Professor Grisez and Natural Law

Extract

Professor Germain Grisez of Georgetown has written his criticism of contraception from the viewpoint of a natural-law theorist. He goes about his task in a tidily business-like way, first setting forth some of his own credentials:

‘My wife, Jeannette, and I married thirteen years ago. At that time I was just entering studies for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. We now have four children, the oldest twelve and the youngest six. Life has not been easy during all of these years. Yet we have survived without contraception, and we think the conviction that we had to survive and could survive without it has been essential to doing so’.

Husband and wife, to use some earlier imagery of the book were not ‘goaded on to wrong paths by enthusiasm over the greener pastures projected in an illusory light by the latest phantasms of secular thought.’ Being thus armored in these durable orthodoxies, Professor Grisez adds a kindly admonition for many of his readers, ‘Those not accustomed to subtle argument, as well as those who do not respect reason, will be little moved by what I have to say. Against the heart reason has little power, and it is just as impotent against sentimentalism which has become confused with charity as it is against plain ill will.’

The subtlety of the argument is immediately evident in Professor Grisez’s derivation of the fundamental and absolutely basic principles of morality from our knowledge of man’s intrinsic inclinations.