The claim that vocation is a principle of natural law might sound strange. When we think about natural law, we tend to think about principles like “Good is to be done and evil avoided,” or “Do not kill.” So how does vocation fit in here, and how is it a principle of natural law? In brief, vocation is a principle of natural law in two senses: first, natural law requires us to make vocational commitments on the basis of serious discernment; and second, these commitments serve as a guide for sound moral deliberation.
But before filling in this explanation, I should clarify that the idea of vocation as a principle of natural law is far from novel, and I certainly did not invent it. Rather, what I call the vocation principle is central to the work of Germain Grisez, the originator of what is now known as the “new” natural law theory—and this idea has been developed by other new natural law theorists, including Joseph Boyle and Christopher Tollefsen. Further, the vocation principle is implicit in the whole classical and Christian natural law tradition, which holds that one’s duties are determined in part by one’s station in life. This idea is also present in Sacred Scripture and Christian theological reflection, and the Second Vatican Council along with recent popes have reminded us that everyone—not just priests or consecrated religious—has a unique personal vocation, a unique role to play in contributing to God’s Kingdom.
At the same time, although this renewed theological attention to personal vocation is a welcome development, reference to vocation seems largely absent from moral theories. If the vocation principle really does play a central role in sound moral deliberation, then this absence is a real problem—a problem which my discussion of vocation in Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law attempts to help remedy.
To fully explain the vocation principle and its importance, I need to say more about how it fits into a broader natural law account of ethics. I lay all of this out in detail in my book, but here let me just offer a brief sketch.
First, I should clarify what I mean by natural law. I use this term to refer to reason-based accounts of ethics in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. The natural law is “law” because it is a set of moral principles and norms directing us ultimately to the common good, and it is “natural” in the two-fold sense that (1) it can be known on the basis of natural reason (without the aid of supernatural revelation), and (2) it directs us toward the fulfillment of our nature as moral agents. That qualifier—that natural law directs us to our fulfillment as moral agents—is important, because we have a complex nature, so sometimes our fulfillment as moral agents will conflict with, for instance, our fulfillment as animal organisms—as when your moral duty requires risking your life for your country. The book develops this point in detail with reference to Aquinas’s crucial distinction among the four orders or types of knowledge—physical, logical, moral, and technical—but this will have to suffice for now.
The natural law account I present in the book has a two-tiered structure. At the foundational level is the first principle of practical reason—or first principle of natural law: good is to-be-done-and-pursued, and evil is to-be-avoided. This most general first principle is specified through practical reason’s identification of basic goods—the goods that we recognize as to-be-pursued, that is, as intrinsically valuable. These goods are our most basic reasons for action. It is worth noting here that unlike most modern moral philosophers following Hobbes and Hume, the Thomistic view holds that we can be motivated by reasons, not just by sub-rational desires. For an act to be a genuinely human act, on Aquinas’s view, it must be freely chosen for an intelligible end, and the basic goods are the intelligible ends that give us sufficient reasons for action. They are what get every genuine human act “off the ground.”
So what are these basic goods that practical reason directs us to pursue and protect? There are seven categories of them: life and health (perfecting us as bodily beings), knowledge and appreciation of beauty (perfecting us as intelligent beings), skillful performance in work and play (perfecting as a unity of bodily and rational powers), friendship and sociability (perfecting us as social beings), marriage and family (perfecting us as sexual beings), integrity and authenticity (perfecting us by harmonizing emotions, judgments, and actions), and religion (perfecting us as spiritual beings). So—putting this all together—the first tier of the natural law account is a set of first principles of practical reason directing us to protect and promote each of these goods, and to avoid their opposites.
But these first principles are insufficient to guide our moral deliberations, because at any given time we could pursue any of those goods, for any number of people. For instance, you all chose to read this article. Did you make the right choice? Well, I hope so, but the first principles of practical reason taken individually will not be able to give you the answer. What we need are moral norms, second-tier reasons that guide our choices among the various competing goods that we have a basic, first-tier reason to pursue. One of those moral norms—and the one that is going to be the most directly relevant in determining whether you made the right choice to come to this event—is the Vocation Principle. But before I say more about this principle, let me briefly explain the other natural law moral principles that guide our choices among competing goods.
Now, utilitarians try to solve the problem of determining what the right thing to do is by saying that you should pursue the course of action that will “maximize the good.” But this solution cannot work, because there are distinct types of good, each of which offers a distinct benefit, and there is no common denominator that would allow us to weigh and measure these goods against one another so as to calculate a “maximum good”—indeed, the very notion makes no sense. And in telling us to act so as to maximize the good, utilitarianism reduces moral reasoning to technical reasoning, which is problematic for reasons that should become clear by the end of this article.
Natural law theory has better criteria for determining what is morally right, criteria that flow from the integral or holistic guidance of the first principles of practical reason that direct us toward basic goods. In other words, morally right action is action that respects and (to the extent possible) promotes each basic good for each person. This is what you might call the “master moral principle,” which can be articulated in more technical terms as: choose and act only in ways that are compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment—that is, the fulfillment of all people with respect to all the basic goods.
This master moral principle can be broken down into several more specific moral principles. The first is a principle that prohibits intentional harm to any person with respect to any basic good. From this principle we can derive familiar moral rules, like absolute prohibitions on murder, rape, adultery, lying, torture, genocide, slavery, and so on. Considered from the perspective of the beneficiary, these prohibitions are the basis of inviolable and inalienable human rights. But apart from this relatively short list of thou-shalt-nots, which, if correctly defined, are binding in all circumstances, most moral norms vary in their application according to personal circumstances.
Although intending harm to a person with respect to some basic good is perhaps the most obvious way that we can violate the master moral principle—making a choice that sets our will contrary to integral human fulfillment and so cuts us off from some good or person—it is certainly not the only way. Because natural law’s first principles taken together direct us to respect and promote every basic good for every person, we can also act immorally by unreasonably prioritizing one person over another or one good over another. The moral norms that direct us to avoid such unreasonable prioritization of people or goods are the Golden Rule and the Vocation Principle. The Golden Rule is a guide for determining whether our choice to prioritize one person or group over another is fair. Now, the Golden Rule does not spit out right answers like an algorithm, because moral questions are not technical questions, and many of them do not admit of a single right answer—in most cases (except when dealing with the absolute moral prohibitions mentioned previously) there is a range of morally acceptable courses of action. Morality is not primarily about outcomes, but about inputs, about the heart—more precisely, about whether our will remains open and adequately responsive to all goods, including friendship with all people. So what the Golden Rule does is ensure that we do not willfully cut ourselves off from friendship with others by discounting their good. Sincerely seeking to apply the Golden Rule by imaginatively putting oneself in the other’s shoes will also help us to grow in the virtue of justice by training us to affectively identify ourselves with others, and so help us combat our natural tendency to give short shrift to the claims of strangers or others with whom we have no emotional affinity.
But some prioritization of our own good and the good of those near and dear to us is reasonable, because it is a requirement of basic goods like friendship, marriage, and integrity. So, in many cases, applying the Golden Rule properly also requires considering one’s vocational obligations, which will often justify or require prioritizing some people over others.
So this brings us—at last—to the Vocation Principle. Vocation is a crucial moral principle because it is only in light of one’s overall personal vocation that one can reasonably prioritize competing goods. Vocational commitments give us reasons to prioritize the goods or people to which we have committed ourselves, because it is only through such commitments that we can make deep and meaningful contributions to any aspect of human flourishing.
So, returning to the question I asked earlier: why are we all here rather than, say, volunteering at a local food pantry? The answer will differ somewhat for each of us, but for most, a crucial part of that answer will relate to our vocational responsibilities. And a more complete answer will also include an account of why we made these vocational commitments in the first place. Because our vocational decisions determine how we will use the bulk of our energy, time, and talent, their moral significance can hardly be overstated.
So I argue in the book that there is a moral requirement to approach life with a vocational sense—that is, to engage in serious vocational discernment, especially in one’s youth, but also throughout life when, for instance, considering things like whether to take a new job, to move to a different part of the country, to have another child, to take on a new volunteer commitment, etc. This discernment needs to consider one’s talents, inclinations, and opportunities, and how those talents, inclinations, and opportunities match up with the needs of one’s communities, and with one’s current obligations. As with the application of the Golden Rule, there is often no single right answer here, but what is important is to engage in this task with moral seriousness. This requires, among other things, sifting through one’s motivations and trying to avoid the potentially distorting influence of sub-rational motivations like fear—fear of failure or difficulty or change or suffering or disappointing people we love or loss of social status—which might lead one to reject certain vocational paths unreasonably—or laziness that recoils at the prospect of hard work or a change in one’s comfortable routine—or greed or vanity that incline us toward the most lucrative or status-enhancing path. So, the moral virtues will be crucial to one’s ability to carry out this vocational discernment well.
Further, I think there is or should be a religious element to this discernment, even if we are considering it from a purely philosophical perspective. For there is ample rational evidence for the existence of an intelligent, benevolent, and provident God, and those who are open and responsive to this evidence can (even in the absence of supernatural revelation) see their talents, inclinations, opportunities, obstacles, or other relevant circumstances as providential signs by which God is inviting them to take or avoid a particular path. If we approach it in this spirit, we can see our vocational discernment—and the making and fulfillment of commitments in accordance with that discernment—as a way of being in harmony with God and of cooperating with God in the promotion of integral human fulfillment—and this end of cooperating with God in promoting human flourishing is the ultimate end that can and should order and unify all of our pursuits in life. I refer to this in the book as the Unity of Life principle, a corollary to the Vocation Principle.
Historical figures like Socrates—who presents his philosophical vocation as a response to a divine call—show that this religious aspect of vocational discernment is available even to those who do not believe in supernatural revelation. But for Christians—or anyone who believes in biblical revelation—the idea that God has a unique personal call for each of us is explicit. Following and being faithful to one’s vocation even when faced with serious challenges or when the fruits of one’s fidelity seem uncertain is hard. And while Socrates’s courage shows that this is possible even without supernatural faith, those of us who are Christians have a huge help in this regard, because Christianity promises that our fidelity will not be in vain, that our efforts to promote the good in line with our calling will ultimately bear fruit in the Kingdom even if we do not see it in this life. Perhaps this is why so many of those both in our current society and throughout history who have heroically risked or sacrificed reputation, career, wealth, status, friendships, or even life itself to do what they believed they were called to do have been Christians. I think of people like St. Thomas More, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Dorothy Day, and I invite you to call to mind others, perhaps unsung heroes whom you know personally.
Of course, most of us will not be required to make such extraordinary sacrifices to fulfill our vocational commitments. But because we live in a fallen world that often bestows honors and wealth on the vicious rather than the virtuous at least in the short term, we almost certainly will have to be willing to sacrifice or at least risk non-basic goods like status and money—and sometimes even basic goods like friendship and harmonious family relationships—in order to follow and be faithful to our vocations.
Allow me to repeat the wise advice that Auschwitz-survivor Victor Frankl would often give to his students:
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. . . . Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
The paradox that Frankl highlights here is essentially the same one that Jesus speaks of in the Gospels: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25). “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (John 12:24). In other words, we are promised that the way to most effectively “succeed”—that is, to use our talents to promote human flourishing—is to stop thinking of human flourishing as a technical goal that we can set out to achieve through own calculations and efforts. If we think about it that way, we will fall prey to the fallacy that the ends justify the means, the dangers of which are exemplified in the atrocities committed by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century which—let us not forget—were done in the name of trying to create a paradise on earth. Instead, the way to “succeed” in promoting human flourishing is—as Frankl says—not to aim at it directly, but to sincerely discern and follow one’s vocation in a morally upright way, even when the fruits seem slow in coming, and indeed even when the short-term consequences look disastrous.
Frankl learned this through his own experience—for in fact he had the chance to escape Austria and emigrate to America, and so to avoid all the horrendous suffering of Auschwitz, but instead he chose to stay, having discerned through providential circumstances that God was calling him to remain with his aging parents. He accepted that the likely result would be an end to his promising career as a psychologist and even to his very life, but it turned out that his willingness to “lose his life” was indeed the prelude to his bearing incredible fruit through his writing of Man’s Search for Meaning, a powerful and widely-read testimony to the human spirit that has changed the lives of countless people—including myself when I read it as a high school student. This theme of fruitfulness through fidelity to vocation even at the cost of self-sacrifice is a deep lesson that is, I think, knowable through human wisdom, but is nonetheless most powerfully expressed and confirmed in Christian revelation, through the apparent defeat and seemingly fruitless suffering of Jesus on the Cross, which was transformed into the ultimate triumph over evil and death through the Resurrection. This pattern is repeated, though usually in less dramatic ways, time and again in the lives of ordinary faithful people.
I hope that my book’s account of the natural law and specifically of the vocation principle will play some small part in encouraging people to approach their lives with this vocational sense. But ultimately, I wrote the book because I thought God was calling me to do it, and so I leave it in his most capable hands to make it bear fruit in accord with his wise and loving plan.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer