Natural Law Liberalism and the Malaise of Modernity. By StephenBoulter. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2024. xvi + 243pp. $129.99. ISBN: 9783031597367

Put one way, the thesis of Stephen Boulter's Natural Law Liberalism and the Malaise of Modernity is not unfamiliar: despite dramatic increases in quality of life, modernity has generated material, moral, political, and spiritual challenges that its own resources cannot adequately meet, but that we can best understand and overcome by recourse to the premodern resources of Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy. Unlike many who have flown the flag of natural law theory, however, Boulter seeks not to replace modernity with some known or imaginary alternative, but to save it from itself. While modernity faces external challenges from those who reject some or all of its central commitments, its greater vulnerability lies in internal tensions between those commitments. Modern and postmodern modes of thought leave us unable to ground those commitments harmoniously if at all. Natural law theory, suitably understood, can strengthen the case for retaining these commitments and enable us to resolve the tensions between them by modifying each in a principled way. In many respects, Boulter's project bears comparison to the Aristotelian critique of modernity that Alasdair MacIntyre has elaborated since at least After Virtue and up to Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (MacIntyre 1981, 2016). Yet where MacIntyre rejects modernity and is especially severe in his attacks on liberalism, Boulter maintains that we will see modernity as worth saving once we see it correctly, and liberalism is the commitment of modernity that he takes to be the most central to his own philosophical framework. Natural Law Liberalism, Boulter's name for that framework, is, as he describes it, a child of liberalism and natural law theory. As children do, it bears some resemblance to both parents but can be identified with neither. Once developed, it can meet the internal challenges of modernity by grounding its commitments in a form of moral realism that recognizes objective human flourishing as distinctively contributing to the objective good of the world. An account of practical reason and of the functions of social, political, and economic orders enables us to understand the elements of modernity in a way that clarifies their relations to each other and guides the resolution of conflicts between them. Boulter's efforts at that resolution lead him to defend some bold proposals in politics and economics in the interest of overcoming the malaise of modernity. To understand him, we need first to understand what he means by modernity and what he takes to be its malaise. We can then consider what Natural Law Liberalism is and how it differs from other forms of liberalism and natural law theory. We will then be in a position to understand how Natural Law Liberalism can help us overcome modernity's malaise without abandoning its constitutive commitments. It is not always apparent what theories of modernity are theories of, but Boulter offers refreshing clarity: modernity is a social order. Drawing on the 20th century sociologist Ernest Gellner, Boulter understands a social order as a unity of collective institutions and practices playing three essential roles: meeting its members' material needs, making and enacting decisions, and arriving at authoritative judgments about how things are. A social order, then, has a productive/economic dimension, a political/coercive dimension, and a cognitive/legitimative dimension. Taking “Modernity” as the name for the social order that has emerged in developed Western nations, Boulter sees it as a distinctive way of conceiving and enacting these functions. In the cognitive/legitimative domain, Modernity is committed to the sciences as the source of authoritative knowledge. In the productive/economic domain, it is committed to a mixed market economy with international trade complemented by governmental provision of needs that competitive markets cannot adequately secure. In the political/coercive domain, it is committed to liberal democracy, which in turn combines commitments to popular sovereignty and constitutionalism. Theorists of modernity might object to this way of conceiving it, but setting merely terminological disputes aside, it is not hard to see that a social order characterized by these commitments has for some time now been dominant in the West, appeared triumphant in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and has lately become increasingly beleaguered, perhaps even more than Boulter might have predicted when he wrote the book. Attacks on modernity from those who reject one or more of these commitments pose serious challenges. None can be met, Boulter thinks, until we have a more satisfactory resolution of the problems that arise from tensions between the commitments themselves. Constitutionalism and the rule of law are in tension with popular sovereignty understood as majority rule on the principle of one person one vote. Democracy's anti-elitism often manifests as an anti-intellectualism in tension with modernity's inevitable political reliance on expert knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge; suspicion of elites and of the sciences is exacerbated when the sciences point to conclusions at odds with the immediate interests of voters, who often ignore expert opinion. Popular sovereignty also sits in some tension with the powers exercised by an unelected judiciary and civil service. Market economies, meanwhile, have led to enormous disparities of wealth, which translate into disparities of political power and undermine democratic equality even in conditions where the material inequalities may not be objectionable per se. Mixed economies also encounter a different sort of tension with democracy, as electorates keen on government-funded services are often averse to paying for those services through increased taxation; governments that refuse to cut services must then choose between increasing the debt for future taxpayers and growing the economy, often by intensifying engagement with global markets. The globalization that follows Modernity's commitment to exchange economies and international trade has made economic power transnational, leaving elected officials at the national level with too little power to control factors with significant impact on the lives of their constituents. Hence, national sovereignty seems to be in tension with our increasing dependence on global markets. Finally, and perhaps worst of all, Modernity's commitment to the sciences as the sole public authority in the cognitive/legitimative domain leaves us with no publicly authoritative way of reasoning about or coming to know objective value. Modernity's cognitive/legitimative authority therefore offers no guidance to its political/coercive authority; it cannot guide voters or officials beyond informing their pursuit of means to their antecedently chosen ends, and it cannot ground Modernity or its elements in anything deeper than the subjective preferences of the majority. These tensions vitiate Modernity's functioning as a social order, and until they can be eased, it will not only be more vulnerable to its external enemies, but more likely to lose supporters as they despair of solving the problems without defecting on one of the central commitments. The way to preserve all three commitments is to understand and relate them to one another in the light of Natural Law Liberalism. Boulter's version of natural law theory combines an objective account of human flourishing with a unified account of practical reason according to which natural laws, in the relevant sense, are dictates of practical reason. These dictates tell the agents to whom they apply that they ought to act in such-and-such a way on the grounds that acting in that way is the best way of responding to the goods relevant in the circumstances of action, goods that are objective because they satisfy real needs. “A flourishing life is not simply one with all the best goods. It is a life where external means goods are sought and employed to facilitate the achievement of the end good of the body (health), which in turn serves the ends of the mind” (31). Actions are reasonable if they are non-defective responses to a good, to something that “promotes human health, physical, emotional, psychological and social by satisfying a real need either directly or indirectly” (36). What sorts of actions respond non-defectively to a good? There are three conditions for right action: the action must be of a kind that tends to promote the relevant goods among those affected by the action (the type condition); it must be appropriate to the agent's concrete circumstances (the token condition); and it must be done with the primary intention of promoting the goods that actions of that kind tend to promote (the intention condition). A natural law theory, then, aims to tell us what the goods at stake in action are, how they fit into human flourishing as a whole, and how it is best to respond to them. To call practical reason's dictates natural is to say that they are aimed at the flourishing of beings with the nature we have, that human beings require no special training or revelation to know their most basic principles, that we have natural inclinations to follow the basic principles, and that no human or divine lawgiver is required to give these laws their authority. Boulter's account stands out among contemporary theories claiming membership in the broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law tradition. His eagerness to defend liberal political institutions and his approach to natural law theory as an account of reasonable responsiveness to objective goods share much in common with proponents of so-called new natural law theory.1 But Boulter distances himself from that approach primarily on the grounds that it embraces an unwarranted fact/value distinction and so ends up intuitionistic in its practical epistemology and non-naturalist in its metaphysics of value. Among contemporary natural law theorists, he most closely follows Mark Murphy (2001) and Jonathan Crowe (2019), but he diverges from them in embracing a more thoroughly Aristotelian metaphysics. Unlike some broadly neo-Thomistic writers, however, Boulter does not appeal to a developed metaphysical system so much as to some broad metaphysical concepts and principles shared by proponents of rival accounts within the ancient and medieval tradition.2 One set of principles concerns part/whole relations. The universe itself is a whole, and everything else is a part of it, but any such part that itself has parts is itself a partial whole. The existence and identity conditions of a partial whole depend on relations to other parts and to the whole to which it belongs, and “to fully understand any such partial whole one has to appreciate that it provides the existence and identity conditions for further entities, viz. its own constituent parts” (58). Another crucial metaphysical thesis is the convertibility of ‘being’ and ‘good’: because everything is good insofar as it exists, the universe as a whole is good, and everything that is a part of it is, too. But since those parts are often also partial wholes, they have a goodness that lies not in their being parts or functioning well as parts, but in flourishing as ends in themselves. Human societies are such partial wholes, and the aim of political philosophy is to understand how their parts would be best disposed and related to serve the ends of the society as a whole. Yet the end of a society as a whole is to promote the common good of the society's members, “peace, security, and the prosperity of all members of the body politic” (62). These members, in turn, are themselves partial wholes, and so do not exist solely for the sake of their societies; rather, a society that promotes the common good of its members must promote their flourishing as the partial wholes they are. They, in turn, must understand themselves and their own flourishing in a way that adequately takes account of their status as parts of wholes on which they depend: not only are we parts of societies and other forms of human community, but we are parts of ecosystems, of planets and solar systems, of the universe. Boulter takes it that this feature of his version of natural law theory helps to temper “the spiritual emptiness of the individualistic atomism of modernity” (59) and to provide a basis for environmental ethics. Yet it also leads to the basic account of politics that he calls “the original liberalism” (57) as he finds it in medieval and early modern Scholastic developments of Aristotelian thought. Political society exists by nature insofar as human beings require it for their flourishing and develop it in accordance with our natural inclination to pursue what conduces to our good. Each of us flourishes only as a partial whole, and our parthood conditions the forms our flourishing can take, and so too the kinds of action that respond non-defectively to the good. Yet the wholes to which we belong exist to promote the common good that we share with the others with whom we co-operate to constitute those wholes. Political offices exist to serve that common good, and the authority of rulers is conditional on fulfilling the duties of office. Political societies exist to ensure that their members have access to the necessary means of well-being, and not being subject to the arbitrary whims of rulers is one of those necessary means. The natural law conception of politics is, then, fundamentally opposed to absolutism; the acts and reasoning of political officials and rulers are subject to the principles of natural law as a matter of what is required for them to play the roles in human society that they exist to play. From this fundamental opposition to absolutism, premodern natural law theorists did not hesitate to derive substantive conclusions that Boulter thinks amount to a form of liberalism. The very nature of politics calls for the rule of law, for the subordination of officials' private interests to the common good, for rulers to rule at the discretion of the ruled, for the consent of the people as expressed through assemblies to stand as the ultimate authority, and for the division of powers already implicit in ancient and medieval theories of mixed government. Many readers will doubt that these principles suffice to make natural law theory liberal; it seems to secure only “civil liberty: the Rule of Law and the rejection of arbitrary rule” (53). Boulter emphasizes that contemporary liberalism is taken to involve a commitment to more than civil liberty; it includes fiscal liberty, personal liberty, social liberty, economic liberty, domestic liberty, national liberty, international liberty, and political liberty in the sense of popular sovereignty. Yet he thinks premodern natural law theorists hit upon most of these forms of liberty as “measures found to be conducive to the common good and to the achievement of Eudaimonia by individuals,” and the contemporary Natural Law Liberal provides the best defense of these “ingredients of the liberal creed” (72). After setting out the elements of Natural Law Liberalism, the bulk of the book turns to resolving the internal conflicts between Modernity's constitutive commitments. A chapter on democracy considers classic and contemporary arguments for and against democracy, finding little to be said in its and to the that any modern on the principle of one person one will be too to make In systems, is either themselves adequately to a that has little or no impact on the or without adequately informing popular sovereignty for political Boulter that liberal the principle of one person one vote. In its they would do well to require to be in order to the system by replace the system with and political The consent expressed in be as a than a of with as or consent to the of an and all laws by a in its first as one of these proposals would be a from the status their seems to amount to in any on the rule of law and on on related problems about the of liberal accounts of the division of The of powers has often been thought to depend on that the of and civil are from in turn has been thought to depend on between making and laws and between and Boulter with of and that these are Yet he the judiciary and civil by the roles of and some from he out an account of a by a and as practical reason. as governments their actions are subject to the principles of practical reason. A therefore be in such a way as to ensure that its actions to those Each of a is to have powers because it has a in action the rule of those We understand each in of three conditions for right action as non-defective to the good. the are to themselves with the common good. The however, in meeting the type by and The judiciary and the on meeting the token The is to ensure that the laws are do this the law to make it non-defective by it to the always with an to and the common The civil to meeting the token in the of While elected officials make to the type on right action, civil in their ensure that are without to the common good. as have an on that cannot be to circumstances without to the common good, so too are civil to have an on that cannot be so of the roles of a them the authority of the fundamental principles of practical reason. than however, it is an when it the enables the to act more by the light of those Yet it also unelected and power elected Boulter natural law liberalism to the of the Scholastic Aristotelian conception of social wholes as of is developed the of through resources from and the and We at an account of what an economic system is, what it is to do, and what it would be for it to do it economic system is an each play a in the of the and in the functioning of the whole. the end of the economic and the point of from which the parts are to constitute a whole, is meeting the material needs of human beings in the of account of an economic system Boulter a philosophy of economics as a that aims to understand the parts of such a system and its to in one part tend to lead to in the Yet this is at once and because we know what an economic system is, we know what a good one would do, and if we know how an economic system we know how a good one would we understand an economic system in its in the social order, we can objective principles for In with of economic and to concrete these principles can ground judgments of economic with a to objective Yet these principles, if not the concrete political judgments of economic are part and of the of economics understood as of an economic order. Drawing on Boulter these principles to in of an economic would economic and into the level of the law where they would not be up for The is to economic from the of an in of and to understood to ensure that economic power to its some of many Yet both the and the out the of the these would become part of the political to democratic from conditions that or Boulter his of Natural Law Liberalism to the malaise of modernity with accounts of the and the within the of a unified order of collective action an and account of these one that enables us to our of the functions of these with our and of them. Boulter some bold proposals for and on an of these as services that to society and the economy in the aims at a with and economic the is one of its and exists to serve as a for provide a and to facilitate Natural Law Liberalism this of the and into the of a social and political order as promoting and the common good. In it grounds judgments about and that have as much to as the and accounts that economics can In all these we can see how Boulter understands the between and judgments of simply are judgments of a kind of will to know more about how to understand Natural Law position to a of and that Boulter does not consider will some of their in Boulter's particularly in The of and from a of Natural law theorists and other will not to many that we might well that a natural law theory ought to Boulter's book simply does not the ground of Natural Law and or the Natural Law the of different to natural law does it that have exercised some in the of Natural and and Boulter's may many or as in each of the many that Boulter will likely have It is perhaps the that one of its provide material for a on its It is a Yet we might also see the and of Natural Law Liberalism as a The achievement of this it seems to is to a of the human social, political, and economic orders as real with objective functions to play to the flourishing of human functions by of practical reason. These orders of social that Boulter's and their might to light We need not these however, to have good grounds for Boulter's of such of collective action exist and are not of those of us who about them seems to on that amount to a rejection of metaphysical can perhaps the that lead us to such we these further Boulter's account provides a for about and economics in a way that what the modern of and has done so much to Natural law theorists and will with much that Boulter in this book. may be to in it a that to make a of sense of social and political practical and Natural Law Liberalism more than it but that is all the of it give to much further thought and The no conflicts of not to this as no generated or the