For our first session, we are joined by our John and Daria Barry Foundation Fellow Greg Brown, discussing "Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Natural Law."
Thomas Aquinas’s theory of natural law has been a topic of extensive—and often fierce—debate. Among the disputed interpretative questions is how to understand our knowledge of what Aquinas calls the first principles or precepts of the natural law, which, he says, correspond to our “natural inclinations” and are founded upon the very first principle, according to which “good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided.” In this talk, I will adapt insights from two of the most influential Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, to provide an account of the natural law that preserves Aquinas's main desiderata. MacIntyre suggests that first principles, properly conceived, are nevertheless susceptible of dialectical defense, allowing mistakes about such principles to be corrected through inquiry and debate. His account, however, risks undermining the availability of these precepts not only to the wise but to all—and thereby risks undermining the natural law’s status as duly promulgated law. I argue that a manuscript of Anscombe’s on moral development provides resources for understanding the sense in which first practical principles are naturally known and available to all: they are known, in normal human development, as a matter of course, since developing human beings are naturally inclined (even if not inevitably guaranteed) to inhabit the conceptual framework in which they are couched. And by exploring Anscombe’s evident debt to Wittgenstein in these passages, we can provide color and realism to a broadly Thomistic account of the human being's acquisition of a moral outlook.
Greg D. Brown received his BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where before coming to PRRUCS he served as a teaching fellow. His principal research is on the significance of the virtues for the proper understanding of practical reason. His dissertation, The Use of Reason: An Essay on Practical Wisdom, draws from the work of Aristotle, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Philippa Foot to identify the differences that virtue makes to practical thought. His philosophical interests extend to language, mind, and metaphysics, as well as the history of analytic philosophy. At Penn, his research will draw from the Collegium Institute Anscombe Archive.