanding of historicism, that is, an understanding of the genesis of historicism that does not take for granted the soundness of historicism.

Strauss, 33. In other words, we have to take off the intellectual glasses that blind us. We have to cut the empiricist, positivistic chains that force us to look at shadows, and attempt to convince us that those shadows are all that exist. We have to be bold enough to leave the cave of human construct and face the blazing sun of the world, of man, of order, as God has made it in all its fullness. We have to pray for intellectual sight and hope that, like St. Paul, scales may fall from our mind's eyes, and we receive once again or perhaps anew that precious gift of being able once again to see things not as we would want, but to see things as they really are.
______________________________
*Cf. Frederick Pollock, The Genius of the Common Law. Savigny wrote about the Volksgeist or the spirit of the people which animated law.
**For that reason, the fear that a Supreme Court justice who believes in a classical "natural law" will overthrow the Constitution is a false fear.
***From Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo"