Gentle readers, I have just posted a new item to the Read Articles page of this website:  “Why Natural Law Is for Everyone” (National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Winter 2023).  You can go directly to the article, or see the whole Read Articles page.  A snippet:

Although I have spoken of the shared moral sense of the plain person, the actual theory of natural law is not so plain.  In fact, it can be abstruse.  This is one of the things that upsets some critics, for if there really is a common moral sense, then apart from the sheer joy of knowledge, why do we need a theory of it at all?  People do not have to be able to analyze what natural lawyers call the procreative and unitive goods just to avoid cheating on their spouses, do they?  Well, no, just as they do not have to know much about what electricians call alternating current just to avoid sticking their fingers into wall sockets.  And yet there are times when it does help to reflect on the natural goods that shape the norms of marriage -- just as there are times when it helps to know something about electricity ….

A wise natural law thinker will not teach natural law to me in a bookish way.  He may not even weigh me down with anything as academic as a “theory of natural law,” although that theory will always be in the background.  First he will remind me of things that I know that I know -- for example, the sweetness of bringing children into the world.  Then he will dredge from the depths of my mind things I know at some level but may not notice that I know -- for example, that a true union between spouses requires the complementary difference of the two sexes.  Finally, he will be on the alert for smokescreens and self-deceptions which have to be dispersed, for it is one thing for me to know something -- and another to admit to myself that I know it.  My desire not to admit it makes the natural law a scandal or stumbling block.

Considering how controversial the idea of natural law has become in our own day -- “Aren’t we beyond all that now?” -- and how little most educated people even remember about the tradition, perhaps the best way for this essay to proceed is simply to call to mind challenges and respond to them.  We find that although from time to time there are new objections, most of the same old ones keep rolling around, as though they had not been refuted over and over.