Saving Natural Law from Itself

R.J. Snell

by R.J. Snell on November 15, 2012 · 2 comments

Better accounts than physicalism are available; the difficulty is convincing refugees of naiveté to accept the reasonable instead of embracing skepticism, the doppelgänger of naïve natural law.

This article is reprinted with kind permission from Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, an online publication of the Witherspoon Institute that seeks to enhance the public understanding of the moral foundations of free societies by making the scholarship of the fellows and affiliated scholars of the Institute available and accessible to a general audience. 

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R.J. Snell

By R.J. Snell

R.J. Snell is associate professor of philosophy at Eastern University and a research director of the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.

Tagged as: Bernard Lonergan, natural law, objective truth

  • Matt

    I think the problem is that almost no one “out there” has given any thought to where morals and ethics come from. The reason we appeal to natural law is because the culture has rejected God as a moral authority. The culture substituted human beings, namely themselves, as that authority, and each human being gets to be his or her own authority. By using natural law, we step back from that brink a bit, to try to bring our culture back at least to where the pagans were, hopefully on a path to eventually accepting God.

  • Jeffrey Arrowood

    Natural law has a proper role to play in Catholic theology, as Saint Thomas Aquinas clearly shows in his writing. While I had a bit of difficulty following Dr. Snell’s arguments here – my “academia” is a little rusty, I would agree that two popular understandings of Natural Law are indeed naive and harmful. One is the simple definition of “the Law written in our hearts,” by which most people mean some sort of synderesis (instinctive knowledge). The other is natural law as an almost biological mandate (is this what Dr. Snell referred to as physicalism?) that we tend to see in explanations of Natural Family Planning. But to understand natural law as the part of the moral law that helps us to live a fully human life seems to me a solid understanding of natural law. This understanding is not divorced from God, since it is a cooperation in God’s wisdom that he placed into human nature.

    I do wish that Dr. Snell had presented an understandable definition of natural law in this article instead of focusing only on what it is not. Would he accept Saint Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on it? Is he opposed to J. Budziszewski’s understanding of natural law? I am all for a clarifying discussion on natural law, and this article offers much to chew on.