ABSTRACT
How do human beings identify what is moral? On what grounds can we make moral judgments? On what basis can we speak of “good” and evil,” “right” and “wrong,” “just” and unjust?” And whence come the human distinctions of wisdom, rationality, and moral agency? Where individuals and societies have ignored or rejected moral first principles, humanity has been degraded in unspeakably tragic ways, to which the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bear gruesome testimony. Even when most people do not consciously work through basic assumptions about ultimate reality, these foundational presuppositions are expressions of certain deeply held convictions. One might compare the function of presuppositions to the function of the tracks on which a train runs and which determine the train’s direction and destination, leading to inevitable and ineluctable ethical results. Affirmation of the “permanent things,” which we might variously describe as natural law, moral law, the law “written on the heart,” the “law of nature,” or “what we can’t not know,” finds confirmation in voices ancient and modern. This chapter seeks to argue that natural law thinking provides a necessary (and appropriate) bridge between religious and non-religious citizens to speak about moral reality.
