Natural Law Thinking in Thomas Aquinas

Natural Law Thinking in Thomas Aquinas

Robert P. George is one of the most influential professor in the United States. Robert P. George is Cyrus Hall McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and a brilliant advocate of natural law philosophy. World Magazine has just published an interview with Dr George and in an interview, he illustrated the concepts of marriage.

George endeavoured to show the unsavory logical consequences of their willingness to equate sodomy with marital sexual love. To justify same-sex "marriage" one should abandon the concept of marriage as a one-flesh union of sexually complementary spouses. But if we adopt the concept that wedding ceremony is basically an emotional amalgamation of persons who find their connection increased by mutually agreeable sex actions of any type. We eradicate the reasonable ground for constraining marriage to two persons (as are against to three or five or eight) and for considering wedding ceremony as intrinsically needing mutual promises of exclusivity and fidelity. People who accept same-sex "marriage" have no cornerstone of standard (as opposed to meagre sentiment or personal preference) for opposing polygamy, polyamory (group marriage), promiscuity ("open marriages"), and the like. What then is left of marriage?

He explained that marriage is the basis of the family, and it is in healthy families that children are raised to be honorable people and good citizens. So marriage and the family are the basic flats of society. No society can flourish when they are undermined. Until now, a social consensus regarding the basic definition of marriage intended that we didn't require to resolve the question at the federal level. Every state identified marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman. (The federal government did its part at one point in our history to ensure that this would stay the case by making Utah's admission to the Union as a state conditional upon its banning polygamy).

In addition, It's part of a larger trend towards recognising the good or the valuable with pleasing experiences and psychological satisfactions. This assists to explain not only the decline of sexual morality in our culture, but furthermore the widespread use of recreational drugs. Many people (including more than a few Christians) have come to view themselves as consciousnesses (or, for people who retain some level of religious self-understanding, as "souls") that inhabit bodies. Since the body is regarded as merely instrumental, other than as part of the personal reality of the human being (considered as a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit), moral constraints of any sort on "nonharmful" drugs or "nonharmful" sexual practices of "consenting adults" appear arbitrary and even irrational.

The breakdown of the consensus certainly does not eliminate the need for a uniform national definition. If we don't have one, then marriage will erode either quickly by judicial imposition, except judges are stopped or gradually by the integration into the prescribed and casual institutions of society of same-sex couples who, after all, possess legally valid marriage licenses from some ...