I’m quite aware of those, thank you. I am, by the Church’s definition and by long education, a Catholic.
Then your woeful ignorance about natural law as evidenced by your prior post is all the more inexcusable.
A good place to begin to rectify your misunderstandings would be Edward Feser’s “The Last Superstition” or his “Aquinas” if you prefer a more academic and less polemical take.
Then you believe that reproduction is a marital obligation, even for those who cannot accomplish it, regardless of the fact that they fit with the man-woman arrangement?
Your ignorance of natural law is at least pardonable since you don’t claim to be a Catholic. Nevertheless you would do well to rectify your misapprehensions, as well, before asking questions that even a casual understanding of natural law would answer.
Actually, I am denigrating teleology in favour of practical benefits. If you can show me why this is unfavourable, I will pay attention.
For starters, it is false.
For another thing, it’s obviously stupid, since consequentialism furnishes no basis for evaluating what constitutes a “practical benefit.”
That is the archaic version of marriage. All social contracts exist to delineate duties - marriage has grown to encompass emotional unions and the commitments - privately envisaged - that go along with them. One couple’s marriage contract no longer resembles every other couple’s marriage contract.
Debating with you is really quite painful, you know.
There is no sense even discussing this with you until you do your homework. Either of Dr. Feser’s books identified above would be a good place to start.
Your view of materialism is limited by your supernatural beliefs - naturalism encompasses all phenomena we experience, but posits natural explanations for them.
And whether or not it does so appropriately is a question it cannot even answer without drawing in metaphysical presuppositions that you reject.
This is the problem with ALL the reductivist epistemological systems of the modern age: they CANNOT justify themselves without reference to that which they deny exists!
Do you think it extraordinary that I could deny an ‘order of things’, when you have offered no justification for believing in such? I don’t question your honesty in declaring your belief - only your reasons for holding to that belief.
I certainly think it extraordinary that you’ve made it this far through life having read so little.
Compound your reeducation by reading, as well, Eric Voegelin’s “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism” and “The News Science of Politics.”
To back up this tirade, you first need to justify your choice of teleology over consequentialism; then you need to define what you mean by sexual degeneracy, as opposed to natural human inclination.
Natural law ethics have the advantage of being objectively and obviously true.
Teleology is simply the claim that efficient causes act toward their respective ends because they have some innate power to do so. The eye sees because it has the power to see. There is literally NOTHING controversial about this. It’s only when you introduce extraneous nonsense, such as the assumption that teleology is volitional, that it starts to sound absurd – but then this is a modern MISREPRESENTATION of teleology which teleology itself does not articulate or demand.
We know intuitively that goodness is existence in accordance with a particular mode of being, so that a good knife is one that cuts while a bad knife is dull, a good pen is one that writes well while a bad pen is one that writes poorly, a good meal is one that is nutritious while McDonald’s hamburgers are “bad” for you, and so on. So it follows that, insofar as humans have volition, intentional action in accordance with our own mode of being as determined by the numerous final causes that arise from our natures are POSITIVE GOODS.
Consequentialism by contrast, again, furnishes NO basis for the evaluation of the goodness of a particular thing. “The ends justify the means” tells me nothing about what the proper end is. At best it can leech off teleological ethics by identifying certain acts as good and others as bad and then simply jettison the teleological part. But this DOES NOT WORK: teleological ethics is a PACKAGE DEAL. If you reject the teleology you cannot even retain its conception of what is good.
Moreover in its most virulent utilitarian form, it consistently yields up ethical conclusions that fly in the face of all our moral intuitions. For instance it may well be the case that rape causes a man more pleasure than it causes his victim pain – and since actions themselves carry no innate moral valence under consequentialist ethics, it therefore furnishes NO basis for objecting to that particular instance of rape.
Consequentialists CANNOT admit this because to do so would be to admit that a world filled with rapists would be EXACTLY what a world run consistently on their principles would look like. So they try to pad it out to make it salvageable. But the more they introduce into their system to try to make it match up with synderesis, the more it converges with the natural law, anyway (rule consequentialism, for instance).
None of which is new all of which has
been addressed in the past by David Oderberg.
Which you would know, if you had done your homework. And until you do, I see no point in wasting further time “debating” you.
