On Natural Law…
Brian Tamanaha at Balkanization has a really awesome blog post on natural law and the view of "objective" that there are really existing natural principles of moral, legal, or political behavior. I find the argument presented here very compelling, but I must confess, I was already on this side of the argument to begin with.
It’s funny to see the string of angry comments against. We get a religious objection, we get an objection based on some sort of biological essentialism, and we get the objection that this is a conflation ontology with epistemology. The raiser of this objection on the blog says that "If we can’t have knowledge about a subject, we cannot say anything
about whether a statement is true or not. The fact that we cannot
comprehend something does not mean it does not exist." I find all three of these accounts unmoving. The first two carry with them obvious grounds for dismissal, particularly as the religious objection is not even completely based on God, but relies upon the idea of mass consensus to support the epistemological legitimacy of the claim.
The third argument is, to me, and uninteresting question, as the poster predicts would be a common objection. I would raise the objection that the idea that ontology is necessarily prior to epistemology does not necessarily seem right. Heidegger takes this on in the early portions of Being and Time when he writes about Descartes’ "cogito ergo sum." This only makes sense if we presuppose that we know what being is, or, to put it another way, it presumes to know what "I am" means and develops the "I think" part as a means of getting to it. If one is inclined to believe that the subject and the world have to be simultaneously understood in order to really understand either, then, it seems to me, that we are pretty much done with any type of hard core ontology-epistemology distinction.
Finally, I would like to once again advance the infinite wisdom of Thomas Kuhn, and point out that all of our epistemological pursuits carry with them an inherently normative component, because we choose to try to learn some things and not others because of anticipated preference satisfaction in knowing certain things rather than others. This seems to indicate that what we know as a subject is going to be constrained by where we find ourselves, who else is around us, and what our norms and cultural customs transmit to us are priority discoveries. This "crazy relativist" description to me looks uncannily like what I see when I look at people who actually try to accumulate knowledge in the world. Which, getting back to Tamanaha’s point, if this version of knowledge accumulation seems to correspond as decently as other versions, shouldn’t we all reserve a healthy dose of doubt in "capital T" Truths? Especially when knowledge runs into power?
