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Author: Richard Berquist
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232422
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.
Author: Richard Berquist
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232422
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.
Author: Eberhard Schockenhoff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Publisher's description: Do human rights apply only to a certain culture group or can they be demanded of all cultures and religions? This discussion about a common world ethos demonstrates how relevant and explosive that question is. In his study of ethical relativism and historical thinking, Eberhard Schockenhoff shows how the universal recognition of fundamental norms that guarantee the minimum conditions for human existence can be substantiated. Dealing critically with the two most important branches of research in present-day moral theology--autonomous morality and teleological ethics--the author presents a new theological-ethical theory of natural law. Integrating the theory of practical reason and Aquinas2 understanding of natural inclinations, Schockenhoff compares this synthesis to the insights of present-day anthropology. This method allows him to re-establish a connection to classical natural law ethics. In so doing, he indicates how ethics can fulfill its most important duty: to arrive at the recognition of anthropologically grounded material norms without falling prey to a logical error. According to Schockenhoff, claims of natural law and of human rights formulate an indispensable minimum, while biblical ethics (the decalogue and the Sermon of the Mount) and the high ethos of the world religions point the way to an encompassing realization of the concept of the good life.
Author: Ernst Bloch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262521291
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Ernst Bloch was one of the most original and influential of contemporary European thinkers, leaving his mark in fields ranging from philosophy and social theory to aesthetics and theology. This book represents a unique attempt to reconcile the traditional oppositions of the natural law and social utopian traditions, providing basic insights into the meaning of human rights in a socialist society.
Author: Robert Spaemann
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 080286693X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
What does it mean to love someone? What does the concept of human dignity mean, and what are its consequences? What marks the end of a person's life? Is personhood more than consciousness? These perplexing questions lurk beneath the surface of everyday life, surfacing only to demand urgent attention in crises. Renowned German philosopher Robert Spaemann addresses these and other foundational enigmas in three eloquent short essays. Speaking wisdom to controversy, he offers carefully considered, novel approaches to key philosophical and theological questions about the nature of human love ("The Paradoxes of Love"), dignity ("Human Dignity and Human Nature"), and death ("Is Brain Death the Death of a Human Person?").
Author: John Lawrence Hill
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621640175
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
The "natural law" worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. Most accounts of the natural law are based on a God-centered understanding of the world. After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation. The book argues that natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important moral and political values – freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others. Without a theory of natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of modern philosophy. Part I of the book traces the development of natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Part II explores how modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values. As a result, our most important moral and political ideals today are incoherent. Modern political and moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the moral good – or abandon these ideas altogether. Thus, modern philosophy and political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism. The conclusion, entitled "Why God Matters", shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the natural law depend on a personal God.
Author: George Duke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107120519
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
This volume brings together leading experts on natural law theory to provide perspectives on the nature and foundations of law.
Author: Tom Angier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108422632
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
How do ethical norms relate to human nature? This comprehensive and interdisciplinary volume surveys the latest thinking on natural law.
Author: Alfonso Gómez-Lobo
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 162616164X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general readers a brief introduction to bioethics from a “natural law” philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion. In contrast to the currently dominant bioethical theories of utilitarianism and principlism, the natural law approach offers an understanding of human flourishing grounded in basic human goods, including life, health, friendship, and knowledge, and in the wrongness of intentionally turning against, or neglecting, these goods. The book is divided into two sections: Foundations and Issues. Foundations sketches a natural law understanding of the important ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice and explores different understandings of “personhood” and whether human embryos are persons. Issues applies a natural law perspective to some of the most controversial debates in contemporary bioethics at the beginning and end of life: research on human embryos, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the withdrawal of tube-feeding from patients in a “persistent vegetative state,” and the definition of death. The text is completed by appendices featuring personal statements by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and on the definition and determination of death.
Author: Yechiel Michael Barilan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262304880
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.
Author: Michael Rosen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065514
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Dignity plays a central role in thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. He also answers a puzzling question: why treat the dead with dignity?
