Courses / Module

Alasdair MacIntyre asks: “Many intelligent, perceptive, and insightful agents either reject what Catholics take to be particular precepts of the natural law or accept them only in some very different version, or more radically still, reject the very conception of the a natural law. And these disagreements seem to be intractable. How can this be?”
The aims of this course are as follows: to distinguish contemporary approaches to the natural law; to develop responses to the challenges, and to evaluate its operation in different practical contexts.

Indicative Syllabus
Contemporary models of the natural law in Moral Theology, Political Science and Jurisprudence
The relationship between Revelation and the Natural Law
The place of the Natural Law in relation to some of the streams of modern philosophy
The applications of the Natural Law in governance and legal justification
The place of the Natural Law in responding to current issues.

Indicative Bibliography
John Paul II. Veritatis Splendor (6 August 1993): AAS 85 (1993).

International Theological Commission, In Search of a Universal Ethics: A New Look at the Natural Law. London: Catholic Truth Society, 2009.
Biggar, Nigel and Rufus Black, eds., The Revival of the Natural Law. Aldershot: Ashgate 2000.
Cunningham, Lawrence S., ed., Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.