Natural Law in the Teaching of Christian Ethics

This article looks at the ways that Thomas Aquinas’ classic and highly influential understanding of natural law ethics has been criticised by students coming from a number of different faith traditions. It suggests that the way that natural law ethics was deployed in Pope Paul vi’s encyclical Humanae Vitae has not typically been found to be persuasive even among Roman Catholic students. It then looks at the way that Lisa Sowle Cahill takes on board these criticisms and offers a more persuasive account of modified natural law ethics.

Natural Law and Ethical Non-Naturalism

There is a lack of clarity in the literature about what constitutes the natural law approach to ethics and what is incompatible with it. The standard, and largely historical, way of understanding the natural law approach risks overlooking theoretical differences of fundamental importance regarding what the natural law approach is usually taken to uphold. Against Craig Paterson, I argue that a necessary condition for an ethical account to uphold fully the natural law approach is that it does not contain any dependence upon the metaethical category of non-naturalism understood in non-supernaturalist (secular) terms. Using the ‘new natural law’ theory of John Finnis to illustrate my case, I also argue that an ethical theory can be largely in keeping with the natural law approach but nonetheless contain elements at odds with it: the issue is more complex than a simple binary. This is an under-explored possibility in natural law ethics.

Ethical Concepts and Problems

This book concerns the nature of ethics and the relation between ethics and politics in the philosophy of Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup. In the book, Løgstrup argues that apart from deontology and teleology, there is a third main tradition within philosophical ethics, which he calls ontological ethics. According to Løgstrup, ontological ethics is rooted in the fundamental conditions of human life and is closely related to Martin Luther’s natural law ethics. Løgstrup sees the fundamental ethical relationship between humans as one of interdependence based on mutual vulnerability. In this respect, Løgstrup is reprising ideas from his earlier work The Ethical Demand (1956), where he introduced his ethical position. In the present book, Løgstrup connects his understanding of the ethical demand with his new key ethical conception of sovereign expressions of life, a concept he introduced a few years earlier in his 1968 Controverting Kierkegaard, but did not then discuss in relation to the ethical demand. Finally, Løgstrup also ventures into the area of political philosophy, discussing how it is possible to connect his own ontological ethics to politics.