Philosophical “Common Ground”?
By John W. Carlson

Thomists or “perennial” thinkers frankly propound a comprehensive doctrine, including the notion of the good and the idea that humans are distinctive among natural beings in our ability to understand and freely pursue the good. Further, human good can to some extent be discerned by practical reason, quite apart from revelation. (This last point is typically formulated in terms of “natural (moral) law,” as distinguished from the specifically “divine law” expressed in sacred texts of the Jewish and Christian traditions.) In this view, “human law”—in particular, public laws and policies—should reflect general precepts of natural law. Followers of Aquinas ask: should not such natural law precepts, together with the human goods they enshrine and safeguard, count as elements of public reason?

Certain caveats are in order. Humankind may have made progress in appreciating the fundamental goods of the social order; but it is always possible to backslide. In addition, people can take and historically have taken as natural law things that are mere cultural accretions. In both cases, philosophers (as well as philosophically informed public officials) must be prepared, in the name of reason, to oppose the social consensus.

Areas of agreement between the philosophical traditions emerge and perhaps point the way to what Christopher Wolfe has called “natural law liberalism.” That is, the resources of the Thomist tradition, as developed by thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon, might provide a sound framework for the functioning of liberal democracies without arbitrarily limiting the range of considerations to which public appeal can be made.

Can liberal democracies be set up in such a way that they are identical to the good regime of the republic/polity, rather than the bad regime of the democracy? I'll say this for now -- if universal suffrage is a essential feature of liberal democracy, I think it is more a bad regime than a good one. Can a bad regime be said to be in accordance with the natural law? If a liberal democracy is reshaped or harmonized with the natural law, is it really liberal? Before this question can be answered, we need a definition of liberalism upon which liberals agree, but this should not be too difficult to find.

Virtually all Thomists now agree, in light of reflection on the scientific data, that fertilization marks the beginning of a human life.

I'd be an exception. I still don't think that human reason alone can determine that the conceptum is a human being, as opposed to matter that is used to generate a human being. If the principle of parsimony were universally true, then it could be argued that a rational soul is infused at fertilization, but the principle of parsimony cannot be shown to be universally true.

They also agree that abortion violates the fundamental precept against taking innocent life.

I think this position follows from the first. However, even if abortion is not against justice, it may still be counter to another virtue and be seriously wrong. (Hence the Church taught that abortion was a mortal sin, even though there was disagreement about whether the conceptum was human or not.)