The natural law is generally presented as highly certain and universal in its first principles, as essentially known by all rational persons, even though the specifications of those principles to concrete actions is far less certain. This view is especially prevalent in classical accounts of natural law rooted in metaphysics or philosophical anthropology. If, however, we begin with a first-personal account of the natural law, as advocated by thinkers such as John Finnis and Martin Rhonheimer, and (arguably, although highly disputed, Thomas Aquinas as well), then the first principles of natural law are grasped by an insight which is neither an intuition or a conclusion, and also not derived from metaphysics or anthropology. If we thoroughly understand what an insight is, we recognize how highly conditioned our grasp of the natural law will be, including cultural conditions. None of this should surprise a Thomist or Aristotelian, however, committed to hylomorphism, but it does require us to think of the natural law as hermeneutical rather than analytical and as conversational rather than methodical.
R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.
Snell is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.