Our goal in this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to clarify two ways in which contemporary Christian bioethicists have erred, on Engelhardt’s account, in their attempts to do bioethics within a distinctively non-Christian idiom, namely, either (1) by rejecting a principal metaethical thesis or (2) by misrepresenting a principal moral-epistemological thesis of natural-law ethics, properly construed. Second, we intend to show not only that Engelhardt can and should endorse the Christian bioethicists’ use of non-Christian moral idioms in the public (...) square but also—perhaps to the surprise both of his critics and of his supporters—that he does, in fact, do so. (shrink)

A claim that is widely accepted and often invoked by philosophers working within ‘new classical natural law theory’ is that choosing directly against ‘basic goods’ is never morally permissible. In this essay, I address the question of whether one can coherently accept the fundamental commitments of new classical natural law theory and yet reject this absolutist claim. I argue that one can.

The extent to which God grounds normativity within natural law theory is analyzed. I examine Hugo Grotius’s understanding of natural law and human nature and show that Grotius makes few explicit metaphysical commitments which makes his view open to development in at least two different ways. Then a Thomistic view of natural law and human nature is developed. It is shown that Grotius’s position could be developed as a proto-new natural law theory, but this leaves it open to powerful objections (...) from Fulvio Di Blasi and other Thomistic philosophers. Finally, I argue that a view can be developed in such a way as to take on certain elements of the Thomistic view, particularly its metaphysics, but still maintain the famous Grotian claim that human nature can establish normativity without God. The key to this is the distinction between the order of knowing and the order of being. (shrink)