Search Results

This chapter brings into focus the discussion about the renewal of Christian ethics participated in by three figures namely: Stanlely Hauerwas, one of the most influential Christian ethicists; Germain Grisez, an American lay Roman Catholic; and Oliver O'Donovan, a third party who asked penetrating questions of both natural law theory, including that produced by Grisez and his collaborators, and key features of Hauerwas's thought. It professes that the effect of the Grisez School's affirmation, of what is widely understood as Hume's contention that it is not logically possible to derive an ‘ought’ and from an ‘is’, is that the starting-point of moral reasoning must be practical reason (the sort of reason people use to plan action) and not theoretical reason (the type of reason that tests the truth of a proposition by seeking to establish its conformity to some prior reality, for example scientific reason).

This chapter studies the initial reception accorded Pope Paul VI’s letter on artificial birth control published in 1968, “On Human Life” (Humanae Vitae). It specifically focuses on the famous “Mayflower Declaration,” a protest document written by Charles Curran (a theology professor at the Catholic University of America) and signed by more than a hundred American Catholic academics. It also analyzes the theological criticisms of that document by looking at four major players on the American Catholic scene: Curran himself, Richard McCormick, Germain Grisez, and Janet Smith.

This chapter examines three theological responses to the late liberal accounts of the family depicted in the preceding chapter. The first response, as seen in the works of James Nelson and Adrian Thatcher, attempts to reformulate Christian teaching on marriage and family in light of key liberal claims regarding individual fulfilment. The second response resists any changes suggested by late liberalism as reflected in the works of John Paul II and Germain Grisez. The third response, represented by such authors as Don Browning, Rodney Clapp, and David Matzko McCarthy, critically adapts selected liberal tenets — such as mutuality and reciprocity — while preserving key theological teachings on marriage and family. In each of these responses, the moral and religious significance of the relation between singleness and marriage emerges as a major theme.

This chapter is an extended examination of a revisionist approach to natural law, explored by Germain Grisez and John Finnis. Grisez and Finnis elucidated an entirely new paradigm that they believed to be both sounder intellectually than the paradigms of the neo-scholastics and revisionists and much closer in outline to the paradigm offered by St. Thomas Aquinas. This approach is usually labeled the “new natural law.” The author proposes that the entire “new natural law” project undertaken by Grisez and Finnis could be viewed as being about saving natural law by reestablishing it on distinctly different foundations that avoided any appeal to metaphysical claims, which modern science had long rejected as outdated and unscientific.

This chapter directly tackles a persistent objection to the use of secular law as a conversation partner in Christian ethics: the worry that a close relationship with the methods and concerns of law risks falling into a “legalism” that obscures the Good News of the Gospel. But what is legalism? Although Germain Grisez and H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. both condemn “legalism,” close analysis shows that they mean opposite things by the term. The chapter uses St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of law and its five primary components to examine and compare the different viewpoints of Grisez and Engelhardt. The chapter concludes that labeling an ethics “legalistic” is too imprecise a critique, and needs to be replaced by more specific challenges and concerns. When properly addressed, these challenges and concerns do not impede the use of law as a constructive conversation partner for Christian ethics.

In 1970 Germain Grisez published a paper criticizing St. Thomas's view of the legitimacy of capital punishment. Grisez rejected Thomas's fundamental conception of political society and indeed, the absolute primacy of the common good. Grisez taught that no one, not even the political authority, could ever licitly intend the death of a human being. Gerard Bradley, in a paper for a Grisez Festschrift, argues that Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical letter Evangelium vitae (EV), tends to agree with Grisez. In so doing Bradley recalls some of the contentions of Grisez in his criticism of Thomas. This chapter reviews passages of Thomas on capital punishment to show the shortcomings of the Bradley criticism. It focuses on two lines of discussion found in Bradley and shows that there is a misrepresentation of the implications of Thomas's doctrine. It starts with the point that for Thomas capital punishment is in keeping with the fundamental human dignity of the criminal.

The book’s main concern is with the defense of natural law theory against criticism from various quarters and its application to problems at different levels of philosophical abstractness. The method used is primarily dialectical and the book proceeds by engaging arguments against the positions it seeks to defend and when possible, examines the arguments advanced by scholars who are critical of these positions. The book identifies plausible arguments against the view expressed here and tries to rebut these arguments, when that is not possible. The theory that the book defends and applies was originally adumbrated by Germain Grisez and substantially developed by the latter, often in formal or informal collaboration with Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., John Finnis, and others.