The Return of Natural Law
March 2, 2017 • Dr. J Budziszewski, Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D., Saint Louis University) at University of Texas at Austin. For centuries, the natural law tradition held that the most basic principles of how to live are not only knowable, but actually known: Even the thief, the adulterer, and the God-mocker know the wrong of theft, the good of fidelity, and the duty of honoring God. Many modern thinkers spurned this tradition, holding that so-called natural law is neither truly natural nor truly law. The story might have ended there, yet as a Roman poet wrote, "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it always returns": Today the theory of the moral truths that we can’t not know is experiencing a renaissance.