The U.S. Constitution provides a framework for our laws, but what does it have to say about morality? Paul DeHart ferrets out that document’s implicit moral assumptions as he revisits the notion that constitutions are more than merely practical institutional arrangements. In _Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design_, he seeks to reveal, elaborate, and then evaluate the Constitution’s normative framework to determine whether it is philosophically sound—and whether it makes moral assumptions that correspond to reality. Rejecting the standard approach of the (...) intellectual historian, DeHart for the first time in constitutional theory applies the method of inference to the best explanation to ascertaining our Constitution’s moral meaning. He distinguishes the Constitution’s intention from the subjective intentions of the framers, teasing out presuppositions that the document makes about the nature of sovereignty, the common good, natural law, and natural rights. He then argues that the Constitution constrains popular sovereignty in a way that entails a real common good, transcendent of human willing and promotive of human well-being, but he points out that while the Constitution presupposes a real common good, it also implies a natural law that prescribes the common good. In critiquing previous attempts at describing and evaluating the Constitution’s normative framework, DeHart demonstrates that the Constitution’s moral framework corresponds largely to classical moral theory. He challenges the logical coherency of modern moral philosophy, normative positivism, and other theories that the Constitution has been argued to embody and offers a groundbreaking methodology that can be applied to uncovering the normative framework of other constitutions as well. This cogently argued study shows that the Constitution presupposes a natural law to which human law must conform, and it takes a major step in resolving current debates over the Constitution’s normative framework while remaining detached from the social issues that divide today’s political arena. _Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design_ is an original approach to the Constitution that marks a significant contribution to understanding the moral underpinnings of our form of government. (shrink)

While the dominant approaches to the current study of political philosophy are various, with some friendlier to religious belief than others, almost all place constraints on the philosophic and political role of revelation. Mainstream secular political theorists do not entirely disregard religion. But to the extent that they pay attention, their treatment of religious belief is seen more as a political or philosophic problem to be addressed rather than as a positive body of thought from which we might derive important (...) insights about the nature of politics and the truth of the human condition. In a one-of-a-kind collection, DeHart and Holloway bring together leading scholars from various fields, including political science, philosophy, and theology, to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and to demonstrate the role that religion can and does play in political life. Contributing authors include such important thinkers as Peter Augustine Lawler, Robert C. Koons, J. Budziszewski, Francis J. Beckwith, and James Stoner. (shrink)

Early modern theorists linked the idea of sovereign power to a conception of absolute power developed during the medieval period. Ockham had reframed the already extant distinction between God's absolute and ordained powers in order to argue that God was free of moral constraint in ordaining natural law for human beings. Thus, the natural law could command the opposite of what God had ordained if He wished to make it so. Bodin extended Ockham's argument to earthly sovereigns, who do not (...) (he argued) have to obey civil law. However, Bodin undermined his absolutism by maintaining that civil law has to be consistent with natural and divine law. Hobbes more consistently argued that while mortal sovereigns are accountable to God, the power of sovereigns to command is not subject to moral constraints. Underlying Ockham's view of God's sovereignty, and Bodin's and Hobbes's view of earthly sovereigns, is a notion of the will's unconstrained power. But this notion is self-referentially incoherent. This incoherence, in turn, infects the very notion of sovereignty. (shrink)

H. L. A. Hart famously claimed that part of the appeal of natural law “doctrine” is the “independence” of natural law from divine and human authority. God, according to Hart, is not necessary to natural law. By way of contrast, J. Budziszewski argues that natural law really is law and that law qua law requires an enactor. Moreover, the only plausible candidate for the enactor of natural law as law is the author of nature—that is, God. In this essay I (...) argue that Budziszewski is right and Hart wrong. Law imposes obligations upon those under it, and obligations qua obligation are categorical rather than hypothetical imperatives. Categorical imperatives, in turn, require prescription. Consequently, prescription is necessary to any intelligible account of moral obligation. And prescription, finally, requires an authoritative prescriber. (shrink)

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not (...) only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced. (shrink)

Most scholars who write on social contract and classical natural law perceive an irreconcilable tension between them. Social contract theory is widely considered the political-theoretic concomitant of modern philosophy. Against the regnant view, The Social Contract in the Ruins, argues that all attempts to ground political authority and obligation in agreement alone are logically self-defeating. Political authority and obligation require an antecedent moral ground. But this moral ground cannot be constructed by human agreement or created by sheer will-human or divine. (...) All accounts of morality as constructed or made collapse into self-referential incoherence. Only an uncreated, real good can coherently ground political authority and obligation or the proposition that rightful government depends on the consent of the governed. Government by consent requires classical natural law for its very coherence. (shrink)

Many scholars view political contractarianism as a distinctly modern account of the foundations of political order. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, the necessity of the consent of the governed for rightful political authority, natural equality, and a pre-civil state of nature embody the modern rupture with classical political philosophy and traditional Christian theology. At the headwaters of this modern revolution stands Thomas Hobbes. Since the American founders subscribed to the social contract theory, they are often said (...) to reject classical political philosophy and traditional Christian political theology as well. In America on Trial, Robert Reilly rejects the usual argument. He maintains that the building blocks of the American founding originate in medieval Christian political theology. In this essay, I argue that a morally and metaphysically realist contractarian tradition—one that affirms natural equality, the authority of the society over government, the necessity of consent for legitimate government, the right to resist tyrannical rulers, and the idea of a pre-civil state of nature—predates Hobbes and also that the voluntarist contractarian tradition inaugurated by Hobbes is self-referentially incoherent. A coherent political contractarianism logicially depends on the sort of metaphysics and moral ontology Hobbes rejects. (shrink)

In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen contends that the American founding is fundamentally Hobbesian and that the Constitution is the application of the Hobbesian revolution concerning liberty and anthropology. I contend that Deneen fundamentally mischaracterizes the American founding. The founders and framers affirmed the necessity of consent for political authority and obligation. But they also situated the necessity of consent in the context of a morally and metaphysically realist natural law, maintained that an objective good of the whole constitutes the (...) final end of political association, and described liberty as subjection to the law of nature and the government of God. To be determined by one’s base passions was to be a slave. Moreover, their constitutional thought and the institutional design of the constitutions they built rejected Hobbes’s theory of sovereign power and the metaphysical ground on which it rests. (shrink)