Truth
Natural Law and the Moral Instinct
Abstract
Law is eminently a social phenomenon.Graham Hughes
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Saturday, 17 August 2013
Law
In primitive societies, religion and law are not distinguished from the various practices and necessities of everyday living. They were simply part of a person’s social life and meant being a decent member of the community.
In ancient Greece, philosophers, notably the Sophists, made a distinction between the laws of Nature (physis) and laws made by people (nomos), the latter being a codification of a city state’s traditions and conventions—civic or positive law. Once this distinction was made, nomos, the man made laws, were plainly not natural, even though human society was a natural development for human beings.
The Greek Sophists concluded that no one had any good reason to obey nomos—because it was merely arbitrary—other than to the degree that it served their own self-interest. Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, they became lawyers from their belief that they could always use logic to prove any case and equally its opposite (sophistry), nomos being so arbitrary. However, their acceptance that there was one reason—self-interest—for complying with the law meant such compliance served the interests of everyone in society who preferred the safety and security of an orderly and harmonious society—most citizens. That was the very purpose of the city—of society.
Once chiefs and rulers emerged, the concept of the law became a sovereign’s orders and edicts. Failure to obey a sovereign’s orders could invite a punishment, and so the citizen had the duty not to invite such punishment. John Austin, whose view this was, also distinguished law and morality—laws need not conform to accepted moral standards.
“Natural Law” has meant different things to different people and at different times, but in large measure it is a law that somehow springs from Nature rather than laws invented by people deciding on conventions—civic law. It is…
- physis not nomos
- natural justice as opposed to rights set out by human beings
- yet our rights as human beings rather than any rights we are “granted” by the state
- for Christians, a divine law as opposed to written statutes.
Hans Kelsen, a German-American, suggested that law consists of propositions that ought to be accepted, and that have been agreed by judges. The basis of such laws is that the constitution is agreed and accepted, as a sort of foundation law, from which the others therefore branch. Any law agreed on Kelsen’s propositions is a valid law, but it still need not be moral, even though it ought to be obeyed. But Kelsen thought choices of values and ends depended upon intuition.
Inasmuch as evolutionary psychologists have found our sociality itself depends upon instinct, and that morality derives from the the same instinctive urge to preserve society, it is likely that questions of justice within society also depnd on instincts, Kelsen’s intuition. If so, then both basic or Natural Law and morality both depend on instincts, and largely the same ones. So Kelsen’s system can provide for laws conforming with the evolutionary principles that built our society. It is not to say that human beings cannot override their instincts when something induces them to do it. That is one of the things that makes us human—we are no longer bound by our instincts.
Both Austin and Kelsen relied upon the threat of punishment for the enforcement of the law. The social and evolutionary psychologists found that human beings in general expect their peers to hold fast to the instincts of compassion, caring, benevolence and protection of each other, and when this expectation is flouted they feel it right that the flouter should be punished. It is another human instinct. Their concept of law reliant on intuition mirrors the instincts that underline human society and morals.
Primary Laws
The British jurist, H L A Hart in 1961, demolished the idea that law stemmed from the commands of the sureme commander of any society, its sovereign. A lot of quite sensible and justifiable law shows no rhyme nor reason for ever having been any concern of the ruler, and nor do many of them imply any sense of duty. Furthermore, commands that are issued as commands by a sovereign must lose much of their sine qua non when that particular sovereign dies. Nothing requires a law to persist after the sovereign who commanded it has deceased. So Hart thought there must be primary and secondary laws.
Primary ones confer duties, and secondary ones are laws about the existing laws—laws for making, changing and abolishing laws, including the primary ones. No special rule of initial recognition need exist, other than the laws that societies, in the course of evolution, find are necessary for the wellbeing of the tribe or clan. An example is the feeling, already noted, that failure to care for or share with or help protect others in society—failure to pull one’s weight as a member of society—ought to be punished. Pulling one’s weight in fulfilling the purpose of society—the caring, sharing, protecting, and so on—is the source of the feeling of obligation to others and duty to society, for these are the reasons society evolved as being worth joining.
When a substantial proportion of people in a society feel no obligation to maintain basic standards of sociality, then being a member of that society loses its attraction for the rest. In primitive societies, they would choose to leave en bloc and set up a new band or community that was worth living in—they would revolt against the injustice. More often the ones who felt others were taking advantage of them would agree to punish the ne’er do wells by agreeing to evict them before the situation got out of hand—the orgin of exile—though eviction might well have meant death. The sanction of punishment that backs up the law therefore comes from the mutual will of the people whose aim is to preserve a society in which everyone benefits who contributes to the common welfare.
This need for coercion is not felt by anyone in society other than the relative few who choose to be “free loaders”, those who want to get more out of society than they put in. Social psychological experiments suggest that in the modern day it is around 20 percent, but varies according to how likely it is that the free loader will be punished. In western capitalism, clever free loaders—the capitalist class—are actually rewarded. Society is run by them. They are the rulers. Modern society is therefore dangerously unstable, and rulers turn to more and more oppressive measures, spying, secret laws and propaganda to maintain order. The underclasses will sooner or later rise up to have their free loading rulers expelled—or murdered.
So far it is evident that social reality compared with practical law suggests that the latter derives from the former.
The Legal Realists—founded by judge Oliver Wendell Holmes and Harvard jurist, Roscoe Pound—rejected the notion of the law as a set of established rules which, strictly applied, lead to justice. They pointed out that the interpretion, and therefore the application of laws depended on the judge and jury. The judge and the jury also decided on which facts of the case were most relevant, whether laws existed that were contradictory, which ones applied and how. In this view, the laws become simply tokens upon which to base the arbitrary decisions of judges and juries—to give them a veneer of reason and repeatability.
There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the judging of the white murderer of the black teenager, Trayvon Martin, as innocent though the shooter admitted he had killed the unarmed teenager, who could have been no threat to the armed man. Here the judge and jury relied on conflicting laws, one of which, in the state of Florida allows murder as an act of self-defence. The facts that the victim was unarmed and black while the shooter was armed and white were deemed irrelevant. Maybe it is of some legal relevance that the Legal Realist school was particularly successful in the USA.
Some prominent US Realists think legal judgements are an important force for social change, suggesting to judges that they should follow up their judgements to discover their social consequences. That way, they should aim to maximize human dignity through their decisions. It seems to require that judges themselves should be ideal human beings with humane feelings, but that is not always the case, not least in the USA.
Additional Factors
Then there is argumentation. The contention is that justice is not derived by logic from premises and syllogisms, but is the application of rhetoric. Cases are not won on the basis of lawyers carefully explaining the rationale of the law to juries. Lawyers are most effective when they bring out sympathetic emotions by forceful questioning and making speeches that appeal to the instincts of the jury.
Another popular view of the law is as the rules of a game. A game will have rules, but when the officials of the game ignore a rule, then it ceases to function as one and should no longer be included in the rules. Hart criticised the Realist movement by using the analogy of the law as a game with the judge and jury acting as the officials. The verdict is the final score. Realism maintains that the officials decide the score as they see fit. The course of the game, and its rules count for little or nothing other than to hide the arbitrary decisions of the judge and jury. It is as if the referee of a soccer game allowed or disallowed goals according to his whim (as seems to happen all too often!). One of the purposes of law is to stop officials like judges from making capricious judgements.
Some other jurists challenged the view that the criteria for civic law to be valid were purely formal, a challenge instigated by the savagery of the Nazi dictatorship of 1933 to 1945 in Europe. The idea of the law being defined purely formally with no regard to morality was believed to be why the barbarity of Nazi edicts were so readily accepted by German jurists. One view to emerge was that the law was not purely formally defined but had to serve a purpose, namely regulation of social life. Len Fuller in the USA argued that an harmonious society could not be possible when law is:
- retrospective
- secret
- ignored rather than used.
For modern states these are increasing true, especially the secrecy aspect. With the excuse of national security against terrorism, we are being subject to secret courts adminstering laws that are secret, doling our punishments that are contrary to Habeas Corpus, and issuing super injunctions that prevent anyone from knowing not only that something is forbidden but even that a superinjunction has been issued! These are all aspects of justice, illustrating that justice requires “the internal morality of the law”.
The sharp separation between law and morals which has charactierized the positivist position becomes difficult to defend when the close similarities between legal and moral resoning are pointed out.Graham Hughes
Natural Law in Classical Times
In opposition to written law, Natural Law is a law that transcends time and the civic laws of different ages, which are transient, being a weapon of the ruling class of the time. So Natural Law expresses any human being’s natural rights as a human being living in a society—their human rights. Human rights are the rights everyone has by virtue of their humanity, the irreducible rights they can expect in any human society. Given the opportunity, one has them by contributing to a human society whatever is ones’s duty to contribute to remain accepted by one’s peers. Humans need society to be humane as well as just, so society should afford every member the same human rights, subject to their not taking advantage of others in that society. Natural rights are therefore expressed in the Golden Rule common to all of the great religions:
Do unto others as you would be done by them.
Natural law recognises that human beings and their societies are part of Nature. Nature has prescribed a way of behaving for human beings that involves them living together socially, and therefore there are laws of nature that regulate that social way of living. Nature imposes a dgree of order over chaos, and Natural Law is that ordering principle applied to human beings in society.
The Greeks called the ordered universe the cosmos—the order superimposed over chaos—an idea that goes at least back to the Babylonians. It was that part of Nature that obeyed laws. For human societies to be part of the cosmos and not be chaotic, they had to obey natural laws. Such laws can be discovered and constitute the Natural Law that is independent of civic law, nomos, though the latter may include some aspects of Natural Law within it. Thus Plato, (The Republic) says justice conforms with Nature and cannot be separated from it. He also distinguishes Natural Law from written law in that the former comes from natural conduct which, in society, is reflected in long established customs and good manners.
Aristotle (Nicomachian Ethics) considered that justice necessitated equality. Justice was therefore only possible in a communistic society. As Nature was the source of justice, the natural world had to be studied, but the observations could not be casual ones giving rise to diverse views, but observations, that people agree together, everywhere have the same effect. In other words subjective observations would not do. They had to be objective. These remain criteria of science still. Human society is humanity’s natural condition, so justice and equality will be observed in uncorrupted societies that follow the Golden Rule.
The Stoics took Natural Law the furthest, regarding it as equivalent to morality. Stoics regarded human intelligence as Nature’s way of letting us understand her, a living, reasonable and intelligible being. Having done so, people could live harmoniously with Nature and not be in a battle with her, as we have chosen to be. Reason is the way we are meant to interpret Nature, and thereby know how to live symbiotically with her. Reason allows us to comprehend our instincts. Living in conformity with Nature is virtuous, for human instincts common to us all are natural instincts, and such instincts have evolved to our benefit, and so are virtuous themselves. The Roman statesman, Cicero (De Republica) wrote:
True law is right reason which conforms to Nature.
Gaius (Institutes), who lived in the times of the Antonines in the second century AD, thought law was made up of two parts, laws common to a particular people (civic law) and law common to everyone—the law of the people (lex gentium)—arrived at by natural reason, which could only mean an appreciation of what humanity’s natural instincts are towards each other. The law of the people “was born with the human species”. When people accept that their civic laws have to comply with this Natural Law to be valid, then law must always be just and cannot be arbitrary.
The Christian Approach
The teaching of Christ, also spreading in the Roman world in the second century AD pinnacle of the empire under the Antonine emperors, chimed with the Stoical humanitarian conceptions of Natural Law. Later, Augustine (City of God) combined the two by giving Natural Law the authority of God as God’s grace or God’s reason. Perhaps it was a good idea at the time, but subsequently distracted greatly from its instinctual basis in human evolution.
Natural law in the Christian world was the expression of God’s obligatory moral order. Here Christianity, at least notionally, impressed the Golden Rule on to Christians as a commandment of Christ, God incarnate! However it necessitates the equality of all human kind, each of which had to be considered by Christians as being God Himself (Mt 25:31-46). It was an idea that bishops found it convenient to lose in theological obfuscation. They were quite content to declare God wrong when it suited them, yet it was a command that Christ plainly said was a question of everlasting life or death for the human soul. Senior Christians thereafter regarded these, Christ's explicit instructions of the behaviour Christians had to adopt to be saved and the Golden Rule, as no more than a useful sop to be fed to the poor and ignorant to keep them well behaved.
Explaining the Christian view of Natural Law expressed by Isidore of Seville (Etymologies), P Fourier and C Perelman wrote:
Natural Law is the same everywhere, for it is not the work of an initial institution, but the result of a genuine instinct…
Earlier, Gratianus in the twelfth century had commented on Isidore…
…the human race is governed by two things, Natural Law and custom…
The codification of custom and more recent habits of humanity in any community is the civic law, the written law, but custom also embraces some of our moral instincts, so civic law commonly has elements of Natural Law already embedded within it. But Natural Law is constant and overules civic law when they clash, and consequently Christians in common with anyone human, can and should resist unjust civic law. Plainly Paul the apostle who chose to revise what God incarnate had taught was quite wrong to say Christians should unquestioningly obey their rulers (Rom 13:1; Tit 3:1). Christian preachers present Christ as having come to earth as a reformer of the corruption of the law of Moses. He defied authority in the temple court. He was clearly not doing what Paul took it upon himself to teach as Christian. Peter and the appointed apostles taught:
We ought to obey God rather than men.
And for anyone calling themselves a Christian, that surely is correct. William of Auxerre (Summa Aurea) pronounced that Natural law is innate and closely associated with the innate moral sense called synderesis (from the Greek meaning “a spark of conscience”). Natural Law in Christian understanding exists as a set of divine commands which manifest as human morality. Through this Natural Law, humans are propelled towards what is good for them, because it is a common good carried on their hearts. It is the opposite of the far better known concept of original sin—it is original goodness!
Jean Bodin (1530-1596), the French jurist and Catholic authority on witches, confirms Natural Law is so called because it is innate in humans, conforming with their social nature and needs. Bodin (Republic) considers people’s natural faculties as being the Natural Laws, which makes sense when if he is referring to our moral instincts as the natural faculties, or included among them. However Bodin is also confusing because he concatenates Natural Law with civic law, and accepts the authority of the king as being the authority for the law, whereas civic law may include Natural Law, but ought not to be identified with it, and any authority a king has is only with the consent of the people, whose duty it is to remove it when it is being misused.
After the Reformation, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) became known as “the father of Natural Law”, largely because he consolidated the tradition going back to the Greeks. He saw humanity as characterized by sociability and reasonableness, which serve to ensure that people in the best cases are in harmony with Nature. As soon as human reason points to the necessity of society to satisfy human sociability, people realise the need for laws to ensure that those who are not the best cases are punished for flouting the human instincts that developed to maintain a stable society—to maintain the reciprocity essential to stable societies.
In the worst case—the 20 percent or so who aim to take advantage of those who instinctively are fair and just—even the civic laws will be disobeyed in the hope of obtaining an unfair gain, so punishment is also needed. As long as the punishments are proportionate and have to be used only against a small fraction of the population, all will be well. But should punishment be too severe or too common, or should tyrants introduce injustice into the system for their own gain, then the innate law and sense of justice of the people will induce them to rise up against the injustice and society will fail, or find itself in a turbulent period. So, those of us whose social instincts are sound (the 80 percent or so) constantly judge—on the basis of our feeling for Natural Law—the actions of our rulers as just and moral or otherwise, and so will conform with the civic law or not, accordingly.
So, inasmuch as Christians consider Natural Law to be divine, the ordinances of rulers need not always be obeyed, contrary to Paul’s gloss of them having a divine right. Kings have no divine right. They are right only when their orders obey Natural Law (or divine law for Christians) and not when they are acting contrary to it. So, statutes need only be obeyed by a Christian when they are in accord with God’s law, His Natural Law! Otherwise, the Christian would not be being “good” or Godly.
God, who in the Christian view, created the world and therefore Nature, only upholds His divine law and most certainly cannot approve of let alone uphold man-made laws, even if made by kings, that are opposed to it. Grotius is therefore certain that God does not direct or control the affairs of men. God has provided humanity with the instincts for goodness they are born with, instincts that promote social harmony, and therefore it is up to Christians to follow them by promoting social harmony, and not being determined to destroy it in the interests of greed. Those who do not can be subject to social sanctions to induce them to comform with natural sociality, and not to override them for ambition of self-aggrandisement, though the sanctions cannot be disproportionate for fear of themselves violating Natural Law.
Evolution of Sociality and Natural Law
Failure to conform must be in such a way as to harm others or prevent them practising social harmony and kindness to others. Spinoza (Ethics) argued that every being had its own nature. That nature remained essentially unchanged throughout the being’s existence, and part of the nature of every creature, solitary or social, is to preserve its life. Humanity was no different in this respect from other creatures. Faced with a personal existential threat, animals will resist it. However, social animals like humans have no instinct to threaten other humans. In wartime, governments and military leaders do everything they can to persuade their own side that their enemies are not human at all, but monsters of some kind.
Of course, we do have an instinct to protect ourselves from monsters! We have an instinct to help each other when some other human is in danger. That is Natural Law, our law of sociality, and it is that desire to help others be secure that is being misused by war leaders in setting upon each other under the pretence that all others are inhuman Gooks, Ragheads, Huns, Nips, or whatever, even terrorists. It is exactly the misuse of Natural Law by our rulers that we should reject. Our expectation is to be kind to other humans in the expectation that they will reciprocate our kindness. Modern Western leaders do the opposite. By wilfully terrorising other people, they create enmity, and pretend, quite cynically, to seem surprised when those they are oppressing sometimes retaliate.
John Locke (Two Treatises on Government) thought human beings evolved in a state of freedom and equality, but freedom was not a matter of “do what ye wilt”—it is no licence to do anything you like. The natural state was subject to reason which allowed people to recognize and accept that the life, health, freedom and property of others were inviolate. No one could injure those rights even if they had political power.
Of course, rights such as these come from the social instincts we posses to preserve society, a body of people collected for their mutual advantage—put rationally—but society evolved over one or two million years of small group living, and that is when the instincts to preserve society evolved too. The “social contract” evolved, as if it had been planned! The theory of evolution was postulated to explain the apparance of design in Nature, and the social contract is an excellent example of it. Humans—or more likely their evolutionary predecessors—came together to form small groups or bands, small communities, but initially there must have been a degree of strife to overcome because previously the creatures were presumably of a more solitary habit.
It probably happened by the solitary mother tolerating her offspring staying with her until they were more and more mature, so it was less a coming together than a resistance to dispersing that led to the first clans. Solitary mammal’s infants already have an instinctive code of rules that applies to their playful leaping upon, wrestling, and hunting each other so that they do not accidentally harm each other. Similar rules can still be observed in pack animals like wolves, and human beings too. Playing allows the infants to develop the muscles, senses and skills needed for survival, like hunting and biting, but the pups “pull their punches” by not biting seriously or leaping viciously on to their siblings, and, if one should yelp, the offender stops the game and looks contrite!
As the young mammals stay longer with their mother, she has to learn to tolerate their presence when she would otherwise be chasing them off, and the offspring have to learn to tolerate each other, extending their infantile habits further into adulthood. The animals that do it survive better because the stay-with-mom offspring are more formidable at staving off opportunist predators and scavengers. The mother’s impatience with her stay at home kin may be tempered by their bringing food into the group, easing her own task. Some such sequence will have happened in human development, the siblings having to learn how to cope with strife by their playing code, and perhaps expelling those of their siblings that fail to do so. The infantile code extended into adulthood yielding the instinctive basis for the social instincts that are the basis of morality and the Natural Law, and thereafter the notion of the social contract. Any proto-human lacking the social instincts would be punished by the group, most probably by ejection from the group, and that was the selective mechanism.
Clearly, every indvidual human has given up some of the “rights” they had as a solitary animal, when they might have attacked a rival trying to take over the same food or territory and killed them, but the animals did not congregate in clans and then larger groups to kill each other, but to secure each other from such threats by bigger predators. The group members gave up the “right” to kill others in the group, and adopted a code of mutual protection. People retained individual rights that did not impinge on the harmony and cohesion of the group, but anti-social one—the ones that the group members would not tolerate as being disruptive—were lost by simply dismissing from the group those who caused trouble.
Locke taught that the state had no power to remove arbitrarily anyone’s individual rights. State power which is not used for the common good but instead attacks people’s individual rights is tyrannical. Political power must unconditionally respect everyone’s individual freedoms—so long as these individuals are not seeking the destruction of society—and aim to serve the common good, but tyrannical use of power can be resisted by force. The French “Declaration of the Rights of Man” laid out that human society was for the “preservation of the natural and imprescribable rights of man”, identified as liberty, personal property, security and the right to resist oppression.
Hegel and Marx
The German philosopher, Hegel, wrote that humanity could not develop in isolated individual humans, but only collectively. Studies of feral children support that idea. Human children brought up by animals cannot be properly humanized. But today the state is the human collective and ought to represent the reality of morality, and thereby serve the common good States that do not are criminal, acting against Natural Law, though Hegel did not say so, being antagonistioc to Natural Law.
Bentham and the Utilitarians were too, arguing that it was arbitrary, though now we can see it is not, being based on instinct. They favoured the concept of social utility. If Natural Law and morality express the social instincts and emotions that have evolved to bind together our societies, they are actually expressions of the essential aspect of social utility. Nor is Natural law, being instinctive, arbitrary, though much of social utility is, or at least not clearly defined.
Marx and Engels have no place for divine or instinctive laws because for them everything stems from economics. The ruling class hold power through their control of the means of production, and they impose laws to consolidate and extend their power. However, Marx and Engels knew that economic power was a social power, and that societies had to exist before economics. They had postulated the earliest state of humanity as being that of “primitive communism”, the earliest stage of the human group before there was any surplus to be grabbed by an elite class, when the people lived in a natural state of economic equality. This is the state already described that people lived in for a million years or more, before settling into a life of farming.
Through those millennia, the human group relied upon each member sharing with others, caring for them when they were distressed or sick, and willing to defend and protect each other. It was in this long stage of human development that our social instincts evolved, and evolved largely because freeloaders were evicted from the group or were killed. Or, if a set of bullies ganged up to try to take over the group by force and enslave the rest, the oppressed majority would secede and re-form as a new group elsewhere, leaving the bullies to fend for themselves. In reality the force of the majority would not easily have been ignored, and the bullies would have been killed in a rebellion of the majority whom the bullies hoped to dominate. Either way, selection faboured those who obeyed the egalitarian Golden Rule.
The truth is that Marxists are the ones intent on restoring the very basis of society—the Natural Law and morality that humans have evolved over several million years. That is what is meant by “the withering away of the state”. Civic law will become unnecessary because Natural Law—our natural socialistic instincts—will prevail. A law above legislators has to exist for it to be possible to abolish them.
Socialism presumes a system of justice and fairness—a Natural Law—existing in the psyche of all or, at least, most people. The Christian religion has struggled with the problem of theodicy—why evil exists—when God is supposedly good and loves us all. The persistence of wrongdoing may be because not all of us have fully developed social instincts. Psychopaths and sociopaths seem to lack them or important elements of them, or the emotions needed to express them fully.
Is Capitalism or Socialism the Natural Law?
Capitalists seem to lack something! The economic power that very rich people have been able to wield in the last few thousand years—in the capitalist era, in feudalism and in the preceding slave owning societies—has allowed military elites to dominate the ordinary folk governed by morals and Natural Law. The progression of societies may be increasingly indoctrinating people to ignore their social instincts, and the capitalist society currently dominant has more or less convinced everyone that capitalism is the natural human situation, and everyone should subscribe to the dream of rags to riches made possible by the “hidden hand” of the market. But then in feudal society serfs were resigned to the existing situation, and so too in slave society slavery was deemed natural. But contrary to the carrot of the “American Dream” offered by capitalist propaganda, no society could prevail in which everyone was intent on exploiting their neighbours.
A popular dictum or even dogma of modern philosophy is that “is” cannot imply “ought”. S Thomas Aquinas thought that the ultimate end of humanity is “the good” because humanity is directed by divine law—Natural Law. The argument of Marx and Engels is the same, as long as the “divine” law is not supernatural but natural. If it can be explained by natural science, and Marx believed his method of enquiry was scientific, then the socialist goal is valid. If the human instinct “is” to care for and share with others and to protect them, then the natural state for humans “is” socialism. We therefore “ought” to run our lives on socialist principles. Unless we do, society must fall apart and civilization will end. When our instincts exist to preserve society we “ought” not to defy them.
Protestants in similar fashion to Aquinas saw a new vision of society in Natural Law, but, for them, understood as man as a social creature whose existence requires and so constructs communities—societies. In contrast civic law, the pure invention of mankind, is at best amoral, and, at worst, immoral. Civic law is purely formal with no moral ground, whereas the Protestant wanted humans to have morals inscribed on their hearts.
Natural Law has its enemies, and they have tried to argue it is not at all in line with human nature. When human nature is judged by the way people behave after several thousand years of living with the economic power of tyrannical rulers, backed up in the main by religion, and ending with centuries of capitalist indoctrination, it is hardly surprising that people find it difficult to read their instincts clearly, so that mistakes and misunderstandings are common.
Successful people these days are all too often selfish, greedy and psychopathic or sociopathic, but, even despite the indoctrination, most people remain personally remarkably kind and generous to others, though the pollsters will often find them harsh and self-centered. They act instinctively in real situations and verbally repeat what they have been indoctrinated by the media and politicians to think.
Our leaders, rich as they usually are or expect to become, and sociopathic enough to believe that they deserve it, typically characterize ordinary people as lazy and feckless, and the latter too often accept it. Some are, of course, just as most people with inherited wealth have been descended from some successful tyrant or capitalist. Most working people are not feckless. In capitalist society, they strike a balance between desiring material wealth and enjoying the companionship and kindness of others. So the characteristics of human innate morality are better worked out empirically by psychologists studying infants and children of various ages or by studying people in situations where the conditions can be controlled by the social psychologist, so as to be able to decide what is truly innate and what is conditioned by experience.
Such studies show that people are indeed intrinsically kind, caring, protective, sociable, fair and just, especially to those they know best. Otherwise they are inclined to be suspicious and defensive. People are inclined by Natural Law to be xenophobic, because we have evolved in small groups of familiar people and we distrusted people from other human groups. Now that the human group is essentially global and soon will be, that is one aspect of Natural Law that we should willfully reject. Our neighbours now are everyone in the world, so we should use our ability to use our reason to overcome the Natural Law in that instance, and learn to live as fellows in the global village.
