Hadley Arkes Speaks on The Common Sense of Natural Law

On Friday evening, November 11th, Murray Hill Institute hosted the first lecture of its Faith and Culture lecture series. The speaker was Hadley Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. Dr. Arkes is a leading expert on American political philosophy, public policy, and constitutional law. He has also been active in the political sphere as a spokesman for human rights. He was the main advocate and architect of the bill that is called the "Born-Alive Infants' Protection Act." The author of many articles and several books, his most recent book is Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

His talk, The Common Sense of Natural Law, focused on how modern man explains his decisions by the prejudices or habits of his "tribe." He also pointed to the capacity of human beings to give reasons for their ideas, which will unlock in others ideas already present in them by nature. To help explain the reasoning of pro-life proponents, he used as analogy the arguments of Abraham Lincoln on the subject of slavery. Lincoln argued that if a person could be enslaved because their skin color was darker, then it would follow that anyone whose skin was lighter than the slave owner in question could enslave them. And if the reasoning went that a person could be a slave to another because he had less intelligence, then the same conclusion could be drawn: that any other person with more intelligence could enslave the slave owner.

Another important point in Professor Arkes's discourse was that secular humanists claim that Catholics and other people of faith are appealing to their beliefs rather than reason. He then pointed out that it is the people of faith who are asking to see and consider the evidence in embryological studies which uphold that the fetus is indeed a living human being. It is rather the secular humanists who are led by passion and have created a dogma that the unborn child is not a living human being—by their belief that it is not.

Prof. Arke’s engaging and informative talk was followed by a lively question-and-answer period from the audience.