By its author’s admission, The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law is an extraordinarily ambitious work. S. Adam Seagrave’s book takes up a question that is coeval with political philosophy: Are some things moral by nature, and if yes, how so? This enduring question lurks just under the surface of every page of this lucidly written book. However, it is approached in the way that this question sometimes confronts us today. Entering a debate that has roiled since the beginning of modernity, Seagrave, an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, focuses on the essential relationship of ancient and medieval natural law theorizing (Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Thomistic) and modern natural rights doctrines. Making the case for what he calls “a new composite concept … [of] natural morality” (pp. 21–22), he fashions an argument that attempts to transcend the deep divisions that have traditionally been seen to separate classical natural law and modern natural rights thinking.

But Seagrave’s argument and ambition does not stop here. He reports that his argument is able to make “sense of [an] intellectual history” (p. 22) that has historically oscillated between positing an organic relation between natural law and natural rights theory or has insisted that the two theories are as incompatible as oil and water. What is more, his position purportedly can “make more sense of contemporary moral and political issues than is currently possible” (p. 22). It is fairly safe to say that Seagrave believes there is a great deal at stake in his book’s argument.

Seagrave situates his argument between two opposing views of the relationship of natural rights to natural law theory. The first, “the continuity-compatibility position” (p. 5), which Seagrave identifies with the thought of the twentieth-century neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, claims that the modern idea of natural rights emerged organically out of ancient and medieval notions of the natural law. In Seagrave’s view, Maritain was correct to see the principled compatibility of natural rights doctrines and natural law theory; he erred in claiming that the modern doctrine naturally evolved out of the premodern theory. Conversely, the twentieth century political philosopher Leo Strauss argued that modern notions of natural rights hinged on a deliberate break from the intellectual tradition that informed premodern natural law theorizing. Propounding a “discontinuity-incompatibility position” (p. 14), Strauss correctly identified modern natural rights doctrines as arising from a way of thinking that represented something new under the sun. But Strauss went too far, in Seagrave’s view. Despite their historical genesis, modern natural rights doctrines can be massaged into harmony with premodern natural law theory. As Seagrave presents it, the affirmation of the specific intellectual origins of the one does not necessarily demand the theoretical rejection of the other.

Seagrave limns a third way, the “discontinuity-compatibility position” (p. 22), which he claims takes us beyond the impasse at which Maritain and Strauss leave us. He finds inspiration for this third way in the writings of John Locke, specifically in Locke’s Divine “workmanship” and human self-ownership arguments in the Second Treatise of Government. His position, as he puts it, is more “Locke-ish” (p. 55) than strictly Lockean. Indeed, as he understands it, his discontinuity-compatibility position is essentially “non-Lockean… though not… anti-Lockean” (p. 55).

Leaning on a notion of what he sees as “concurrent ownership” in Locke’s writings, Seagrave credits Locke with intimating “an ingenious and promising inspiration for achieving a genuine and coherent reconciliation of ancient/medieval and modern conceptions of morality” (p. 54). Inasmuch as human beings possess rational faculties and powers that set them apart from all other natural creatures, they are “owned by God”: inasmuch as a human being possesses self-consciousness and personhood, he “owns himself” (p. 43).

However, Locke’s intimation is theoretically incomplete—Seagrave’s strong commitment to blazing a third way inevitably requires him to view Locke’s account as unfinished rather than theoretically incoherent or intentionally obscure. The core of Seagrave’s book tries to fill in this lacuna by interpreting the significance of two sets of “ordering facts.” The first set concerns the relationship of the “potential self” to the “actual self.” Natural rights doctrines are said to grow out of the relationship of the potential self’s capacity for self-consciousness and the actual self’s consideration of individuals “as actually reflective or self-conscious” (p. 88). Striking an unmistakably modern note, Seagrave goes so far as to say that “the potential self produces or makes the actual self through the operation of reflective capacity” (p. 67). (It is difficult to overstate just how untraditional this claim about self-making is in natural law theory; one could not imagine natural law thinkers like Aquinas or Orestes Brownson or John Courtney Murray making a similar claim.) Seagrave concludes that the potential self “owns” the actual self. The second set of facts looks at natural law’s claim about the relationship between our shared, given humanity and Seagrave’s notion of the self-made and self-conscious self. Citing Aristotle and Cicero, he argues that our humanity is comprised of substantially more than sensual appetites and self-consciousness. Most of all, it includes our capacity to reason. Natural law follows the commands of what reason discovers about our nature. Seagrave enlists Aquinas to claim that while natural law originates in God, “human nature or humanity as it is apprehended through induction is its immediate source” (p. 108). This composite natural law tradition, we are told, “provides a persuasive argument” for a “blueprint” of human action rooted in our humanity (p. 119).

Taken together, these sets of ordering facts reveal the true harmony of modern natural rights doctrines and ancient and medieval natural law theory. “The strong compatibility between natural rights and the natural law, arising as it does from the ultimate unity of the individual human being, justifies the inclusion of both within a broader concept of natural morality” (p. 131). The brief final chapter of Seagrave’s book describes the “new ways” his position supposedly helps democracies and citizens think about thorny “public policy” issues like universal health care, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty (p. 142). By his account, his position shows that natural morality 1) supports a policy of government provision for health care for those who could not otherwise attain it, 2) identifies deficiencies and weaknesses in arguments on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, and 3) affords a “broad-minded and dialogic” treatment of the death penalty that weighs the claims of the criminal’s right to life against civil society’s duty to protect the common good.

There is a good deal to admire about Seagrave’s book. His arguments raise hosts of fundamental political, philosophical, and, in some cases, theological questions we are likely to gloss over precisely because they are fundamental or first questions. Moreover, his book is refreshing inasmuch as its primary concern is to build an argument, not to engage in exegetical examinations of natural rights and natural law literature for exegesis’ sake. His concern is with the truth of the foundations of morality and the possible compatibility of natural rights and natural law theory.

For the sake of argument, let us momentarily grant that natural law and natural rights are, as Seagrave believes, theoretically reconcilable. There is still reason to think that his argument for this compatibility is less than convincing. For in many respects, Seagrave offers us a rather clipped notion of the natural law. Glossing over the fact that the notion of ancient and medieval natural law that he wields is itself a composite idea, the account of natural law he gives is noticeably less robust than what Seagrave takes to be Aquinas’ “culminating statement of the old natural law” (p. 99).

Seagrave’s account largely steers clear of the questions about cosmology and the relation of theoretical to practical reason that Aquinas presents as necessary for establishing the coherence and scope of natural law theory. Unlike the “old natural law,” Seagrave’s account is remarkably anthropocentric. He speaks, for example, of natural law in terms of humanity’s commands, not reason’s commands. It is difficult to understand how exactly our humanity, on its own, provides a compelling reason for moral action. By linking up inclinations and ends, the old version of natural law had the virtue of offering a reason, maybe not a wholly compelling reason, why we should act this way and not that way, why this particular action pursues this particular natural end.

Like most theorists today, Seagrave is primarily concerned, as his title makes clear, with the foundations of morality. He seems to be concerned with the peaks of morality to a lesser degree. It does not seem to have much to say about the statesmen or the magnanimous human being or the saint. His interest in injecting modern natural rights doctrines with more moral content than they were originally said to have no doubt explains part of this. But an adequate understanding of these peaks is needed to show why acting morally is naturally desirable in the first place. For it is the peaks of morality that give shape and form to the foundations of morality; it is the peaks of morality that best explain what the goal of moral action and moral excellence is. Seagrave’s salutary desire to solve the problem of the compatibility of natural rights and natural law theory ironically distracts him from making the prior case that natural morality is essential because it contributes to the natural perfection of the human person in an important and indispensable way.

Making such a case is admittedly a tall order. But it is an order that Seagrave sets for himself when he lays out the grand aims of his argument. It will be interesting to hear what this young scholar has to say about these questions in the years to come—especially since his book is apt to leave some readers thinking that articulating the true nature of natural morality is more humanly important than vindicating either natural rights or natural law theory, or bringing about some arranged marriage of the two.