As I tiptoed into the living room, the burglar was bending
over to pick up the television set from the entertainment center. “Stop!” I
commanded, pointing the Sig at him. “Put it down slowly, then stand up with
your hands in the air. The cops are coming; you’re going to go to jail for
burglary.”
The burglar did as I told him. To my surprise, though, he
asked, “Is burglary wrong because the law says so, or does the law say so
because burglary is wrong?”
Puzzled, I asked, “What does it matter?”
“Well,” he responded, “if Texas law says so because burglary
is wrong, then the State of Texas doesn’t really define burglary.”
I shrugged. “That’s a trivial objection, because Texas enacted
the definition in its laws, and you’re still subject to Texas law. But what if
I say burglary is wrong because Texas law says so?”
The burglar smirked — or, at least, I think he smirked; it was difficult to tell through his pantyhose
mask in the dim light. “In the first place, if it’s wrong only because the law
says so, then ‘wrong things are against the law’ is merely a tautology, and
says nothing significant about wrongness.”
“I’d say the fact that you’re going to jail is pretty
significant,” I shot back. “The statement ‘Water is H2O’ is
tautologous, but it’s still significant. Definitions by their nature are
tautologous precisely because they express an identity. Numbers are only
definable by themselves; yet we use numbers for everything from counting
pennies to calculating the trajectory of a space vehicle. So the objection that
tautologous equals trivial is false.”
“If burglary is wrong because the law says so,” the burglar countered,
“the law could just as easily have been written to say that rape is acceptable
behavior. Therefore, it cannot be wrong just because the law says so!”
“How so?” I shrugged. “Just over one hundred fifty years
ago, Texas state law said the chattel enslavement of black people was morally
acceptable; and many if not most Texans took great exception to anyone who said
otherwise. We criticize that attitude now because we come from a context in
which slavery is morally abhorrent; had we been raised in the antebellum South,
it’s more than likely neither of us would have thought it wrong. Heck, prior to
the Civil War, many people in the North didn’t think it was unacceptable, or
that they were called to end the institution. You’re assuming what you need to
prove — that wrongness has a meaning defined
by something other than what the law says.”
“You obviously think it doesn’t,” the burglar said bitterly,
as cop cars began to arrive.
“Sed contra,” I
replied, “Scripture says, ‘You shall not steal’ (Genesis
20:15; cf. Deuteronomy
5:19).” I always seem to pick up St. Thomas Aquinas’ style in the middle,
not from the beginning.
“I respond: There is
a moral standard, a ‘natural law’ to which human law ought to adhere. We
Christians believe that natural law takes its nature and being from God, Who
wills good things to be good, and desires that the creatures to whom He’s given
free will do that which is good. That our laws fail to encode the natural law fully
or consistently is testimony, not to its absence, but to our fallen, limited
nature. Texas law encodes the natural law by illegalizing theft, which includes
burglary.
“However, God is at the beginning of all things. Once you
get to the beginning, there’s no going further back, no beginning before the beginning. In a similar
fashion, there can be no ur-standard logically prior to God’s standard; the
moral law is good, not because it meets a certain benchmark, but because it is the benchmark. It’s like positing a
natural number less than one but more than zero — by definition, it can’t exist.
Therefore, there can’t be a standard by which the natural law’s prohibition of
theft is wrong.
“To your first objection I reply: since all that is good comes from God, and God gives
all things their goodness, it would be true in a manner to say that God calls
them good because they are good — God
does not lie. However, that manner
wouldn’t necessitate a moral law separate from and prior to God.
“To your second objection I reply: the identity between God and goodness cannot be of a trivial nature, because the existence of
the moral law tells us God is not only interested in our behavior but makes
demands of it — we are called to ‘be perfect, as [our] heavenly Father is
perfect’ (Matthew
5:48). If God could have defined goodness
differently, what of it? He did not; to find the alternate-reality ethos
repugnant only demonstrates the fact that we adhere fully to the ethos God did create. You’re assuming an
independent standard your argument doesn’t make necessary.”
The burglar asked one final question as the cops entered the
house. “But what if there is no
objective standard?”
I shrugged. “Well, then there’s no objective reason to
change laws we like. Morality is all about ought
and ought not: People ought to respect others’ possessions;
they ought not take things that don’t
belong to them. If there is an objective natural law, then human law ought to conform to it, and ought not deviate from it except by the
necessity of survival. But if there is no natural law, then there is no
external standard to which human law ought
to conform, and therefore no objective measure by which a law can be judged
‘immoral’. I might think it wrong; you might think it wrong; but why should
our opinion of the law be privileged over everyone else’s?
“We’re left then with our subjective preferences and
desires. De gustibus non est disputandum:
you can’t dismiss on grounds of irrationality that which never claimed to
be rational. We here in Texas prefer not to be burgled; heck, we prefer to have
the option to shoot people we catch robbing our homes,” I said, wiggling the
Sig to underscore my point. “On what grounds can you persuade us to adopt a
more tolerant law, given that — in the absence of an objective morality — tolerance cannot be morally better or
worse than intolerance? This is the
way we like it here in Texas, and who the hell are you to say different?”
At that point, the police broke up the conversation, cuffed
the interloper, and took my statement. As they cuffed him, he breathed a sigh
of relief … probably for the same reason I sighed as I put down my Sig. We’d
been talking for quite a bit, and that gun was getting heavy; no doubt his arms
ached from holding up his hands all that time. Eventually, he was carted off;
the CSI guys got their prints; the police left, and peace descended on the house.
He’s in jail, now, having pleaded out to breaking and entering and misdemeanor
misuse of philosophy.
I just hope that, when he gets out, he doesn’t try again
using Hume’s “is/ought” problem. Then I might really have to shoot him.
