Natural law, human dignity, and the limits of institutions
For years, I have been struggling with natural law. Not because it does not make sense. It does. The world around me does not.
I have returned to the question in different forms over the years: when I have written about belonging, power, caregiving, institutions, human rights, and the ways systems decide whose knowledge matters. I did not always connect those subjects to natural law. I thought I was writing about separate problems. Lately, I have begun to wonder whether I have been circling the same question all along: What do we owe one another before any institution decides what it is willing or able to do?
Part of my struggle came from wanting natural law to give me certainty. I wanted it to tell me when a government, a hospital, a court, or a university had crossed a line. I wanted the Spiritualist principles to be clear enough that the right answer would follow from it. Instead, natural law kept forcing me back into harder questions:
- What happened to the person?
- What does that person need?
- What responsibility remains when an institution has followed its rules but the human need at the center of the situation remains unresolved?
A Simple Premise
Natural law begins with a simple premise: some things belong to human beings because they are human beings. Human dignity does not come from a government, a court, a university, a church, or a majority vote. Those institutions can recognize rights, protect them, limit their exercise under certain circumstances, or fail to protect them. They cannot create the underlying worth of the person.
Human power is not the final source of human worth.
Human institutions have enormous power over the conditions of people’s lives. Governments regulate citizenship and borders. Courts determine what evidence meets legal standards. Universities, hospitals, employers, and religious institutions establish rules that can shape a person’s opportunities, care, standing, and sense of belonging.
We need institutions because rights need protection. But an institution becomes a problem when its authority becomes the measure of who deserves protection.
The Questions Dr. Quinn Raises
Sometimes an abstract moral question becomes easier to see when it appears in a story. A legal code can tell us what an institution is permitted to do. A story can show us what that decision looks like when it reaches an actual human being.
Perhaps part of the reason I keep circling back to natural law comes from an unlikely place: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
The television series presents a nineteenth-century world where authority, belonging, gender, race, and social status constantly collide. Dr. Michaela Quinn enters a community that does not automatically recognize her authority because she is a woman. The show also portrays hostility toward Indigenous people, Black people, and outsiders, including immigrants, while repeatedly asking who gets to belong and who gets heard.
It is fiction, of course. I am not using a television series as historical evidence. I am using it because the questions are easy to see.
- Who has authority?
- Whose knowledge counts?
- Who belongs?
- Who receives protection?
- Who gets to decide what justice requires?
Those questions become more complicated when the person with institutional authority and the person seeking protection do not stand on equal ground. Race, gender, origin, and social position can affect who gets believed, protected, or permitted to belong.
History gives us more than enough examples. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. Women could be denied the right to vote. Indigenous people could have their lands taken through government policy and law. Immigration systems have excluded people based on nationality, race, origin, and other classifications.
Legality did not make those people less worthy of dignity when the law denied it.
That is one of the places where natural law becomes useful to me. It gives me a way to distinguish between what an institution has decided and what a person is.
Rights and Remedies Are Not the Same Thing
Cornell brought this distinction into sharper focus for me this week.
A former Cornell student filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven fraternity members in 2024. The complaint describes alleged communications and other evidence connected to the incident. The Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office later said that its review of the police investigation did not provide sufficient evidence to support criminal charges. Cornell conducted its own disciplinary process, separate from the criminal system, with different standards and consequences.
Those systems can reach different conclusions because they ask different questions and operate under different rules. The distinction matters because we often collapse two different questions into one.
Did something happen?
If it did, what remedy can this institution provide under its rules?
Institutional safeguards exist for good reasons. A criminal system cannot operate on accusation alone. Evidentiary standards help protect people from wrongful punishment, false accusations, and decisions driven by fear or public pressure. Due process is itself a protection of human dignity.
The Limits of Institutional Remedies
But those protections also define what an institution can establish within its own authority. A finding that evidence is insufficient for criminal charges does not establish that nothing happened. A university disciplinary finding answers the question presented within that university’s process. A civil lawsuit asks a different question again.
The rules may prevent one kind of harm while leaving another unresolved.
An investigation can end without criminal charges while another person remains hurt. A case can end without a remedy that makes the underlying experience whole. An institution can follow its procedures carefully and still leave a human being carrying consequences that its process was never designed to address.
That does not make the institution’s rules meaningless. It shows their limits.
Natural law does not tell me that evidence is unnecessary. It tells me that evidence and procedure operate in service of people rather than above them.
That distinction is important to me because I have spent years watching institutions make decisions about people I know. More than that, I have watched institutions make decisions about someone for whom I carry significant responsibility. Those experiences have taught me that institutional knowledge and human knowledge are not always the same thing.
What I Know About the Person in Front of Me
Caregiving has made that distinction impossible for me to ignore.
As the Chief Care Officer in my family, I have a kind of knowledge that no institution can acquire simply by reading a chart. I know the person I am caring for. I know her baseline. I know how she communicates, what she can usually do, what confuses her, what comforts her, and when something feels different from the ordinary pattern.
A chart can contain accurate facts and still fail to convey the reality of a particular day. It may not show what I recognize in a pause, a change in expression, a confusion that is not ordinary, or a silence that means something different because I know the person who is silent. That knowledge does not make me a physician, nurse, social worker, or other clinical professional. It does not replace their expertise. It gives them information about a particular person that may not appear anywhere else.
Sometimes an institution needs information from me that it cannot get anywhere else. Sometimes I need an institution to listen.
That distinction matters because institutional authority can become very abstract. A person becomes a diagnosis, a case, a room number, a chart, a policy violation, an eligibility determination, or a discharge plan. The institution has legitimate reasons for using those categories. It cannot afford to forget that the categories describe a person rather than replace one.
My authority as a Chief Care Officer also has limits. I cannot order a hospital to practice medicine according to my wishes. I cannot substitute my judgment for a specialist’s expertise. I can, however, recognize when the person I know is being described inaccurately or when an important piece of information has been overlooked.
Where Institutional Knowledge Ends
Every institution has authority within a purpose. A university has authority over its students because it has a responsibility to educate and maintain a functioning academic community. A court has authority because society needs a structured way to resolve disputes. A government has authority because people need systems capable of protecting rights and maintaining public order.
Authority does not justify itself. It has meaning because of the purpose it is meant to serve. When an institution forgets that purpose, the person inside its system can become secondary to the system itself.
What Institutions Owe the Harmed
This is where I find myself asking: What about the Epstein files?
The Department of Justice says it has released millions of pages responsive to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, while redacting or withholding material to protect victims and comply with legal restrictions. The department continues to maintain an Epstein Library for releasable material.
There are legitimate reasons for some secrecy. Victims deserve privacy. Grand-jury material and other protected records carry legal restrictions. Personal identifying information can cause further harm. A person’s name appearing in a document is not itself evidence of wrongdoing.
But the existence of legitimate limits does not remove the larger moral question: What does an institution owe people when it holds records connected to profound human harm?
Millions of pages can become another institutional category—files, evidence, disclosures, redactions. But those records concern people. People were harmed. People were failed. Some were children. No release, investigation, or procedure should let the scale of the records obscure the human beings whose lives made those records necessary.
I have to ask what all the procedures, investigations, laws, files, courts, agencies, and authorities are actually for.
That is the question natural law keeps putting in front of me.
What Natural Law Has Given Me
This is where I think I have been struggling with natural law all these years.
I wanted it to explain why the world works the way it does. Instead, it keeps giving me a standard for noticing when the world fails to live up to what people owe one another.
I wanted natural law to give me certainty. What it has given me instead is a responsibility to pay attention.
It has made me more attentive to the person affected by a decision, especially when the institution making that decision has more power, more language, more resources, and more authority than that person does.
Remembering What Institutions Are For
That does not make every moral question easy. It does not eliminate disagreement. It does not tell us exactly how a government should balance borders with humanitarian obligations, how a court should weigh conflicting evidence, or how a university should respond when competing rights collide. Those questions still require law, evidence, expertise, judgment, and sometimes compromise.
Natural law asks a question underneath all of them: what happens to the person while the institution is doing its work?
The difficult part is building institutions that remember that question. The people inside them are working with rules, evidence, competing interests, limited authority, and imperfect information. The answer cannot be to abandon institutions or dismiss expertise. It has to be to remember what all of those things are for.
I do not want a world without institutions. I want institutions that understand why they exist. I do not want authority abolished. I want authority exercised with an awareness that it belongs to something larger than itself. The institution exists for the human being. The human being does not exist for the institution.
Maybe the problem is not that natural law fails to explain the world. Maybe natural law explains why the world bothers me.
The world around me still does not make sense. Perhaps natural law was never supposed to make it make sense. Perhaps it was meant to keep me from becoming so accustomed to the world’s failures that I stop recognizing them as failures.
