Download or read book A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory written by Russell Hittinger and published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Russell Hittinger presents a comprehensive and critical treatment of the attempt to restate and defend a theory of natural law, particularly as proposed by Germain Grisez and John Finnis. A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory begins by examining the positions of various moral philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Alan Donogan, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Stanley Hauerwas, who wish to recover particular facets of premodern ethics. Hittinger then explores the work of Grisez and Finnis, who claim to have recovered natural law in a manner that avoids the standard objections brought against it since the Enlightenment; they thus claim to have recovered natural law theory available once again for moral theology. Hittinger examines this new theory for internal coherence and consistency. In addition, he examines whether it is sufficiently comprehensive to explicate the religious, anthropological, and metaphysical questions that bear upon natural law ethics. He argues that the new natural law theory fails because it does not take into account philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. It cannot show how and why "nature" is normative for human activity. Hittinger concludes that if natural law theory is to be recovered, we must discover how to constructively bring theoretical rationality to bear upon ethics and practical rationality. Until this is done, he asserts, we will not have a defensible theory of natural law.
Download or read book The Role of Natural Law in Civic Government written by John Conor Gallagher and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The First Grace written by Russell Hittinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last two decades or so have seen a marked resurgence of interest in natural law thought, a movement in which Russell Hittinger has been a major figure. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World reveals the power and subtlety of Hittinger's philosophical work and cultural criticism. Whether discussing the nature of liberalism, the constitutional and moral problems posed by judicial usurpation, or the dangers of technology, Hittinger convincingly demonstrates that in our post-Christian world it is more crucial than ever that we recover older, wiser notions of the concepts of freedom and law - and that we see that to place these two concepts in opposition is to misunderstand both profoundly.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics written by Tom Angier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do ethical norms relate to human nature? This comprehensive and interdisciplinary volume surveys the latest thinking on natural law.
Download or read book The Revival of Natural Law written by Nigel Biggar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural law theory has been enjoying a significant revival in recent times. Led by Germain Grisez in the USA and John Finnis in the UK, one school of thinkers has been articulating a highly developed system of natural law built upon a sophisticated account of practical reasoning and a rich and flexible understanding of the human good. However, long-standing prejudices against old-style natural law among moral philosophers and Protestant ethicists, together with the new theory's appropriation by conservatives in the impassioned debate between the Vatican and dissenting theologians in the United States, have prevented the Finnis-Grisez version from being adequately appreciated. Providing a clear and substantive introduction to the theory for those who are new to it, this book then broadens, assesses, and advances the debate about it, examining crucial philosophical, theological and ethical issues and opening up discussion beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church. Part 1, on philosophical issues, starts with two broad chapters that locate the Grisez school in relation to modern moral philosophy and the Roman Catholic philosophical tradition of Thomism, and then follows these with further chapters on two crucial issues: the possibility of consensus on the human good, and the nature of moral absolutes. Part 2, on theological dimensions, begins with a Lutheran critique of Grisez, locates him in relation to the ethics of two very prominent 20th century Protestants, Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas, and then explores the major area of theological controversy within the Roman Catholic community - how to conceive of the "Church's" authority with regard to moral matters. Part 3 subjects the school's thought to critical examination in a broad range of ethical fields: bioethics, gender, sex and the environment. A concluding chapter then develops eight topics that recur in the course of the book: the status of ethical realism in the contemporary intellectual climate; whether realism is best conceived in rationalist or naturalist terms; whether marriage should be counted as a basic good; whether physical pleasure should not be counted a basic good; whether it is always wrong to act deliberately against a basic good; the problems of moral certainty and authority; the rapproachement between Protestant and Roman Catholic ethics; and, finally, whether ethical understanding is really independent of one's anthropological point of view. Drawing together North American, European and Australian contributors from across moral philosophy and Protestant ethics as well as from Roman Catholic moral theology, this book opens up the debate about the Finnis-Grisez theory, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses in order to advance current discussion about natural law in moral theology and in moral and legal philosophy.
Download or read book Patriarchal Religion Sexuality and Gender written by Nicholas Bamforth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal theorists are familiar with John Finnis's book Natural Law and Natural Rights, but usually overlook his interventions in US constitutional debates and his membership of a group of conservative Catholic thinkers, the 'new natural lawyers', led by theologian Germain Grisez. In fact, Finnis has repeatedly advocated conservative positions concerning lesbian and gay rights, contraception and abortion, and his substantive moral theory (as he himself acknowledges) derives from Grisez. Bamforth and Richards provide a detailed explanation of the work of the new natural lawyers within and outside the Catholic Church - the first truly comprehensive explanation available to legal theorists - and criticize Grisez's and Finnis's arguments concerning sexuality and gender. New natural law is, they argue, a theology rather than a secular theory, and one which is unappealing in a modern constitutional democracy. This book will be of interest to legal and political theorists, ethicists, theologians and scholars of religious history.
Download or read book Natural Law written by Howard P. Kainz and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as an objective law of morality? Natural law theorists maintain that there is, and Natural Law probes the history and implications of this powerful concept. Tracing the development of natural law from ancient times to the present, the book also examines the leading figures, transitions, and turning points in the idea's evolution, and brings a natural law approach to contemporary issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and assisted suicide.
Download or read book Normative Jurisprudence written by Robin West and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence – natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies – that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns – toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique – and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship – scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform – is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.
Download or read book The Status of Natural Law Within Christian Ethics written by Conor Dugan and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Natural Law Theory written by Tom Angier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Section 1, I outline the history of natural law theory, covering Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. In Section 2, I explore two alternative traditions of natural law, and explain why these constitute rivals to the Aristotelian tradition. In Section 3, I go on to elaborate a via negativa along which natural law norms can be discovered. On this basis, I unpack what I call three 'experiments in being', each of which illustrates the cogency of this method. In Section 4, I investigate and rebut two seminal challenges to natural law methodology, namely, the fact/value distinction in metaethics and Darwinian evolutionary biology. In Section 5, I then outline and criticise the 'new' natural law theory, which is an attempt to revise natural law thought in light of the two challenges above. I conclude, in Section 6, with a summary and some reflections on the prospects for natural law theory.
Download or read book The Threads of Natural Law written by Francisco José Contreras and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-13 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of “natural law” has repeatedly furnished human beings with a shared grammar in times of moral and cultural crisis. Stoic natural law, for example, emerged precisely when the Ancient World lost the Greek polis, which had been the point of reference for Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophy. In key moments such as this, natural law has enabled moral and legal dialogue between peoples and traditions holding apparently clashing world-views. This volume revisits some of these key moments in intellectual and social history, partly with an eye to extracting valuable lessons for ideological conflicts in the present and perhaps near future. The contributions to this volume discuss both historical and contemporary schools of natural law. Topics on historical schools of natural law include: how Aristotelian theory of rules paved the way for the birth of the idea of "natural law"; the idea's first mature account in Cicero's work; the tension between two rival meanings of “man’s rational nature” in Aquinas’ natural law theory; and the scope of Kant’s allusions to “natural law”. Topics on contemporary natural law schools include: John Finnis's and Germain Grisez's “new natural law theory”; natural law theories in a "broader" sense, such as Adolf Reinach’s legal phenomenology; Ortega y Gasset’s and Scheler’s “ethical perspectivism”; the natural law response to Kelsen’s conflation of democracy and moral relativism; natural law's role in 20th century international law doctrine; Ronald Dworkin’s understanding of law as “a branch of political morality”; and Alasdair Macintyre’s "virtue"-based approach to natural law.
Download or read book In Defense of Natural Law written by Robert P. George and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2001 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his collection George extends the critique of liberalism he expounded in Making Men Moral and also goes beyond it to show how contemporary natural law theory provides a superior way of thinking about basic problems of justice and political morality. It is written with the same combination of stylistic elegance and analytical rigour that distinguished his critical work. Not content merely to defend natural law from its cultural despisers, he deftly turns the tables and deploys the idea to mount a stunning attack on regnant liberal beliefs about such issues as abortion, sexuality, and the place of religion in public life.
Download or read book Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics written by Mark C. Murphy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural law is a perennial though poorly represented and understood issue in political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In this 2006 book, Mark C. Murphy argues that the central thesis of natural law jurisprudence - that law is backed by decisive reasons for compliance - sets the agenda for natural law political philosophy, demonstrating how law gains its binding force by way of the common good of the political community. Murphy's work ranges over the central questions of natural law jurisprudence and political philosophy, including the formulation and defense of the natural law jurisprudential thesis, the nature of the common good, the connection between the promotion of the common good and requirement of obedience to law, and the justification of punishment.
Download or read book The Unnecessary Science written by Gunther Laird and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nature as Reason written by Jean Porter and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This noteworthy book develops a new theory of the natural law that takes its orientation from the account of the natural law developed by Thomas Aquinas, as interpreted and supplemented in the context of scholastic theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though this history might seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century life, Jean Porter shows that the scholastic approach to the natural law still has much to contribute to the contemporary discussion of Christian ethics. Aquinas and his interlocutors provide a way of thinking about the natural law that is distinctively theological while at the same time remaining open to other intellectual perspectives, including those of science. In the course of her work, Porter examines the scholastics' assumptions and beliefs about nature, Aquinas's account of happiness, and the overarching claim that reason can generate moral norms. Ultimately, Porter argues that a Thomistic theory of the natural law is well suited to provide a starting point for developing a more nuanced account of the relationship between specific beliefs and practices. While Aquinas's approach to the natural law may not provide a system of ethical norms that is both universally compelling and detailed enough to be practical, it does offer something that is arguably more valuable -- namely, a way of reflecting theologically on the phenomenon of human morality.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law written by Kody W. Cooper and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has Hobbesian moral and political theory been fundamentally misinterpreted by most of his readers? Since the criticism of John Bramhall, Hobbes has generally been regarded as advancing a moral and political theory that is antithetical to classical natural law theory. Kody W. Cooper challenges this traditional interpretation of Hobbes in Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law. Hobbes affirms two essential theses of classical natural law theory: the capacity of practical reason to grasp intelligible goods or reasons for action and the legally binding character of the practical requirements essential to the pursuit of human flourishing. Hobbes’s novel contribution lies principally in his formulation of a thin theory of the good. This book seeks to prove that Hobbes has more in common with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law philosophy than has been recognized. According to Cooper, Hobbes affirms a realistic philosophy as well as biblical revelation as the ground of his philosophical-theological anthropology and his moral and civil science. In addition, Cooper contends that Hobbes's thought, although transformative in important ways, also has important structural continuities with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of practical reason, theology, social ontology, and law. What emerges from this study is a nuanced assessment of Hobbes’s place in the natural law tradition as a formulator of natural law liberalism. This book will appeal to political theorists and philosophers and be of particular interest to Hobbes scholars and natural law theorists.
Download or read book Fundamentals of Ethics written by John Finnis and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we entitled to be confident that our moral judgements can be objective? Can they express insights into aspects of reality, rather than mere feelings, tastes, desires, decisions, upbringing, or conventions? Why must we consider some of our choices to be free, and how do our free choices matter? How far should our moral judgements be based on assessments of expected consequences? Can utilitarianism, and other consequentialist or proportionalist theories, be anything more than the rationalization of positions taken on other grounds? The main theme of this book is the challenge to ethics from philosophical scepticism and from contemporary forms of consequentialism. But in seeking to meet this challenge, the book develops a sustained philosophical argument about many of the central questions of ethics. It reviews classical positions, and challenges some long-influential interpretations of those positions. It also reviews and participates in some recent developments and controversies in Anglo-American ethical theory. The activity of ethical theorizing itself is shown to be a matter of free and intelligent decision, in pursuit of intelligible good; it thus provides a test-case for any ethical theory.
