A Spanish version of this paper appears in: Miguel Ayuso Torres (ed.), ¿El derecho natural contra el derecho natural? Historia y balance de un problema (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2024).

A pdf of this essay can be found here.

Introduction

The so-called “New Natural Law Theory” is a name applied to a certain attempt at recovering natural law theory in a form that would make it impervious to objections taken from Hume’s “is-ought problem.” The attempt was begun by Germain Grisez in 1965, and carried on by Grisez himself, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Robert P. George, and others.¹ The theory began as a new interpretation of St Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on natural law, but it quickly diverged from St Thomas’s teaching on many particular conclusions. The name “New Natural Law Theory” seems to have been used first by critics of the theory.² The theory has been influential in jurisprudence, political philosophy, moral theology, and the interpretation of Catholic Social Teaching. While it has had some influence among non-Catholics,³ its primary influence has been among Catholics.

The New Natural Law Theory has been found useful as a way of defending what I will call “neo-conservative” Catholicism. By the term “neo-conservative” I mean to signify writers who, in the decades following Vatican II, were concerned, on the one hand, with defending the objectivity of moral norms and the truth of the Church’s moral teachings on matters such as abortion, euthanasia, and contraception; but who, on the other hand, interpreted Vatican II as allowing for a rapprochement between the Church and classical liberalism on such matters as usury, free market economics, social contract democracy, the primacy of individual rights, the separation of Church and state, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and (in short) most of the ideas that had been condemned by the 19th-century Popes as “liberal errors.”⁴ Thus, a theory whose theoretical concern was in part reinterpreting the natural law in response to the moral epistemology of the Enlightenment ended in endorsing many of the particular political and juridical conclusions that originally stemmed from Enlightenment thought.

In this paper I offer a critique of the New Natural Law Theory from the perspective of the traditional Thomist understanding of natural law, and more fundamentally of the good to which natural law is directed. I will argue that New Natural Law Theory exaggerates the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. This exaggeration leads its proponents to a fundamental misunderstanding of the good. Counter-intuitively, their exaggeration of the distinction between speculative and practical truth leads them to have an overly abstract understanding of the good; they neglect the implications of Aristotle’s insight that while the truth is found primarily in the mind, the good is found primarily in things.⁵ They consider the good according to the mode of existence that it has in the mind. As a consequence of this, the proponents of the New Natural Law Theory misunderstand the way in which the good is most properly said to be universal or common. They tend to understand the universality of the good as a universality in predication (one name said of many things), rather than a universality of causation (one elevated cause of many effects below it).⁶ They thereby misunderstand the way in which natural law is related to the good. They understand the first precept of the law, on which all the precepts of natural law are founded—“good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided”⁷—to refer to the universal predicate “good,” a name abstracted from particular goods and said of particular goods, rather than as referring the actual common good of all things, in which all other goods participate, and to which all goods are directed. The proponents of the New Natural Law Theory therefore deny that there is a hierarchy among the goods to which we are inclined by nature. This leads them to the astonishing opinion that God is not the complete end of human life. The denial of the hierarchy of goods also leads them to deny the primacy of the common good of a complete society (societas perfecta) over the private goods of individuals. They therefore also misunderstand the relation of the common good to individual rights. Instead of rights flowing from the common good by means of law (which is always directed to the common good), the proponents of the theory see rights as the foundation of law, and the common good as an instrumental good that secures rights to individuals. The proponents of the New Natural Law Theory therefore accept modern liberal errors on such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.

In Part I of this paper, I will give an outline of the New Natural Law Theory and show how the conclusions just mentioned follow from its principles. In Part II, I will explain the traditional Thomistic understanding of the good and the natural law and show how it grounds the rejection of liberal errors by the 19^th-century popes.

Part I: Goodness, Law, and Right in the New Natural Law Theory

In 1965 Germain Grisez published an article that came to be seen as the beginning of the New Natural Law Theory. The article offered a new interpretation of Summa theologiæ Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, in which St Thomas treats the question of whether the natural law contains only one precept or many. It will be useful to summarize St Thomas’s text before turning to Grisez’s interpretation.

St Thomas points to an analogy between speculative and practical reason. Just as speculative reason moves from self-evident, naturally known principles to conclusions, so practical reason moves from self-evident, naturally known principles to its conclusions. Reason first apprehends being, and from this first apprehension, the first principle of speculative reason is derived: the principle of contradiction. This principle is based on the understanding of the opposition of being and non-being. What is is and cannot not be. Or, in other words, the same cannot be affirmed and denied of the same thing at the same time. All other self-evident principles of speculative reasoning are based on this first principle and would be meaningless without it. For example, it is self-evident that a whole is greater than any one of its parts. But this proposition would be meaningless if the same could be affirmed and denied of the same, for then the whole could be both greater and not greater than one of its parts.

In practical reasoning, i.e. reasoning directed to action, St Thomas argues the first thing apprehended is the good, that which all seek after, because “every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good.” From this the first principle of practical reasoning follows: “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” All other self-evident principles of practical reason, St Thomas argues, are based on this first principle and would be meaningless without it.

Nevertheless, St Thomas goes on to argue there are many precepts of the natural law, because man is inclined (slanted) by nature to many different kinds of goods that perfect or complete him. Human reason apprehends such goods as ends on account of the first principle that the good is to be done and pursued. Nevertheless, the goodness of those ends is self-evident and naturally known through the natural inclinations in man. Thomas shows how various levels of nature in man result in various kinds of inclinations. The first level is what man has in common with all beings. As a being, a substance, man is inclined like all substances to conserve his being, to keep on existing. And because the being of living things is life, natural law commands man to preserve his life. The second level has more particularly to do with man’s being as an animal, a sensitive being. In accordance with this level man is inclined to sexual intercourse and the rearing of young, and such things. The third level has to do with man’s specific nature as a rational being. According to this third level, man is inclined to specifically rational goods, and thus he is bound by natural law to shun ignorance and falsehood and, moreover, to avoid offenses contrary to rational sociability.

In his interpretation, Germain Grisez reads St Thomas as making a rigid distinction between speculative and practical reason. He takes Thomas here as having anticipated the famous “is-ought” problem raised by Hume:

The theory of law is permanently in danger of falling into the illusion that practical knowledge is merely theoretical knowledge plus force of will. […] [P]ractical reason really does not know in the same way that theoretical reason knows. For practical reason, to know is to prescribe. This is why I insisted so strongly that the first practical principle is not a theoretical truth. Once its real character as a precept is seen, there is less temptation to bolster the practical principle with will, and so to transform it into an imperative, in order to make it relevant to practice. Indeed, the addition of will to theoretical knowledge cannot make it practical. This point is precisely what Hume saw when he denied the possibility of deriving ought from is.⁸

Although practical reason does not know in the same way as speculative reason, nevertheless it still does know abstractly. This is seen in how Grisez understands the notion of “good” in the first precept of the law. At first, Grisez seems to indicate that “good” refers to the last end, the ultimate final cause: “The good of which practical reason prescribes the pursuit and performance…is the last end, for practical reason cannot direct the possible actions which are its objects without directing them to an end.”⁹ But it soon becomes clear that Grisez does not think the first precept orders reason to any actual good in things, rather “good” in the precept is merely a universal predicate, one name said of many particular goods. The good of the first precept is indeterminate. For Grisez the first precept does not actually prescribe any actions, but rather makes human actions possible by “determining that action will be for an end.”¹⁰ “Good” in the first principle does mean the actual final cause of human action, but rather signifies abstractly anything that man might choose as his final cause:

The will necessarily tends to a single ultimate end, but it does not necessarily tend to any definite good as an ultimate end. We may say that the will naturally desires happiness, but this is simply to say that man cannot but desire the attainment of that good, whatever it may be, for which he is acting as an ultimate end. The desire for happiness is simply the first principle of practical reason directing human action from within the will informed by reason. Because the specific last end is not determined for him by nature, man is able to make the basic commitment which orients his entire life.¹¹

For Grisez there is therefore a “gap” between the first precept of law and the subsequent precepts of the natural law. Each of the subsequent precepts is in a sense a “first” precept; each of them is a self-evident ordering to some kind of good to which man is inclined. There is therefore no order between the other self-evident precepts of the natural law. They cannot be ordered by their proximity or distance from the true final end, because the first precept, at work in them, is not about the true final end. Rather, any of the goods of the other precepts, or any synthesis of them, can be taken by man as his final end. This is why proponents of the New Natural Law came to call such goods “basic goods.”¹²

One of the most startling consequences of the New Natural Law Theory’s denial of a hierarchy of ends is Germain Grisez’s thesis that God is not enough to satisfy the human heart. In a 2005 lecture entitled “The Restless Heart Blunder,” Grisez argued that St Augustine’s famous dictum that our hearts are restless until they rest in God was a blunder, because friendship with God is only one good among others. Therefore, he argues, the true end of human life is not God, but the Kingdom of God, which includes all human goods: “Strictly speaking, God is not the ultimate end toward which we should direct our lives. That end is God’s kingdom, which will be a wonderful communion of divine persons, human persons, and other created persons. Every member of the kingdom will be richly fulfilled in respect to all human goods, including friendship with God.”¹³ This opinion is so offensive to pious ears that it scarcely needs refutation. I will, however, show why it is wrong in Part II. I believe this to be the most pernicious error of the New Natural Law Theory.

The denial of the hierarchy of goods leads proponents of the New Natural Law Theory to deny the primacy of the political common good, the common good of the complete human community, over the goods of parts of the community as parts. Although their position is qualified in various ways, proponents of the New Natural Law Theory tend to see the “specifically political common good” as being “limited and in a sense instrumental.”¹⁴ The role of the state is to provide the necessary conditions for persons and smaller communities to seek their basic goods. The state, according to them, is therefore not ordered to the fullness of human virtue, but only towards such social virtues as are necessary for maintaining public order: “As the public good, the elements of the specifically political common good are not all-round virtue but goods (and virtues) which are intrinsically inter­personal, other-directed…, person to person…: justice and peace.”¹⁵

In this instrumental understanding of the political common good, proponents of the New Natural Law are closer to the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and their 19^th-century liberal heirs, than they are to the Socratic tradition of political philosophy as it was developed by Plato, Aristotle, and the great thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is thus not surprising that proponents of the New Natural Law Theory tend to agree with the Enlightenment philosophers and the 19^th-century liberals on the vital importance of rights such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc. 

To his credit, John Finnis points out that there was a “watershed” in the understanding of the concept of right or jus between the time of St Thomas Aquinas and that of Francisco Suárez. St Thomas had seen the primary meaning of right as being “the just thing itself,” meaning “acts, objects, and states of affairs, considered as subject-matters of relationships of justice.”¹⁶ Finnis implies that the distribution of such rights is related to the common good. To make his point more explicit: the duty that someone else has to render to you, what is your due by justice, is measured by law, which is an ordinance for the common good. Three centuries later, Finnis notes, in the work of Suárez, the primary meaning of jus comes to be a moral power that a person has over what belongs to him or is due to him.¹⁷ Finnis, however, disagrees with theorists such as Michel Villey that this watershed represents a bad development that needs to be corrected. According to Finnis, “there is no cause to take sides as between the older and the newer usages.”¹⁸ In a postscript to the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, Finnis goes even further, arguing that the “watershed” between Thomas and Suárez, “must be regarded as much more a matter of appearance and idiom than of conceptual, let alone political or philosophical, substance.”¹⁹ The main reason for this is Finnis’s instrumental understanding of the common good. Since the common good is ultimately for the sake of the enabling the enjoyment of basic goods, “right” in St Thomas’s sense is ultimately for “right” in Suárez’s sense:

[W]hen we come to explain the requirements of justice, which we do by referring to the needs of the common good at its various levels, then we find that there is reason for treating the concept of duty, obligation, or requirement as having a more strategic explanatory role than the concept of rights. The concept of rights is not on that account of less importance or dignity: for the common good is precisely the good of the individuals whose benefit, from fulfilment of duty by others, is their right because required in justice of those others.²⁰

Ultimately, therefore, Finnis can affirm the modern use of rights language as “a supple and potentially precise instrument for sorting out and expressing the demands of justice.”²¹ Finnis certainly disagrees with some contemporary claims about rights, such as the claim of a right to abortion or homosexual marriage,²² but he agrees with others. Particularly, he defends the right to free practice of religion. He reads Vatican II’s Declaration Dignitatis humanæ as having defended that right on the basis of an instrumental understanding of the common good.²³ I would argue that his reading of Dignitatis humanæ is, in fact, incorrect, and that his error of interpretation flows from the error in his principles.²⁴

In Making Men Moral, Robert P. George disagrees with the radical liberal claim that politics should not be concerned with morality, yet he uses the New Natural Law theory to defend the rights that had been defended by classical liberals: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.²⁵ The list reads almost like a list of liberties condemned by the 19^th-century popes.

Part II: Contrasting the New Natural Law Theory with the Old

Contrary to Grisez’s claims, St Thomas did not hold the main theses of the New Natural Law Theory. An understanding of his “old” natural law theory will, therefore, show the conclusions of the new to be erroneous.

For St Thomas the distinction between speculative and practical reason is not as rigid as for Grisez. Practical reason is distinguished from speculative reason from something that is accidental to reason as power—namely that practical reason orders what is known to action, whereas speculative reason orders it to contemplation. But, St Thomas argues, “to a thing apprehended by the intellect, it is accidental whether it be directed to operation or not.”²⁶ In other words, to know for the practical intellect is not radically different than for the speculative intellect. 

Nevertheless, since the good is in things, the practical intellect ought to consider goods according to the existence they have in reality, rather than merely according to their abstract existence in the mind. Hence the first precept of the law, “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided” refers not to a universal name, said of many goods, but existing only abstractly in the mind; rather it refers to a good common in its causality—the final end attracting all things by its actual goodness. 

Hence, in discussing the essence of law in general St Thomas argues that law is always ordered to a good which is universal in causality. Thomas argues that law is always ordered to “the common good.” He raises an objection: “Law directs man in his actions. But human actions are concerned with particular matters. Therefore the law is directed to some particular good.”²⁷ In response, Thomas writes: “Actions are indeed concerned with particular matters: but those particular matters are referable to the common good, not as to a common genus or species, but as to a common final cause, according as the common good is said to be the common end.”²⁸ In other words, in any kind of law, particular actions are commanded because they are directed toward that common good which is their final cause. Therefore, in the first precept of law, “the good” refers to the most common good to which all other goods, and all actions, are directed. Insofar as it refers to other goods to be done, it is referring to those other goods as actually ordered to the highest good and last end.

But what is the last end and highest good?²⁹ It is God Himself, the unbounded ocean of actuality, perfection, and goodness. The good is what all things desire insofar as they desire their perfection. But since every created perfection is from God as its agent, exemplar, and final cause, it is a participation in God’s perfection. To participate is to take part in something without removing a part from it. My reflection in a mirror partakes of my form, without depriving me of any part of my form. God does not have parts, but creatures share in Him in an incomplete, that is, a partial way. Therefore, creatures are ordered to their Creator the way parts are ordered to a whole. The perfection that each creature desires consists in an ever-greater likeness to the Creator. But that means that the perfection that they desire only ever exists in a secondary way in themselves. It exists fully only in God. Therefore, St Thomas teaches, creatures naturally love God more than themselves:

In natural things, everything which, as such, naturally belongs to another, is principally, and more strongly inclined to that other to which it belongs, than towards itself…. For we observe that the part naturally exposes itself in order to safeguard the whole; as, for instance, the hand is without deliberation exposed to the blow for the whole body’s safety. And since reason copies nature, we find the same inclination among the social virtues; for it behooves the virtuous citizen to expose himself to the danger of death for the public weal of the state…. Consequently, since God is the universal good, and under this good both man and angel and all creatures are comprised, because every creature in regard to its entire being naturally belongs to God, it follows that from natural love angel and man alike love God before themselves and with a greater love. Otherwise, if either of them loved self more than God, it would follow that natural love would be perverse, and that it would not be perfected but destroyed by charity.³⁰

As all the great mystics of the Catholic tradition have known, therefore, God and God alone fully satisfies the desires of the human heart. Contrary to Grisez’s impious thesis, the one who has God and all created goods does not have more than the one who has God alone.

As James Berquist has shown, however, it does not follow that one could simply restate the first precept of the law as “God is to be pursued and what leads to Him is to be done.”³¹ This is because what is first naturally known to us is rather indistinct and confused. We know there is some final end of desire, but we do not yet know explicitly that it is God. Hence St Thomas writes:

To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely [simpliciter] that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for many there are who imagine that man’s perfect good which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.³²

A human being first apprehends the natural law when he attains the age of reason. St Thomas describes the first deliberation that takes place at the age of reason as the discernment of the true end to which man must order himself. If he fails to order himself to his end, he commits a mortal sin.³³ As James Berquist has shown, the one who fails to order himself to his end does not see the good as a common good, to which he must order himself, but rather as a private good which he wishes to order to himself.³⁴

From this primacy of God as the universal common good follows a hierarchy of all other goods, which are good because they are like God and because they in some way (either indirectly or directly) help us to approach God. The highest good of the human moral life is the common good of the complete human society, the political community. The intrinsic common good of the polity is peace, the tranquility of order that results from justice and prudent governance. This peace is a thing of beauty, in which the splendid virtues of citizens are brought into a harmonious unity, like a symphony of human life which imitates the beauty of Heaven. As Socrates puts it, “no city can be happy which is not designed by artists who imitate the heavenly pattern.”³⁵ The extrinsic common good of the city is happiness. As Aristotle teaches, a city is founded for living well, that is acting according to moral virtue.³⁶ Human happiness is found in doing the human activity (ergon) virtuously. And this is ordered to God both by making human beings more like God, and by preparing them for the contemplation of God. This virtuous activity is a truly common good when it is shared in political friendship.³⁷ All other human goods are directed to this common good. This does not mean that the political community can simply destroy lesser human goods; on the contrary, the lesser goods are necessary for the primary good, which depends upon them.³⁸

Given the primacy of the common good, Finnis is wrong to see the watershed between the older understanding of “right” as found in St Thomas and the modern theory of “rights” as a matter of appearance rather than substance.³⁹ On the contrary, on the older understanding, since the common good is understood as true human happiness, rights are distributed with a view to that true happiness, to the fostering of the virtuous activity in which it consists. But on the newer understanding, the common good is degraded to an instrument for serving rights understood as something merely personal. As the Laval School Thomist Henri Grenier put it:

If objective right is understood as right in the strict sense, it follows that subjective right, i.e., right as a power, is measured by the just thing, according to conformity to law. Moreover, since law is an ordinance for the common good, it follows that the whole juridical order is directed to the common good. But, if subjective right is understood as right in the primary, strict, and formal meaning of the term, it follows that the juridical order consists in a certain autonomy, independence, and liberty. For subjective right is not measured by the just thing, but the just thing is measured by the inviolable faculty, which is a certain liberty. Therefore, according to moderns, the juridical order is directed to liberty rather than to the common good. This gives rise to errors among moderns, who speak of liberty of speech, liberty of worship, economic liberty,— economic liberalism,— without any consideration of their relation to the common good.⁴⁰

As Charles De Koninck argues, this reversal has “execrable practical consequences.”⁴¹ For, when each orders the common good to his own private good, every member of society is a little tyrant.⁴²

The papal condemnations of the demands of 19^th-century liberals for freedom of speech, worship, etc. can be understood in this light. The popes recognized that the freedom being demanded was a tyrannical freedom, contrary to the fostering of true virtue and the common good. Thus, Pope Leo XIII in examining liberal demands for religious liberty teaches that such a liberty, understood as “the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none” is contrary to the virtue of religion, whereby we render to God what is His due. He then goes on to discuss the relation of this supposed right to the common good of the state. It is worth quoting him at length:

This kind of liberty, if considered in relation to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of Him; that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic faith. But, to justify this, it must needs be taken as true that the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity, both of which assertions are manifestly false. For it cannot be doubted but that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society; whether its component parts be considered; or its form, which implies authority; or the object of its existence; or the abundance of the vast services which it renders to man. God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engravers upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect, if they would provide— as they should do— with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community. For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs; and, although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found in this life, yet, in so doing, it ought not to diminish, but rather to increase, man’s capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his everlasting happiness consists: which never can be attained if religion be disregarded.⁴³

This argument is based on the contrast that Pope Leo XIII sets up between true liberty, ordered to the true good, and false (liberal) liberty, which is ordered indifferently to whatever human beings take to be their end. Thus, liberty of speech, of publishing, etc. are condemned in similar terms. True liberty is essentially ordered to God, who is the last end and first principle of all human moral acts. As Leo XIII teaches in the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, the true understanding of human morality is thoroughly theocentric:

The idea of morality signifies, above all, an order of dependence in regard to truth which is the light of the mind; in regard to good which is the object of the will; and without truth and good there is no morality worthy of the name. And what is the principal and essential truth, that from which all truth is derived? It is God. What, therefore, is the supreme good from which all other good proceeds? God. Finally, who is the creator and guardian of our reason, our will, our whole being, as well as the end of our life? God; always God.⁴⁴

The errors of the New Natural Law Theory remove God from the center of human moral, juridical, and political life. The acceptance of those errors therefore leads to a hollowing out of morality, and a secularization of jurisprudence and politics. Ultimately, it represents a capitulation to the modern enemies of the Church, who have set up a secular anti-culture in the place of the noble customs of Christendom. It is therefore imperative that those errors be resisted.

1. For an overview see: Patrick Lee, “The New Natural Law Theory,” in Tom Angier (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 73-91. ↩︎
2. See: Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 5. ↩︎
3. See, for example: Anver M. Emon, Matthew Levering, and David Novak, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Trialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), which shows how the movement has been influential on certain Jewish and Muslim thinkers. ↩︎
4. See, for example: Gregory XVI, Mirari vos (1832); Pius IX, Quanta cura (1864); Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum (1888). My own view is that the teaching of Vatican II is in continuity with that of the popes of the “Pian” age. See: Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Religious Liberty in the Light of Tradition,” in: idem (ed.), Integralism and the Common Good: Collected Essays from The Josias, vol. 2, The Two Powers (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2022). ↩︎
5. See: Aristotle, Metaphysics, VI.4 1027b; St Thomas Aquinas, In Metaph. VI, lect. 4, 1240. ↩︎
6. See: James Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion: The New Natural Law Theory’s Confusion of Predication and Causality Destroys the Natural Order,” The Josias, February 13^th, 2023. I am very much indebted to Berquist’s insights for my reading of the NNL. ↩︎
7. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, c; translation Laurence Shapcote, op, edited and revised by The Aquinas Institute, available online at aquinas.cc. ↩︎
8. Germain Grisez, “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1-2, Question 94, Article 2,” in Natural Law Forum 10 (1965), 168-201, at 193-194. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 182. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 199. ↩︎
11. ↩︎
12. Patrick Lee, “The New Natural Law Theory,” 73; cf. Steven A. Long, “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory” in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (2013) 105-131. ↩︎
13. Germain Grisez, “The Restless Heart Blunder,” 2005 Aquinas Lecture, Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. ↩︎
14. John Finnis, “Public Good: The Specifically Political Common Good in Aquinas,” in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law and Moral Inquiry: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics in the Thought of Germain Grisez (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 174–209, at 187. ↩︎
15. Ibid., 179. ↩︎
16. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 206. ↩︎
17. Ibid., 207. ↩︎
18. Ibid., 210. ↩︎
19. Ibid., 465. ↩︎
20. ↩︎
21. Ibid., 210. ↩︎
22. See: John Finnis, “Is Natural Law Theory Compatible with Limited Government?” in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality: Contemporary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1-26. ↩︎
23. Ibid., 6-7. ↩︎
24. Cf. the exchange between Thomas Pink and Finnis on the interpretation of Dignitatis humanæ in: John Keown and Robert P. George (eds), Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩︎
25. Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 7. ↩︎
26. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia, q. 79, a. 11, cf. Long, “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory,” 107-108. ↩︎
27. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 90, a.2, arg. 2. ↩︎
28. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 90, a.2, ad 2. ↩︎
29. The following paragraph is based, in part, on my paper: “Common Good Eudemonism,” Divinitas 62.1 (2019), 425-439. ↩︎
30. ↩︎
31. Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion.” ↩︎
32. ↩︎
33. Ibid., Ia-IIae, q. 89, a. 6. ↩︎
34. Berquist, “Uncommon Confusion.” ↩︎
35. Plato, Republic, 500. ↩︎
36. Aristotle, Politics, I.2 1252b 27. ↩︎
37. See: Jacques de Monléon, Personne et Société (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) 142-145; Gregory Froelich, “Friendship and the Common Good,” The Aquinas Review 12 (2005) 37-58. ↩︎
38. See: Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, in: The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, ed. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). ↩︎
39. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 465; cf. Part I of the present essay. ↩︎
40. ↩︎
41. De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 108. ↩︎
42. Ibid., 80. ↩︎
43. ↩︎
44. ↩︎

For Joel Feil

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1 What is Commonly Thought About the Common Good

1.1 Honor and the Common Good

Honor is a concept that is closely related to the common good, especially the political common good. Honor, Aristotle, notes, seems to be the end, the telos, of the political life. In truth however, he goes on to argue, the end of political life is virtue; we seek honor to convince ourselves that we are good, since honor is the recognition that others give to our virtue.[2] We human beings long to contribute to something greater than ourselves, and to have our contribution confirmed by the recognition of others, by honor. Jan Eyre, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, after turning up destitute at the doorstep of Moor House, ends up as a schoolteacher in a small village. The usefulness of her work as a schoolteacher to the community, and the recognition, the honor, that she receives from the villagers for that contribution, make her feel that she is “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet” and that her feelings are budding and blooming under its rays.[3] What is true of honor in a small village is even more true in a greater, properly political society that can achieve a greater common good.

1. Beginning with the obvious^[1]

Some things are difficult to understand because they are very abstract, separated from the concrete and sensible realities surrounding us—this is a difficulty that we experience, for example, in the consideration of the most universal predicates. Other things are difficult to understand because they are so exalted, existing on a higher level of perfection than us—this is the difficulty we find, for example in understanding the hierarchy of the angels. Yet other matters are difficult to understand because they are so complicated, involving so many parts and elements and influences that it is difficult to keep them all in our minds at once—for example, the politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina.