Online research in philosophy

This paper argues against the indeterminacy thesis that attempts to defeat traditional natural law by asserting that specific moral norms cannot be based on human nature. As put by Jean Porter (Nature as Reason 2005, 338): “the intelligibilities of human nature underdetermine their forms of expression, and that is why this theory does not yield a comprehensive set of determinate moral norms, compelling to all rational persons.” However, if this were so, one could adopt any morality with impunity from nature’s (...) sanctions. But I argue that nature punishes violators of the natural law in various ways. In addition, I argue that the indeterminacy thesis cannot be supported by appealing to the diversity of moral norms across the globe. Such diversity is required, for instance, both by the reliance of Thomistic natural law on the practical syllogism and by its reliance on practical reason’s ability to prescribe for the sake of the person in highly unique situations as required by Wojtyla’s Personalistic Norm and Aquinas’s norm of neighborly love. (shrink)

This paper seeks to counter the argument that since Aquinas’s natural law obligations necessarily presuppose the ability of practical reason to prescribeand proscribe for the sake of eudaimonia, it is irrational in cases of inescapable suffering to characterize any natural law obligation as indefeasible. Four possiblerebuttals of this argument from suffering are examined; but only three are judged successful. Their key premises are that, as Aristotle and Aquinas pointed out, this life’s eudaimonia is defined in terms of human nature and (...) not in terms of individual psychological conditions, e.g., suffering; that suffering does not negate the rationality of hoping for attaining eudaimonia in the future; and that suffering necessarily precludes neither the virtuous acts that per se constitute this life’s eudaimonia nor the love that enables one to experience eudaimonic joy. (shrink)