"Nature and Morality," David Crawford

Hume's Law: question of relationship between "is" and "ought," "fact and "value"

• Naturalistic fallacy = to draw normative conclusions from statements about the way things are, to collapse practical reason into empirical or speculative reason

Many moral theologians accept this law, at least to a certain extent (e.g. Finnis, May, Grisez, Rhonheimer)

The emergence of this "law" has much to do with the characteristically modern way of understanding nature and the body--the problem is to see the ways in which nature does in fact offer a foundation for morality

"If nature is created, then: (1) it has 'value' inscribed in it from its beginning in the form of a vocation that constitutes and radically structures it, (2) it represents and manifests God's freedom, in which human freedom is given its possibility and form, (3) it possesses a radically sacramental structure, indicating its saturation with meaning that cannot be separated from or merely related extrinsically to human action. The strict division between is and ought presupposes a reduction of nature to dead matter, of reason to rationalism, of freedom to freedom of indifference, of causality to merely efficient causality, of order to mechanism, etc."

Critique of Church's teaching on bioethics (e.g. contraception) as  being "biologistic," i.e. drawing moral teaching from an analysis of the natural functioning of human bodily organs (e.g. sexual anatomy as ordered to procreation).

Prior to Vatican II, tendency to defend the teaching on contraception by reading moral norms from natural teleologies, in which God's law has been inscribed. Practical reason becomes basically speculative reason discovering the commands written in nature and applying them to concrete situations.

• Why must I obey natural teleologies? To reply that God is creator and has created things thus in his wisdom could lead to voluntarism: we ought to follow the natural law because God says so (extrinsicism, law is imposed)
• Rationalistic and deductive approach that fails to consider human aspiration: truth without freedom. This Suarezian approach fails to take into account the paradoxical nature of the God-world relationship, fails to make thematic the fact that the truth is ultimately a call that anticipates and requires freedom because it must be embraced and made one's own through action
• Also attempts to prove too much, draws too much moral truth from nature (e.g. is it wrong to cut your hair?)
• Presupposes Ockhamist sense of freedom as indifference. In the end, moral reasoning is conceived in terms of a discovery of the law or norms imposed through nature, moral laws that are simply "out there," waiting to be discovered--but then the moral subject is looking at human nature as an object external to himself and to his freedom