Ethics and Nature

Extract

I am writing this in a rural area of the Rivers State, Nigeria. This is relevant to the rest of what I have to say, because it means that I have very few reference books available, and so I must ask the reader’s patience for my failure to give accurate references. However, as I do not expect to be within reach of appropriate library facilities for quite some time, I feel I should write what I have to say without the appropriate backing of footnotes.

Long-time readers of New Blackfriars will no doubt groan on finding that I want to revive in some measure the controversy over artificial methods of birth control which filled so many pages in the late sixties. My intention is not to go over the whole ground, Papal authority, rights of conscience, and so on, but to argue that the “conservative” position is intelligible, given a certain number of presuppositions, which, admittedly, are far from being generally made explicit by those who in this matter are conservatives; and, moreover, if these presuppositions, which are not tied to specifically Catholic dogmatic positions, are denied, then those who deny them seem to be faced with problems of ethical philosophy much wider than the single question of contraception. To put it rather differently, the dispute over contraception seems to be a’ a very close analogue of the process outlined by T. S. Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s argument is that scientific research is advanced neither by great minds making great discoveries nor by a multitude of small discoveries opening the way for major innovations; rather, once a scientific discipline is established, it possesses a “paradigm”, a set of mutually consistent accepted ideas within which research is conducted and discoveries made.