Dr. Martin Luther King and The Idea of a Natural Moral Law

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter when he was incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama.  This is the city where the 16^th Street church was bombed and his home was bombed when his family was at home.  There was a lot of racial tension there.  Blacks were literally being slaughtered.  Dr. King was incarcerated for protesting in his effort to call attention to the injustice.  While he was in jail, he began to ask “where is the church?”.  He once said that 11am on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in the country.  You had whites in their own churches and the blacks in their own churches and they were not getting together.  While Dr. King was in jail he took scraps of paper and began to write to the conscience of America asking Pastors why their voices were silent.  The pastors never responded to him. 

Dr. King had studied philosophy and wrote about the moral dilemmas we face in our society.  His first audience was pastors.  Who would have the integrity and strength to resist evil?

Dr. King faced having to think about the moral value of a law and whether he should engage in civil disobedience.  He was highly criticized for civil disobedience.  When he found a law to be unjust, he would appeal to the divine law, a higher law, the natural law.  He believed that if a law is unjust, it was our moral responsibility to resist the unjust law.  That was the basis of the civil rights movement.

About Dr. King’s Belief In A Moral Law

Dr. King was operating out of a very long and old tradition of justice and love.  The natural law tradition.  It occurred in a culture that still identified with that tradition.  Dr. King was appealing to the idea that we are all created equal.  He got that idea from the Bible.  It is the idea that man is created in the image of God.  Does that notion depend on divine revelation?  Not necessarily, because King appealed to Natural Law.  St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine appealed to Natural Law.  

In the doctrine of Natural Law there are fundamental concepts.  These things are knowable by reason itself.  This is how Dr. King was able to find an objective moral basis for standing up against the great evils of his day. 

Dr. King didn’t take breaking laws lightly.  When it was necessary to break a law because of its injustice, it must be done openly and not in hiding, lovingly, and with a willingness to bear the consequences.  He realized that law was a condition of freedom.  Respect for the law was important.  Unfortunately a law can be unjust, which puts it in opposition to a law above the law, the Natural Law.  The higher law must prevail.  Dr. King was aware that truth is knowable.  If we are to address our challenges today, we need to agree upon a standard upon which we are going to live.  Truth has to be knowable for there to be ethics.  This truth can be seen as a common thread throughout traditional cultures.  It is universal across all people, regardless of culture, geography, or time in history.  From this perspective we can rely on our experience to an extent to recognize what is true. 

Truth is a correspondence between what we say and what is.  It is the phenomenon of being right about reality.  A moral truth is a claim about what is right or wrong that is true.  We know it is right to love people and wrong to treat them badly.  This is a truth, among others, that is consistent across cultures.  Even children have a keen sense of justice.  We count on truth in courts, in schools, in commerce and in everyday life.  If we didn’t know truth, ordinary life would be impossible.

There is a part of the brain that processes moral thought.  Research has shown that even as a 6 month old baby, we have a sense of right and wrong.  If you were to take a toy away from a baby, it will cry “that’s mine” and want it back.

Our culture has been slowly embracing the idea of relative truth.  What is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me.  We have slowly been rejecting truth in exchange for a lie.  Without truth, we cannot have justice.  We need to return to the use of Natural Law as a foundation for our moral code to guide our legislation and law enforcement, before we lose our sense of justice.