[Maximilian]

This article is a little bit long and difficult, but your effort will be greatly rewarded. This is the best single-article description of the Natural Law debate that I have seen. J. Budziszewski is a genius, and he has the ability to make complex arguments simple to understand.

A first glance these issues may seem abstract, but as the author points out so well, they have concrete applications to every single one of the moral issues which are troubling our society.

[Notwithstanding]

Ave Maria School of Law
http://www.avemarialaw.edu/prospective/cur1.cfm

Preparing for Leadership in the Profession:
Guiding Principles

Ave Maria’s curriculum reflects its mission — to provide students with a superior legal education enriched by instruction in the __natural law__ and the Catholic intellectual tradition. The curriculum ensures a rigorous intellectual environment and grounds students in the knowledge and the skills critical to the intelligent practice of law. The curriculum fosters the development of professional men and women by challenging students to develop an informed and mature judgment and to approach issues in a comprehensive, integrative manner.

[livius]

Interesting article. I think that Catholics (at least those who have not had their brains turned to mush by AmChurch) will make a significant intellectual contribution in the near future through a restoration of Thomism and its associated concepts. Neo-neo-Thomism?

[.45MAN]

PING

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[HumanaeVitae]

Ditto. Thanks for posting and pinging.

Someone needs to create a libertarian list and ping them on this stuff...may knock some sense into them.

[Aquinasfan]

When St. Thomas Aquinas used the phrase “natural law” back in the thirteenth century, he meant that the law is natural because it is grounded in the design by which God made the universe. Yes, of course, certain moral truths are self-evident and we can’t not know them, but the important thing is that they are self-evident truths about the order of creation. That’s why St. Thomas doesn’t just call our natural inclinations good but defines goodness in terms of inclinations. “Good,” he says, “is that which all things seek after.”

And also that each thing has its proper good, end or purpose. Fish have to swim and birds have to fly. It's as simple and commonsensical as that.

This is the sort of reasoning that George, Finnis, and Grisez reject. They agree with the Enlightenment rebuke that the old natural law theory commits the “naturalist fallacy,” which means trying to derive a moral conclusion from a factual premise—in Thomas’s case, “X fulfills nature, so X is good.” We must rather assert that although some truths are self-evident, they are self-evident for a different reason than St. Thomas thought. It isn’t because they are built into nature for the reasoning mind to reflect, but because they are built into the reasoning mind itself. Self-evidence lies not in the way the world is put together, but in the way the mind is put together.

This way leads to relativism.

Of course, making good on this claim requires an understanding of nature in which the properties of things are not “simple” but “dispositional”—which is a technical way of saying that you have to view each thing in the universe as though it were an arrow directed naturally to a goal. That’s what St. Thomas thought. The nature of a thing, he said, is “a purpose, implanted by the Divine Art, that it be moved to a determinate end.” And, regardless of philosophy, it’s the way we all naturally tend to think of things.

Good philosophy conforms with common sense and experience.

On the other hand, some believers say that since we have the Bible to tell us what to do, we don’t need a natural law. In fact, maybe there isn’t any. The Old Testament doesn’t even mention “nature.”

Not literally. But the idea is laid out explicitly in Deuteronomy:

Deuteronomy 30

1 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, "Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

Good article.

[Dajjal]

Po-Mo-Tho bump

[ultima ratio]

Thanks for posting this. Just to tie it in with the other threads, the claim that the natural law is changeable has been a common assertion of the new theology. Charles Curran made this claim, teaching that the natural law and moral rules were in continual evolution. Cardinal Suenens made a similar point when he stated that "a healthy evolution" had removed certain taboos in the relations between men and women. Some of this thinking has permeated the seminaries for a long time now, which explains in part some of the moral rot. In other theological circles the ontological basis for the Natural Law itself has been fiercely attacked.

[Hibernius Druid]

Thank you. An important post. While the most general contours of natural law may be "self evident," the particulars aren't all that clear, hence the centuries of disucussion of this important concept. Glad to hear it's back on the front burner of at least some moral philosophers. Generally speaking, though, natural law has few champions amidst the prevailing orthodoxies of postmodernism. Too bad.

[Askel5]

What a pleasure to come across this thread. Thanks for the flag.