On April 8, 2025, I participated in a symposium on Melissa Moschella’s new book, Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press), sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life.
Here are my remarks:
My enthusiasm for Melissa Moschella’s new book originates in common experience, as I learned from her introduction. She writes of being a freshman at Harvard University and taking Ethics and International Relations with Professors Stanley Hoffman and Bryan Hehir.
I know this well. Both of these fine professors – Hehir also a legendary priest in the Archdiocese of Boston – were my doctoral dissertation advisers when I was a graduate student in political science at Harvard from 1989 and 1996 (only slightly before Melissa arrived) and I served as a teaching fellow for Ethics and International Relations. I recall the enormously long reading list that Melissa mentions. Hoffmann sported a theory that students would complete only, say, 30% of the reading no matter how long the reading list – and so crafted very long syllabi.
I recall, too, what Melissa recounts, that the two leading approaches to ethics were deontological ethics, whose standard bearer was Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism, the legacy of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The syllabus reflected the pages of philosophy journals, which were dominated then by these oscillating and dueling schools.
Melissa’s reaction to this vivifies her tenacity and intellectual integrity. She was unsatisfied with the going alternatives, knew enough to be unsatisfied, and would settle her quest on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, whom she studied at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. It was there that she came across the ideas of the New Natural Law Theory (NNL), an ethics that is rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas and builds on their insights in fresh ways, much like a tree growing new shoots that give it new form, a new look. Yet she accepted the views of NNL common among skeptical Catholic philosophers.
It was Professor Robert George, her doctoral adviser at Princeton, where she studied political philosophy, who invited her to annual small gatherings of the leading NNL scholars, where she posed her toughest questions – and received answers. Here again lies testimony to Melissa’s intellectual virtue – that she would open her mind and her heart to a view of which she had been dubious.
Here, our stories intersect again. I first came across NNL in graduate school when one of its leading scholars, Oxford professor John Finnis, visited Harvard, spoke, and met with a small group of graduate students. I began gradually to read the NNL scholars. I was not able then to confidently sort out their views from, say, those of Kant, or to answer the prominent challenging criticisms of NNL. But in recent years, I was also invited to the gatherings and so to read the writings of this school in much greater depth.
To study with the NNL scholars is to be received into a rare fellowship, where one may search for the truth in honesty and in friendship. The school was given its name – the new natural law theory – by political philosopher Russell Hittinger, one of their earliest critics, who graciously and wryly writes the introduction to Melissa’s book.
The NNL school is also rare in the world of moral philosophy for its degree of scholarly collaboration around a single theory. I know of nothing that resembles this focused intellectual teamwork except perhaps for that around the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. NNL is now in its third generation, its paterfamilias being the philosopher, Germain Grisez, whose launching of the theory we may place retrospectively in 1965, and is now carried on by several talented young scholars, including Melissa, Sherif Girgis, my colleague in Notre Dame’s Law School, and Ryan Anderson, now President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Manifesting the ability of this theory to deliver determinate ethical answers, as well as the integrity, sense of service, and commitment to the teaching of the Catholic Church of these scholars, is their constant efforts to speak publicly about the issues of the day, including the most controversial of them. Finnis, George, Anderson, Girgis, and Notre Dame Law Professor Gerard Bradley have defended marriage and traditional teachings on sexuality in a time of rapid and colossal revision; Finnis, Grisez, and philosopher Joseph Boyle have argued against the morality of nuclear deterrence; philosopher Christopher Tollefsen has written on lying, the atomic bomb, and many other issues; many other NNL scholars, (including, at greatest length, philosopher Christian Brugger), have opposed the death penalty; Melissa has written on parental rights; and others have written on many other issues.
Now, Melissa’s new book performs three major tasks that, when combined, make it a rarity in moral philosophy.
First, it is an introduction to a school of thought: NNL theory. Sixty years on, the school has lacked and badly needed this. Grisez’s core statement of the theory exists in three volumes that amount to over 2000 pages. Monographs and articles abound, which Melissa helpfully catalogues in the annotated bibliography at the end of the book. But hers is the first succinct exposition of the entire core of the theory, its chapters unfolding through the basic human goods, the moral principles, the theory’s account of community, its political thought and its manifestation of God, all in a form that is accessible to first-time students and readers. Like an astounding outfield catch, this feat looks easy when it is done well and disguises the virtuosity and training that made it possible.
Second, the book takes on controversies about NNL among scholars. There are many of these – itself a tribute to the influence and prominence of the theory. It is too much Kant. Not enough Aquinas. It is not grounded in human nature. Not grounded in metaphysics. It promotes goods that are free floating, abstract and not part and parcel of human flourishing. It is too rationalistic. It leaves out the virtues. It is too individualistic and gives short shrift to human ties and community. It does not make religion rightly superior. Its common good is too thin. It is opposed to what Alastair MacIntyre argues. Or what Servais Pinckaers argues. Melissa manages to engage virtually all of these controversies and to do so gently on the first-time reader through clear descriptions in the text and through sending the argument to footnotes when it gets technical. She also engages her critics charitably and carefully, always seeking common ground where it is to be found – as she does with MacIntyre’s thought, for instance. Balancing this second task with the first is an even rarer feat.
It is rarer still to accomplish a third dimension, which is to offer original philosophical arguments and interpretations – ever new shoots on the NNL tree. This is a go-to book but is not merely a briefer restatement (to borrow John Rawls’s title). In several ways, Melissa developed dimensions of NNL that made it all the more compelling to me.
In the first few pages, she brings forth and develops MacIntyre’s insight that a good ethical theory combines principles, goods, and virtues. These are three legs of a stool that collapses when one is absent. Melissa shows how each is important, how some philosophers stress one to the detriment of others, and how the NNL theory synthesizes the three. Here Melissa makes the simple but profound argument that the NNL theory is eudaimonistic, centered on an account of human happiness, flourishing and fulfillment – an insight that alone recasts the theory in light of common criticisms.
Melissa’s development of the Vocational Principle; her argument for the meaning of the common good; for the difference between the political common good and a society’s entire common good; for limited government; that political authority is mostly but not totally instrumental; her treatment of the virtues; her explanation that the good of religion is ultimate in one sense yet remains incommensurable with other goods; her account of the good of the family and other associations (drawing on her previous work); her argument for partial commitments – that is, of why we have greater obligations to those proximate to us while retaining some obligations to those far from us; and her treatment of other matters are all original and compelling.
On page three, Melissa makes a big statement, “I have slowly become convinced that the NNL theory provides the best account of ethics that has been developed up to this point, and that it offers a rigorous and satisfying alternative to deontology and consequentialism, largely resolving the question I have had since I first began studying moral philosophy during my freshman year of college.”
This piece was slightly updated on April 11, 2025.