In his post below, Joe Komonchak wrote about the Pope's latest attempt to defend natural law reasoning in the German Reichstag. Coincidentally, I have been reading what the late Paul Ramsey on the topic, in his book Nine Modern Moralists, written about fifty years ago. In chapters Nine and Ten of the book, he attempts to retrieve and refurbish the natural law tradition for wider use, by correcting the impression that it is the narrow province of Roman Catholics. At the same time, Ramsey (who was, after all, a Protestant) did not absolve Catholics of all guilt for the loss of credibility of the tradition as a tradition of reasoning. He writes:If there are inflexibilities and claims of absolute certainty and finality in a theory of natural law, these, you can be sure, do not ordinarily flow from the account actually given of the meaning of the law of nature, but from quite another point in Roman Catholic moral theology, namely, the claim that the natural law has been republished in revelation, or given determinate and specific shape in Scripture as guarded and interpreted by the positive teachings of the Church. (Nine Modern Moralists, p. 227).For what it's worth, Ramsey modeled his account of natural law on what he considered the inductive approach of Jacques Maritain, along with the writings of Edmond Cahn (a mid-twentieth century American jurist) on the "sense of injustice." It was important to Ramsey, if natural law were to have any viability outside of a narrowly Catholic context, that it did not attempt to shut down controversial questions prematurely, or attempt to have the last word in the public discussion. For that reason, he viewed the continuous argument embedded in the common law tradition as a better model of how it might operate than the manuals of moral theology.I wonder how Ratzinger would respond to Ramsey.