A recent claim to reject the natural law risks misunderstanding the role of reason and overlooks the difference between practical reasoning and morality. The first in a two-part series.
In the most recent issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart, the noted theologian and author of the modern classic, The Beauty of the Infinite, brusquely rejects natural law theory, especially “the attempt in recent years by certain self-described Thomists, particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates, but in a way amenable to modern political culture.”
While having no “metaphysical disagreement” with them about the nature of the cosmos, Hart judges it a “hopeless cause” to hold “that compelling moral truths can be deduced from a scrupulous contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world.”
Further, it just isn’t likely, he claims, “that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind,” so that “any rightly attentive intellect” would know the wrongness of abortion, lying, same-sex marriage, and so on. For Hart, nature “tells us nothing of the sort,” nor does “knowledge of our nature or of the nature of the universe at large instruct us clearly in the content of true morality.”
Read More at Public Discourse.
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