Note: This is Part 5 of the “Justice as Conditionals” series.

This idea is the last of those from them period about a year ago when I came up with the core idea of the theory, meaning that all posts after this one will be recent ideas, at most a month old and quite possibly come up with since the last update to the series. This also means that updates will be less reliable and potentially less frequent. We’ll have to see. More important to this post is that this part of the theory is not foundation for further components. What I mean is that while this is something I believe, it is not necessary for the functioning of the rest of the theory. I stress this mostly because this is the only religious segment of the theory and I don’t want people thinking that the theory itself is a religious one.

St. Thomas Aquinas is generally considered the most important theologian of the Catholic Church since the end of the second millennium. This is largely because, though he was certainly not the first to consider reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with that of Christianity, he was by far the most successful figure in doing so. His Summa Theologica is a masterwork of philosophy, bringing together with impressive unity the mainstream theology of Christianity and “The Philosopher” who the philosophers of the Middle Ages respected so much. Though many of the exact arguments given by Aquinas are no longer those held as true by the Church, it is safe so say that the bedrock supporting modern theology is still that laid by St. Aquinas. (As a side note, he has the title “Doctor of the Church,” which is only given to critical theologians who were also saints. It’s a pretty slick title.)

One of the concepts developed heavily by Aquinas is that of the different types of Law. He discusses four types: Eternal Law, Natural Law, Human Law, and Divine Law. The gist is that Eternal Law is the overarching plan of existence, Natural Law is the inclinations and moralities built into human nature, Human Law is the set of laws put in place by humans to govern humans, and Divine Law is the scripture. All of this serve different roles and have significant interplay, but diving into that is a job for some other blog post. Let’s get to how this fits into the theory of Justice as Conditionals.

Remember that a Conditional is a function from behaviors of the recipient to behaviors of the originator. In this digression, we might instead generalize and say that a Conditional is any intentional transmission of information which results in preferences/inclinations in the recipient. We consider this alternate definition because Natural Law is built into human nature, so considerations of phrasing and imprecision are not very meaningful like they are in the analysis of human-generated Conditionals. This generalization exceeds the name “Conditional,” but we’ll use the term anyway for consistency.

In short, I propose that Natural Law itself is a Conditional. This set of unconscious inclinations and a conscience in a person may be considered transmitted information regarding the nature of God and/or morality as the two are related to the actions of the person. Precise information about how the two may behave retributively is not necessarily included, but that’s not an issue. The point of such indications is to transfer the related preferences onto the recipient’s perceptions of their own actions. As Natural Law imprints these inclinations directly, such indirect retributive threat is unneeded. A Conditional is expressing your morality and preferences onto another person in such a way that it impacts their own morality and preferences.

If Natural Law is taken to be a special case of Conditional, we may learn something from the definition of Justice as being the study of Conditionals: the dictates of conscience, away from the more particular moralities we may develop alongside them, are the most fundamental decrees of Justice. In other words, if this interpretation is to be believed, the preferences imposed by conscience and given to some extent to almost all people are an expression of the morality of God. That is, the dictates of your conscience are the Conditionals that reflect True Morality.

Divine Law is probably also interpretable in part as a collection of Conditionals, but that’s a discussion for another post.