Ultimate Normative Foundations The Case for Aquinas's Personalist Natural Law

Ultimate Normative Foundations: The Case for Personalist Natural Law Across the Globe focuses on two features of morality and law that most normative paradigms ignore. The first of these is the indefeasibility of moral obligations that prevents moral agents from exempting themselves from culpability, and the second is that certain norms (such as the proscription of genocide) are universal. Rose Mary Hayden Lemmons explores the foundations of normativity and delves deep into metaethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, and jurisprudence, exposing the weaknesses inherent in key normative theories. She argues that today's popular normative paradigms cannot adequately explain or justify the universality and indefeasibility of any moral or juridical obligation; this explanation and justification is provided instead by the personalist natural law formulated by Thomas Aquinas in terms of a love of God and neighbor distinct from Christian charity. Personalist natural law establishes the parameters of interpersonal relationships that enable each of us to flourish while establishing indefeasible and universal obligations that hold across the globe. At the same time, it retains the ability to do the work of traditional natural law theory and justify, for instance, inalienable rights and Just War theory. These considerations will have strong implications for any academic concerned with philosophy, theology, or law.

Rose Mary Hayden Lemmons is associate professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota.