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: New Natural Law
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”
Normative Normality: An Aristotelian Account
Happiness consists, for Aristotelians, in the actualization of all of our unconditional and essential causal potentialities. But none of our powers are absolutely unconditional. They all depend on two things: on our internal constitution being in a healthy and intact state, and on our being located in a normal environment (that is, an environment thatContinue reading “Normative Normality: An Aristotelian Account”
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”
Aristotle vs the New Natural Law
Traditional Thomists (like Steve Jensen) and “new natural law” theorists (like Chris Tollefsen) differ radically on the nature of intentional action. For new natural lawyers, I intend to do something only if the thing in question is entailed by some description of my action that figures as such in my practical reasoning. For Aristotelian Thomists,Continue reading “Aristotle vs the New Natural Law”
The Analytic Thomist 