What was Leo Strauss up to?

Public Interest, Fall, 2003 by Steven Lenzner, William Kristol

What then of the nature of right or justice? The just is typically equated with the legal. But laws result from human agreement or human conventions. And the natural as the permanent is to be fundamentally distinguished from the conventional. The way of dogs--"barking and wagging the tail"--is natural; the way of Jews--"not eating pork"--is conventional. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the conventional seems to call into doubt the existence of natural right or justice before it can even be discovered. How can one discover a standard that is everywhere and always just if the just is everywhere different?

According to Strauss, the idea of natural right emerges when one takes the differing accounts of what is held to be just as an incentive to discover whether anything may in truth be said to be right or just:

Differences regarding things which are unquestionably conventional do not arouse serious perplexities, whereas differences regarding the principles of right and wrong necessarily do. The disagreement regarding the principles of justice thus seem to reveal a genuine perplexity aroused by a divination or insufficient grasp of natural right--a perplexity caused by something self-subsistent or natural that eludes human grasp.

The classic natural right teaching arises in response to that perplexity, and in particular, in response to the claim that all right or justice is merely conventional. Strauss calls this view "conventionalism."

In place of that which is right or just by nature the conventionalist substitutes that which is by nature good: "By nature everyone seeks his own good and nothing but his own good. Justice, however, tells us to seek other men's good." Conventionalism, more specifically, identifies the good with the pleasant: All men prefer the pleasant to the painful. The pleasant is unquestionably good. Classic natural right--the teaching of, above all, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--maintains on the contrary that there is an essential difference between the good and the pleasant. The good is more fundamental than the pleasant because there are a variety of pleasures and those pleasures correspond to wants that have a natural order or rank. As Strauss remarks:

Different kinds of beings seek or enjoy different kinds of pleasure: the pleasures of an ass differ from the pleasures of a human being. The order of the wants of a being points back to the natural constitution, to the What, of the being concerned; it is that constitution which determines the order, the hierarchy, of the various wants or of the various inclinations of a being.

Everyone acknowledges that human beings stand higher than the brutes by virtue of their possession of "speech or reason or understanding." This natural capacity elevates man, and it is the cultivation of this capacity that perfects him. "The good life is the perfection of man's nature. It is the life according to nature." The classic natural right teaching accordingly culminates in a defense of the philosophic life as the best and truly just life.