A Natural Law Based, Simple, Elegant Framework for Discernment

A Pragmatic Lens for Accountability and Responsibility

I have been thinking, and writing, a lot lately about frameworks for human flourishing: seeking ideas, concepts, framings and mindsets which might help us be our best selves, and to live the most fulfilled, meaningful and purposeful lives. My main measure of success for candidate frameworks is if they help to reduce, or minimize, the ravages of chronic illnesses, effects of trauma, and chronic stress on our own lives, and hence on our society and culture more widely.

Here is an example of some of my previous thoughts along these lines:

"Do Not Steal": A Guiding Axiom

The other day, I listened to a podcast about a framework based on Natural Law and Common Law of England. What the interviewee described immediately struck me as another potentially pragmatic framing to help with human thriving and flourishing, and hence another tool in our “living healthy and well” toolkit. So I thought I would share it here, in case anyone else finds it as helpful, and thought provoking as I did. Here is the transcript of what the interviewee said:

"The law is very simple, we cause no harm, no loss, no injury. We have to act responsibly and proportionally in all circumstances. We are honourable in our contracts.

Our rights end where another person's begins. No one is above any one else under the law.

Our inalienable rights are those that we need to exist, survive, stay alive, and thrive. We need water, food, clean air to breath, to be able to protect ourselves, to self-defend, shelter, bodily autonomy so no-one touch us if we don't want them to.

All the other rights are everything which is not a wrong. The law is to cause no harm, no loss, no injury, that's a wrong to cause these. So if you are not doing any of these things, everything else is your right.”

It also struck me that this provides an objective morality and ethic with which to hold the powers-that-be accountable and responsible for their deeds and the outcomes of their policies.

[This is something else I have been thinking and writing a lot about recently. I feel we to be more vociferous in holding powerful, influential and wealthy people to account - those who can affect our own lives - for any failures of their policies. Indeed, we need to do this while we still can, before all the anti-protest, and anti-speech/censorship “laws” that are now on the cards everywhere (e.g. the RESTRICT act in the US, anti-protest acts in the UK) are brought in. If we don’t use our collective voice to speak out now, it will be too late, as we will never be able to speak up, call out, or question and criticize the government and institutions, ever again. Use it or lose it.]

I am not just thinking about whether the powers-that-be are doing anything actually illegal, i.e. doing wrong according to their own legislation/statutes/acts, which are created mainly to protect their own interests, but against deeper, more human and natural ideas of wrongdoing. Justice is not blind, it is discerning.

For example, if we apply the above framing of the natural law as a lens through which to view the handling of the pandemic, and the policies which were foisted upon us, I think this makes it very clear, that, regardless of whether anyone in power did anything illegal, or whether the calls for a Nuremberg 2.0 are justified, there has been an awful lot of wrongness done to everyone by the policy makers.

Indeed, it is now clear that these policies resulted in gross levels of harm, loss, injury, were unreasonable and disproportionate, and were dishonourable in terms of contracts. They impinged and violated other people’s rights at every level. The policy makers should therefore be made accountable and responsible, under the natural law framing, for the immoral, unethical nature of these polices, and the clear wrongdoings they perpetrated.

More broadly, I commend the natural law framing as another useful tool to add to our anti-dystopia toolbox:

How to Avoid a Hybrid Orwellian-Huxleyian Dystopia