Let me turn next to proposition 3, the incommensurability of basic goods. As I mentioned at the beginning, I will distinguish between weak and strong incommensurability. Weak incommensurability refers to the incommensurability of different goods in the short term, in a single moment (synchronic incommensurability). Strong incommensurability would entail that there can be no rationalContinue reading “Against the New Natural Law: Incommensurability”
Category Archives: Natural Law Ethics
Against the New Natural Law: Theoretical Knowledge of the Good
If my account of normative normality is roughly correct, then we can see that the human good is something that belongs, both semantically and metaphysically, to the domain of the objects of theoretical knowledge (in contradiction to proposition 5 of the NNL). It is possible for God or an angel to know the human goodContinue reading “Against the New Natural Law: Theoretical Knowledge of the Good”
Causal Powers and Natural Teleology
This is second in a series of posts on teleology and the natural law. In my previous post, I sketched the difference between the new natural law and classical Aristotelian-Thomist natural law. Once one has causal power in one’s ontology, one also has teleology. Each causal power is essentially forward-looking: it refers to a possibleContinue reading “Causal Powers and Natural Teleology”
New Natural Law and Natural Teleology
The natural law tradition is rooted in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and others and plays a central and foundation role in the history of Western civilization, in particular, in its conception of ethics, law, and politics. It has played that role simply because it is both profound and correct. Therefore, the task of interpretingContinue reading “New Natural Law and Natural Teleology”
The Analytic Thomist 