The following article deserves to be read in full. I've just put up the first part, the introduction to the concept that the law ought not to be divorced from morality.
Read More: Truth and the Law: Legal Should Also Mean Moral ~ Catholic Culture
Secularists assert that religion is a 'private matter', for they are radical individualists. Moreover, they assume that everyone is naturally an atheist, that they represent what is normal. This secularist illusion gets to us, particularly through the media, and we may even absorb that false assumption.
But anyone who makes a stopover on a flight to Europe can enter cultures where life is communal and religion is normal. If you observe the world beyond our narrow horizons, assertive individualism and atheism find no place in the lives of most of the people who inhabit this planet.
At the heart of the 16th Century, in the England of Henry VIII, two Christian lawyers rose to the highest office in the land and both of them ended up on the scaffold at the Tower — Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Cromwell. In the Catholic tradition, the former is revered as a canonised saint, the patron of the noble legal profession, while the latter is reviled as a toady and plunderer of monasteries.
But Thomas Cromwell was no monster. A flawed but brilliant man, he also died courageously and prayerfully. Yet he represents something else that, I would argue, undermines truth in the practice of the Law. He is one of the remote fathers of legal positivism. By acceding to the dictates of a tyrant, he divorced morality from law.
St Thomas More remained faithful to an older and richer tradition, to the Natural Law. The Judaeo-Christian ethic rests on this Natural Law: that good is to be done and evil avoided, that there are objective moral standards, moral truths. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in the highest literature and the best popular culture, we find a fascination with the human struggle to discern right from wrong, to identify good and evil, questions requiring a moral judgement we call 'conscience'.
The Natural Law posits that these realities are knowable through reason, indeed written into the very nature of the human person. Hence the making and application of good laws is assured by remaining true to the higher principles of an ethic grounded in our very nature as moral beings, derived from what may be called 'the truth of the person'.
Legal positivism, by contrast, separates morality from law. There are many ways of attempting to define this dualism, this self-verifying theory of law. The autonomy of law was articulated by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, an atheist, who in my world-view, represents the shadowy side of the Enlightenment.
Read More: Truth and the Law: Legal Should Also Mean Moral ~ Catholic Culture