Letters

Must We Think of the Author to Read?

I admired Ryan T. Anderson’s review of Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (“Written on the Mind,” June 25), but I found one point unclear. Summarizing Justin Buckley Dyer’s views, Anderson writes that Lincoln’s arguments against slavery “require a certain metaphysics of morals,” one according to which moral principles are “binding because of God’s design.” But “Dyer quickly adds that one need not start with belief in God and then work toward morality. Instead, the intelligible order of nature, our ‘grasp of human goods,’ and the ‘distinction we draw between right and wrong’ are themselves ‘evidence for the existence of such a providential God.’”