Thursday, February 23, 2017

How to be a pervert


We’ve been talking of late about “perverted faculty arguments,” which deploy the concept of perversion in a specific, technical sense.  The perversion of a human faculty essentially involves both using the faculty but doing so in a way that is positively contrary to its natural end.  As I’ve explained before, simply to refrain from using a faculty at all is not to pervert it.  Using a faculty for something that is merely other than its natural end is also not to pervert it.  Hence, suppose faculty F exists for the sake of end E.  There is nothing perverse about not using F at all, and there is nothing perverse about using F but for the sake of some other end G.  What is perverse is using F but in a way that actively prevents E from being realized.  It is this contrariness to the very point of the faculty, this outright frustration of its function, that is the heart of the perversity.  (See the paper linked to above for exposition, defense, and application of the idea.)

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Mired in the roiling tar pits of lust


As I note in my essay on the perverted faculty argument, not all deliberate frustrations of a natural faculty are gravely immoral.  For example, lying involves the frustration of a natural faculty and thus is wrong, but it is usually only venially sinful.  So what makes the perversion of a faculty seriously wrong?  In particular, why have traditional natural law theorists and Catholic moral theologians regarded the perversion of our sexual faculties as seriously wrong?  (The discussion that follows presupposes that you’ve read the essay just referred to – please don’t waste time raising objections in the combox unless you’ve done so.)

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Foundations of sexual morality


The foundations of traditional sexual morality, like the foundations of all morality, are to be found in classical natural law theory.  I set out the basic lines of argument in my essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” which appears in my book Neo-Scholastic Essays.  The title notwithstanding, the perverted faculty argument is by no means the whole of the natural law understanding of sexual morality, but only a part.  It is an important and unjustly maligned part of it, however, as I show in the essay.  Along the way I criticize purported alternative approaches to defending traditional sexual morality, such as the so-called “New Natural Law Theory.”  Anyway, you can now read the essay online.  After you’ve done so, you might follow up with some other things I’ve written on the subject of sexual morality.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Science, computers, and Aristotle


If you think that the brain, or the genome, or the universe as a whole is a kind of computer, then you are really an Aristotelian whether you realize it or not.  For information, algorithms, software, and other computational notions can intelligibly be applied within physics, biology, and neuroscience only if an Aristotelian philosophy of nature is correct.  So I argue in my paper “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature,” which appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Nova et Vetera.  You can now read the paper online.