The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell

The Perspective of Love - R. J. Snell


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ways, to the inadequacy of natural law in the face of the distinctives of theology, the church, and the Gospel, distinctives which the natural law not only cannot include but which are potentially violated by natural lawyers, even if unintentionally.

      Modes of Meaning and the Nature(s) of Intention

      In addition to Boyle’s three senses of tradition-dependent rationality, the last of which he judges foreign to natural law accounts, I suggest a fourth sense, one which on face seems rather at odds with the universalism of natural law, what I’ll term the modes and stages of meaning. Meaning itself is tradition dependent, or historical, because meaning depends upon the operations of concrete human subjects who always operate as historical. This statement is rather more than the first sense identified by Boyle, for the claim here is not simply that the same moral principles are expressed in disparate cultural forms, something analogous to “dog,” “Hund,” and “le chien,” all of which mean the same thing. In other words, the claim is not that the differences in legal systems depend upon a deeper underlying correspondence of first principles. (I think that’s true, it’s just not what the fourth sense intends to convey.) Instead, the very meaning and way that meaning is formed changes in time and culture, thus even concepts such as “nature,” or “law,” or “reason” do not mean the same thing in all places and times, nor is the way that humans make those meanings identical, although this is not, in any way, to suggest the absence of invariant, transcultural, or normative precepts for how meaning, in its various modes, is or ought to be made.

      We find the distinction in many domains of human inquiry, not just science. Consider the difference between the Trinity of St. Patrick’s shamrock and the homoousious of the Creed, or how we explain fairness to a child (“Would you feel good if they took your toy?”) and principles of contract in the first year of law school. In each case, relatively similar objects are addressed, and perhaps even by the same people, but in quite distinct modes of inquiry. And as the mode of inquiry functions differently, so too does meaning, and so too does the heuristic of expectation change, the unknown but sought x which guides the query, the “nature.”


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