The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell

Jacobs, “More on Natural Law Arguments.”

11. Feser, “A Christian Hart, a Humean Head.” For the extended debate, see Hart, “Nature Loves to Hide,” 71–72, and Feser, “Sheer Hart Attack.”

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Anderson, “Why Natural Law Arguments Make Evangelicals Uncomfortable,” para. 5; Girgis et al., “What Is Marriage?” 245–87. See also, as examples, Carter, “Why Aren’t Natural Law Arguments More Persuasive?”; Knippenberg, “Evangelicals and Natural Law Update.”

15. Mohler, “Moral Argument in Modern Times,” para. 46.

16. Anderson, “Assorted Thoughts on Evangelicals and Natural Law,” para. 4.

17. See Budziszewksi, Written on the Heart, 179–219; Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know, 19–53.

18. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 40.

19. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 24.

20. Ibid., 25.

21. George, In Defense of the Natural Law, 254, also 249–58.

22. Boyle, “Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions,” 5–6.

23. Ibid., 6. Lewis made the same claim; see Abolition, 44–48.

24. Ibid., 7.

25. Ibid., 9–10. See, as examples, Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic; Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject; Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics; Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World.

26. Ibid., 16, 11.

27. Mohler, “Moral Arguments,” para. 46.

28. Lonergan, A Second Collection, 43–53.

29. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 64.

30. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 81.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 82.

33. Ibid., 83. See also Lonergan, Insight, 343–71.

34. Ibid., 83.

35. Snell, Through a Glass Darkly, 78–97; Snell and Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism, 15–43.

36. Snell, “Protestant Prejudice,” 21–30; Snell, “Performing Differently.”

37. Lonergan, Method, 83.

38. Ibid., 83, 105.

39. Ibid., 84.

40. This is an argument I posited in “Protestant Prejudice,” 21–30. See also my “Thomism and Noetic Sin, Transposed,” 7–28.

      Part One

Natural Law as Nature and as Theory

      1

      Natural Law as Ordo Naturae

In a very helpful essay, J. Budziszewski explains those elements common to all natural law theories. All “share a conviction that the most basic truths of right and wrong . . . are not only right for everyone, but at some level known to everyone by the ordinary exercise of reason. They are an heirloom of the family of man.”41 Every natural lawyer would agree, he suggests, that basic truths are natural because somehow “embedded into the structure of creation, especially human nature, which includes the structure of the human mind,” and all would agree that this structure obligates or binds.42 True, known to be true, and right.

Particularly, he differentiates four aspects commonly affirmed by classical accounts, while new natural law demonstrates less commitment to the second and third: (1) a normative structure to practical reason; (2) an evident design to human nature; (3) the particular aspects of this design and the innate purposes and meanings of the designs; (4) natural consequences or discord to violating the good proper to our nature.43 As Budziszewski indicates, much of the dispute in the natural law literature between classical and contemporary theories pivots around the status of teleology in nature: does nature reveal design, can design be known absent theological commitments, does design entail normativity and obligation, is the Aristotelian paradigm of final causality still meaningful, is metaphysical biology sensible, and does natural law begin with and ground its conclusions upon nature? In short, what is the status of teleology?

As Leo Strauss articulated in his classic Natural Right and History, commitment to natural right seems reminiscent of a world existing no longer, part of a teleological universe “destroyed by modern natural science” and rejected by the social sciences in the name of “History and in the name of the distinction between Facts and Values.”44 Given the ateleological universe, historicism, and the fact/value distinction, it might appear quite unreasonable to maintain belief in natural law or natural right, for the intellectual substructure is, as Alasdair MacIntyre put it, echoed by David Bentley Hart, “unacceptable by the dominant standards of modernity.”45 Yet the cultural and scientific developments noted by Strauss have not resulted in the withering away of either natural right or natural law but instead contributed