4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 71.
6. Potemra, “A Bracing Challenge to Conservative Natural-Law Theorists.” For my responses, see Snell, “Understanding Natural Law” and “Natural Law Is neither Useless nor Dangerous.”
7. Ibid.
8. Millman, “What’s Natural about Natural Law?”
9. Dreher, “Why Natural Law Arguments Fail.”
10. 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
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
