John R. Regalbuto had a good Catholic upbringing, but it wasn’t until he was 23 years old and a graduate student in chemical engineering at Notre Dame that he came across the notion of an absolute ethical system based on “immutable and universal natural law.” In a world of messy moral dilemmas, crumbling standards, gray areas, exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions, here was something to hang on to. “My jaw dropped and I said, ‘That’s just what I’ve been looking for. Absolute truth.’
“Uncle JR wants you!!!” read the homemade sign sticking out from his office in the chemical engineering building, “for possibly the most stimulating course you will ever take:
Beyond that Regalbuto is absolutely certain–and will undertake to prove logically if you ask–that animals have no moral rights, that abortion is always wrong, and that engineers faced with ambiguous choices (when to blow the whistle on sloppy quality control, how much to spend for one extra safety feature) can come to firm, definite conclusions. And his amiable self-assurance, combined with a certain philosophical naivete, makes you want to agree with his reasoning even when you can’t.
“You can’t promote ethical conduct,” he says, shaking his head, “if you don’t indicate a direction.” In that case, all you’re promoting is moral relativism. It’s not enough just to hold a discussion and then say, “Follow your conscience, there are many answers or maybe none.” People’s consciences have a way of pointing in the most bizarre directions.
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It’s an extreme case, but a good one. For one thing, it eliminates relativism right away. Even sophisticated people of the 90s–the sort who are inclined to say that it’s “OK for you” to sleep around but “OK for me” to be faithful to one person–are not likely to think that this question has “several correct answers, or perhaps none.” So moral relativism is out; let’s try another moral theory. If you believe that one should always seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number (utilitarianism), then, says Regalbuto, you would weigh the misery of a few hundred frozen research subjects against the future benefits to millions and millions of people–not to mention the happiness of your family, which will suffer if you turn the job down. So you could take the job.
Regalbuto finds just such a theory in natural law, according to which an action is morally permissible only if the intention, the circumstances, and the act itself are all good or are at least indifferent.
God is fundamental in Regalbuto’s system, and he uses the Second Law of Thermodynamics to prove God’s existence. Since the Big Bang, the total useful energy in the universe has been decreasing, leading ultimately to “thermal death,” in which energy is evenly distributed and entropy is maximized. (This is the same process by which your living room naturally becomes messier rather than more orderly.) “The second law [of thermodynamics] states that we’re on a hill progressing downward in time, and there’s no natural way to return to the top,” Regalbuto writes in a 40-page course summary. “How then was the initial state produced? Since there is no natural explanation . . . the answer must be supernatural. And unless the Creator wants himself to be degraded to nothing in time, he would be a spiritual being apart from the material world.” People have immortal souls, because they can think of abstract ideas (like solidarity, or prime numbers) which do not decay or change. Animals cannot conceive of abstract ideas apart from sense-experience, so they don’t have souls. And thus, in the space of about three and a half double-spaced pages, Regalbuto has–to his evident relief–structured a foundation on which to build true morality.
