ad nausium<\/em>, but I will stop at this point.<\/p>\nWhile it may be that there are important differences between a Thomist understanding of natural law and an Orthodox understanding of natural law, the historic difference is most assuredly not that Thomists accept it while the Orthodox do not. Furthermore, there often seems to be little care in differentiating between Enlightenment versions of the natural law, which may in fact be overly rationalistic, and other Western versions, such as the Thomist articulation, rooted in Christian convictions and augmented by faith.<\/p>\n
All this, I suspect, has led to the relative cacophony among Orthodox writers with regards to social thought more generally. For example, without natural law, what basis do we have for the rule of law in political matters? Or, without natural law, what basis do we have for declaiming fraud, exploitation, and other forms of theft in economic matters? If, according to Hart, what the fathers assumed to be basic dictates of conscience actually require \u201can apocalyptic interruption\u201d for anyone to grasp, public engagement in our pluralistic society without the natural law<\/em> would, itself, be \u201ca hopeless cause\u201d \u2026 but perhaps that explains the current cacophony, at least in part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: Acton Blog | Dylan Pahman At Ethika Politika today, I examine the recent critique by David Bentley Hart in the most recent issue of First Things of the use of natural law in public discourse in my article, \u201cNatural Law, Public Policy, and the Uncanny Voice of Conscience.\u201d Ultimately, I offer a measured critique\u2014somewhat agreeing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12635,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634\/revisions\/12635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}