Pierre Manent is a renowned professor of legal philosophy and political philosophy. He has written Natural Law and Human Rights (Katz, 2021), a topic open to constant dialogue among researchers. Manent approaches the topic from a classical perspective in counterpoint with the modern vision of law. Thus, he points out that “the Christian, or biblical, idea of a humanity that begins under the law and that, obedient or disobedient, remains under the law is replaced by that of a humanity that begins in a freedom ignorant of all law and that, once forced by necessity to give itself laws, it will only do so under the condition and to preserve the integrity of its lawless freedom: the modern citizen, by placing himself under the law that he has produced, hopes to continue being, according to the formula of the Social Contract, “as free as before.” In other words, from now on the law only has validity or legitimacy if it aims to guarantee human rights and is limited to that purpose” (p. 14). Hence, the law, in modernity, is aimed at giving a letter of citizenship to all the claims that the individual or groups desire.
Modernity, Manent maintains, conceives nature in a very simple way, reducing it to a minimum biological content, without consistency or the ability to guide a future path of conduct. This nature has nothing to teach us about what a human being is and even less about what it should become. In this way, human development becomes free, and undifferentiated: all configuration possibilities would and do have a place. Nature, thus understood, is radically separated from properly human, in such a way that it can be constructed or deconstructed as desired, since there is no determining or inspiring natural basis of human biography (cf. pp. 15-16).
At this point, Manent suggests that “the extension of rights, the opening of “new rights”, can never constitute more than half of the task of humanization. Indeed, we have the obligation to order the common world through determining rules or laws that must derive from other sources, in addition to human rights. The declaration and promotion of human rights – Manent states – presuppose the prior existence of a human world already ordered according to rules or purposes that do not simply derive from human rights” (p. 56). That is, our world is, essentially, archic, ordered. However, the initiators of the modern movement stated that this archic character was not natural at all, that what was natural was, on the contrary, the anarchy of a condition without command or obedience and that, only from this similar condition, could build a just mandate and a just obedience, in such a way that the laws would adjust to our own wants to continue being free under the mandate of the general will (cf. p. 109).
Manent does not renounce order and maintains that human rights require a founding root that is natural law, which is made explicit in the practical life of the human being, whose actions require “a collaboration and a weighing between the three main motives that are the pleasant, the useful and the honest. To the latter can be added the just and the noble, which fall into the same genus. These motives belong to the human being as such. No human being can avoid being moved by what is pleasant, what is useful and what is honest (what is just, what is noble). We have no power over the active presence in us of these three great motives, even though the strength of each one and their relative weight, the way in which they affect our actions, vary according to our individual nature, our education and, precisely, the way in which we get used to acting” (p. 111).
The introduction of motives into human action, according to Manent, would provide an adequate understanding of natural law and its practical character. In this way, it would be possible to escape “the tyranny of the explicit and the exhaustive, which is the fatality and scourge of the philosophy of human rights, which, having abandoned the perspective of the agent, can only guide action through of absolute propositions that could not enter into practical deliberation because, where a human right has been declared, there is nothing to deliberate, but only to strictly apply it”. On the other hand, the understanding of natural law, in its practical dimension and taking into account the motives of action, excludes a dogmatic and despotic explanation, as it always leaves room for deliberation and then choice (cf. p. 121). Natural law, thus conceived, is a guide to action and not a rigid protocol, which allows judging regarding the best goods.
The dialogue that Manent carries out between the classical and modern perspectives around natural law and human rights is commendable. By introducing the motives into the natural law, it acquires freshness and loses the rigidity to which it is exposed, when it is isolated from its natural setting, which is practical life. However, it seems to me that conceiving natural law as the set of inclinations towards the pleasant, the useful and the honest is reductive and insufficient. This Aristotelian perspective remains halfway and, although it gives flexibility to natural law, it fails to solve the problem: what pleasant, useful or honest goods are those that are best for the human being as such. The weighing must be accompanied by the discernment of the good inherent in the human essence. That is, we return to the beginning of the discussion in the sense of specifying what are those tendencies and intrinsic goods that are conducive to human flourishing.
A very suggestive essay by Professor Manent, a topic – that of nature, natural law and human rights – to which we must return many times in the attempt to make the human condition understandable.
Exaudi
THE NATURAL LAW
AND THE REASONS FOR THE ACTION
Return many times in the attempt
make the human condition understandable
VOICES – FRANCISCO BOBADILLA
