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July 29, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
08:18
Ben Shapiro Explains Natural Law
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All right, my friends.
Ben Shapiro.
Yes, THE Ben Shapiro.
How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps is his book about the disintegrationists and the unionists.
That's the way he...
Those are his terms for left and right, as it were.
Is that correct?
Is that fair to say?
I think that's fair.
I mean, I would say that there are some people sort of on the alt-right or the radical right who also think that the country is steeped in racism and think that the country should fall apart because of it.
So I've tried to eschew the terms left and right here specifically because I think too many liberals don't understand the difference that you always make between liberal and left.
And instead I've used unionists and disintegrationists to hopefully provide a common point to rally around in spite of labels that people tend to use.
That's the hope of your book.
I got that clearly.
That the better angels, as you put it, will prevail.
I have a question.
That will, I think, surprise you, because I know you think I'm bright.
So, I am going to confess to you ignorance on something so basic to the American founding, and I have to tell you, a lifetime of reading about it, including in your book, and you're clear, I still don't understand natural law.
Okay.
So the basic idea of natural law is that discoverable in the human condition are certain laws that you can discern just from the way that nature works.
So Aristotle, mostly Aristotle, but Plato also talks a little bit about the idea of natural laws existing in the universe and the teleology of things.
So, for example, Aristotle talks about the difference between good and bad, not lying in a moral distinction between good and bad.
But in the usefulness of the proper use of a thing.
So, for example, if you see a spoon, a good spoon is a spoon that holds soup.
A bad spoon is a spoon that does not hold soup.
A good person, says Aristotle, is a person who is capable of reasoning, right, because a person is made to reason.
And so a person who reasons properly is doing something that is good.
A person who reasons improperly is doing something that is unfit.
In the same way, when you look at the universe and you look at rules that are made for the universe, they're rules that...
They adhere to human nature.
Those are natural laws that we work in accordance with.
And then there are rules that run against human nature, and those are rules that we do not, that cut against the ability of human beings to operate in accordance with reason.
The natural law, according to the ancients, was really about the effectuation of reason in the world, right?
That you can look at the world around.
You can discern certain rules that apply.
And in the modern world, we tend to think of this as science, right, like gravity.
But in the ancient world, they thought of this in terms of...
Certain laws that apply to human nature that when followed make life better and that also are discernible from just the nature of man and the world around him.
So first of all, I want everybody to know why I'm asking it because this played a real role in the founding.
What is it?
Nature and nature's God, correct?
Right.
That's in the Declaration of Independence.
Right.
So the founders were big believers in the natural law and natural rights that kind of spring there.
From natural law precedes natural rights and philosophy.
So Aristotle talks about natural law.
He never talks about natural rights.
Natural rights are a much later outgrowth.
And that really comes when people recognize that natural law means that individuals are sovereign.
And so as an aspect of natural law, you know, the way that human beings rationally interact with the world, there are certain rights that adhere to you as a member of Society and as an individual.
It really becomes clear to people that you need natural rights, not just natural law, because there are a lot of tyrannies that use natural law in order to effectuate tyranny.
There are theocracies that say natural law is following the Bible, and therefore you should follow the Bible.
Is natural law morality without theology?
Yes.
I think that's fair.
Yes.
And so the...right.
Yeah, I think that's accurate.
And so the addition of rights to that is kind of an interesting amalgam.
Because morality really doesn't tend to talk about rights very much.
And morality is about what you should do.
Rights are about what you can do.
And they occupy kind of different spaces.
The reason that they burst into Western history is really in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, when a bunch of places that acknowledge morality, but different types of religious morality say, okay, yeah, but if we're going to live together, we're also going to have to recognize that we have a right to disagree on certain aspects of how we worship, for example.
The birth of natural rights really doesn't happen.
In sort of its full flowering until, for example, Hugo Grotius, who's the first person to use the idea of natural rights, starts talking about this in the 16th century, and then that starts to take on a life of its own, that you have rights as Englishmen, you have rights as citizens.
Let me tell you part of the problem I've had my whole life is that it's an odd name because you can't learn, I don't think you could learn anything about right and wrong from nature.
Right.
So this is a struggle that Leo Strauss famously had, you know, sort of reason versus revelation.
And I talk about this actually in my last book, Right Side of History.
The fact is that what the founders did with that is they said sort of what Maimonides actually says, which is there are certain laws that are sort of common that you see across societies, like don't kill each other.
Like that's fairly common across societies, including primitive societies.
Now they only apply to members of the tribe.
The universalization of that law requires something broader.
Usually people say, don't murder somebody inside our tribe, but if you, you know, go murder the neighbors, that's okay.
But the universalization requires something broader, which is why what the Founding Fathers really did in the story of the West is not just the story of Greece or Rome, you know, Athens.
The story of the West is the application of biblical principle along with reason.
And so what you see in Aquinas, what you see in Maimonides, is the idea that there is a—and this is something you agree with, Dennis—there is a reason to God's commandments that is discoverable.
In general, by humans.
That it is not just a series of...the word in Hebrew would be chukim.
It's not just a series of rationality-free commands, that when you look at God's law, it actually makes a lot of sense.
And so what Maimonides sort of suggests, and Aquinas does too, is that there is no conflict between natural law and biblical law.
And that's why Aquinas essentially says that Plato and Aristotle came very close to mimicking the morality of the Bible just through use of pure reason, but they couldn't get fully there because you still require revelation.
Okay.
Alright, the reason I asked it is because I think I represent a lot of my listeners who've heard the term all their lives, and I'm not all that clear on it either.
Alright, anyway, if you had the ability to speak to every young person in America, what would you say with regard to the next election?
What I would say is that the character of the presidential candidate is not code for what they represent.
Right now, I think there's a great conflict in the view of President Trump.
And the view of President Trump, on the one hand, people on the left, they point to the fact that he's vulgar, and then he says things on Twitter they don't like, and the fact that, you know, all the things that we already know about President Trump and his flaws.
And they say, why should somebody like that be president?
And people on the right say, because they're stopping people on the left.
That what Trump really is, what he represents more than anything, is a dam against the encroaching waves that are going to swamp society if Democrats were to take complete power and move toward that.
The battle in the election, and then it's something you've been saying for a really long time, is very rarely about the candidates themselves.
It's about the movement that they represent or the philosophies that they represent.
And so if you're going to make an intelligent choice about who you want to be president, you should be making that choice not on the basis of...
Trump's vicissitude or Joe Biden's finality.
You should be making a choice on the basis of who you think the idea is represented by the movements that are backing these folks.
Okay, hold on there and let's, I want to continue with it.
His book, Ben Shapiro's book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps is up at DennisPrager.com.
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