Having gotten myself started with philosophy blogging, I’ve been kind of at a loss to know what to talk about next. There are so many topics of interest, and they are all related, and it’s hard to know where to start.

Thanks to the peculiarly timed bit of tyrannical overreach on the part of the Department of Health and Human Services that’s been much discussed on-line in recent weeks, however, lots of people have been talking about the Church’s position on contraception. This, in turn, is based on natural law theory, and natural law theory is based on an Aristotelian view of causality and of human nature; and if I can’t get at least half-a-dozen good-sized posts out of the first half of this sentence I’m not trying hard enough.

The essence of natural law theory (about which, as always, I am not an expert) is that there are certain natural laws of human behavior—laws about how humans ought to behave—that derive from human nature, from what it means to be human, and that can be be known with certainty by human reason, without any need for divine revelation. If this were true, one would expect that most cultures in most times and places would generally agree on questions of morality. It’s customary these days to emphasize the disagreements, and even to say that they outweigh the agreements; but this turns out not to be the case.

C.S. Lewis talks about the natural law in his book The Abolition of Man, which I highly recommend. In an appendix, he goes through the moral teachings of the great cultures of the world point by point, appealing to their holy books and great teachers, and shows that to a first approximation moral teachings really are the same everywhere. The same principles apply. Often they are held to apply only to “real people”, “people like us”: my family, my race, my country. But even if I believe that I may morally steal from you, or kill you, you’ll note that you aren’t allowed to steal from me or kill me. The shocking thing about Christianity is that in principle (thought not always in practice) it increases the range of “people like us” to all of humanity.

Next up: causality.