By George Flannery

Recently, Boston College hosted a lecture by Robert P. George, well-known conservative scholar and natural law theorist.  George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, spoke on “Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity” as part of the annual Prophetic Voices Lecture program run by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.

During his lecture, George touched on many aspects of natural law and the grounding it provides for human rights.  George dwelt on the importance to recognize the dignity of the human person in all its aspects, including physical, rational, moral, and spiritual dimensions.  This dignity, and our capability to recognize it through ethical reasoning alone, formed one of the major themes of George’s lecture.

George honed in on rights as the fulfillment of the basic goods of the human person, and contended that these goods are “the goods of a rational creature”. In his own words, the “key joint of [his] argument” is that these capacities – the capacity to envisage a state, grasp the value of bringing it into being, make a choice to bring it into being, and work to do so – are “godlike”, and can be recognized as such even by those who do not believe in God.  As such, George argued that the intrinsic value of the human person can be recognized and protected even by those who disagree about the ultimate source of this value.

Throughout the talk, George reinforced his point that when it comes to providing a basis for human rights, “we don’t need to agree on the answer, as long as we agree on the truths of the question.” While George touched upon his own Catholic views, describing his view that protection from abortion and euthanasia are part of the same right to life that prevents killing of noncombatants in wartime, he recognized that there has historically been disagreement: “Historically, some of the greatest theorists denied basic human rights, and religious freedom in its robust form…is being denied even today” both by liberal secularists and by radical Islamists (as opposed to Islam).

George’s talk took a more philosophical bend near the end, focusing on the similarities and differences between natural law theory and two other ethical philosophies: consequentialism and Kantian deontology.  George concluded by stressing the importance of both rules and virtues in choosing a moral course.  Our choices, according to George, have not one, but two effects: they not only alter worldly states of affairs, but also they enable us to “constitute ourselves as people of character.  In light of this, a complete natural law distinguishes both norms and virtues”.

The lecture concluded with a question and answer session.  When asked how students could internalize and continue to pursue the discussion of natural law and human rights despite the sharply differing viewpoints present on campus, George cited the importance of continually asking questions and engaging opposing points of view, despite the personal cost.  George held up Socrates and St. Thomas Aquinas as mentors for students seeking truth, describing Aquinas’s willingness to engage over ten thousand questions by taking seriously and answering the strongest lines of counter-argument for each one, and Socrates’s pursuit of truth even at the cost of his life.

In George’s own words, the mission of the student ought to be “harmonic, open, allergic to ideology, and cautious of the prevailing ideas held by the beautiful, the partisan, and the possessors of power and prestige” in order for the student to live a life of the sort exemplified by Socrates and Aquinas, and that the role of the university was to “assist, encourage and fulfill students” to live lives of this sort: vital words for all of us who take seriously the question of what our university is, and what it ought to be.