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January 29, 2005
Contemporary Natural Law
I've asked this of a few of you in person, but let me throw it out there. I'm looking for a good, relatively short article on contemporary natural law theory. I use the Rachels book for my Intro to Ethics classes, but I'm just not too happy with his section on NLT and I think it needs to be supplemented. But my preliminary searches haven't really turned up anything I'm thrilled with. Specifically, I'm looking for an article that discusses a contemporary NLT perspective on some of the traditional problems raised for the theory (by Rachels and others) -- e.g. the difficulty of settling on a proper sense of "natural" that makes the theory plausible, and avoiding (or addressing) the naturalistic fallacy. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Posted by dbzdak at January 29, 2005 4:58 PM
Comments
Have I sent you my little handout on that? It doesn't deal with any contemporary sources, but I think I list some options for interpreting 'natural' beyond his, and I'm a bit critical of some straw man positions he attributes to Aquinas. The naturalistic fallacy issue is also one where his treatment bugs me, because the way he describes where natural law theory fails turns out to cause problems for virtually every normative theory that finds some facts relevant to whether something is right or wrong, which is just nuts on any objectivist view and even strange on subjectivist views that involve truth and falsity (which find their truth value based on facts about the person). I just thought his discussion of that seems completely at odds with his treatment of subjectivism, because noncognitivist views, which he finds most plausible, seem to be the only ones he can accept given his treatment of natural law. It also includes Alston's response to the Euthyphro problem, which I expect you're probably not familiar with.
I've got the Word file online if I didn't send it to you and you want to download it.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at January 29, 2005 6:40 PM
Are you looking for something on classical or contemporary NLT's?
Posted by: chuck at January 30, 2005 5:47 PM