Is justice, or morality generally, like a science, something that we learn or confirm by reason and observation?

Or is it fundamentally sub- or supra-rational, a truth or command that we know or believe only by instinct, conscience, faith, habit, or heart?

Or is it not even a thing at all, but the product of human wish or agreement, a myth or convention?

If we don’t know how we know right from wrong, or good from bad human beings, how can we guide our lives, or claim to know ourselves?

In this seminar, we will search for a path out of the confusion, by retracing the steps of the first philosophers, and see how the problem of justice first came to light for them.

We will discuss how their revolutionary discovery of the idea of “nature”—the mysterious ruling necessity and causality that science takes for granted—challenged all existing ways of life, then governed by the authority of ancestral traditions and divine laws. By appealing to nature—a trans-historical, trans-political, trans-moral, and transreligious principle—the philosophers were led to ask: does justice exist by nature? They saw that the things that are by nature do not vary by country or according to our wishes (“Fire burns here and in Persia”).

But notions of right and wrong do so vary. That led some of them to reason that morality was like the “holy” in holy cow, a human invention hiding, elevating, or distorting the natural cow beneath it. While justice may be a socially useful belief or a noble lie, they concluded that it was not by nature. Instead, they thought that by natural inclination—without coercion or artificial penalty—no one would seek justice or the common good, but only their own pleasure or private advantage (and ultimately, the life of philosophy). This culminated in classical hedonism’s open attack on ruling gods, punitive or providential—instead, the universe is constituted and ruled by the blind motion of material, yet eternal, atoms. We will examine this view and its great rival: Socratic philosophy rejected much of this (original or pre-modern) “Enlightenment” teaching about justice and the gods—perhaps due to a more thorough examination of justice and morality, and so greater cautiousness regarding our grasp of nature and god.

FIRST MEETING AND DINNER: April 11th (Tues.), 6 p.m., at the Abigail Adams Institute. The reading for this seminar will be the German philosopher Leo Strauss’ account of the “Origin of the Idea of Natural Right,” chapter three of his Natural Right and History (1953, rev. 1974). A pdf of the reading is available below.