Why Natural Law is the Best!

Death to homosexuality and condoms!

Yesterday I was speaking with my very real Catholic friend (before I converted, that is). We were vigorously discussing natural law theory, as Catholics so often do, getting into the intricacies of constitutive vs. coordinative powers, aborted acts (life starts at conception, btw), and the modal metaphysics of gum. As usual, I was spewing objections right, left, and center, trying my best to avoid his rationally ironclad arguments. For a while I had lulled myself into a sense of keeping up. Until, that is, he asked me:

“You’re raising all of these objections because you’re masturbating. Am I right?” All the blood drained from my face, and I loosened the grip on my penis. I was caught. I was rejecting natural law because I didn’t know how to cancel my OnlyFans subscription.

Needless to say I was instantly converted—I now accept our lord and savior St. Thomas Aquinas into my heart! After the scales have fallen from my eyes, I am at awe that I ever rejected the view! I mean, it so elegantly captures a long list of Moorean truths of ethics, such as that:

• It’s worse to lie than to allow your family to be tortured to death.

• There’s an absolute prohibition against giving your wife facials.

• You should allow the entire earth to be blown up before you get a piercing.

• The contingencies of saliva production are often the only thing between you and moral depravity.

• Jakeing it is worse for your flourishing than being tortured to death.

Any theory that doesn’t get these points right is obviously disqualified from being taken seriously. Now, if some of those points are not as obvious to you as they are to me, well, don’t worry: The great thing is that natural law can say whatever you want! If you’re tired of those people walking 0.5 m/s slower than you on the sidewalk, well it’s obviously because they’re using their locomotive power against its natural end of getting places in a reasonable fucking amount of time—to hell with them! But despite appearances to the contrary, you’re not using your digestive system against it’s natural end of health by eating 1000 Big Macs, because, well, you see, there’s also the proximate end, and, ummm, nutrition is good, and actually, um, it’s that you’re just using the coordinative power of, ummm chewing and stuff; oh and also it exercises your fastfooditive power, whose natural end is to eat a bunch of tasty burgers.

But this might make you wonder which ad hoc explanations are the right ones, if you can argue for anything. Well don’t worry, as there is a perfectly principled answer: Any dispassionate and impartial truth seeker worth their salt will come to conclusions matching exactly what the catholic church currently teaches! If someone ever ends up disagreeing with these teachings, that can only be explained by them being extremely biased, blindly accepting the authority of their own whims, rather than thinking objectively.

Some naysayers may say that it seems “egoistic” and “misguided” that the reason I should not murder you is that it’s contrary to my flourishing. But that’s a big ol’ misunderstanding, as natural law surely cannot be egoistic when I really wish I could be gay, but I’m just not allowed to! Really, it’s a deep, metaphysical, and wholly nondescript sense of flourishing that should guide my actions (obviously), so surely it cannot be a sign that the theory is selfish and egoistic when it claims that my reasons for not murdering you have nothing to do with your interest and flourishing—what’s supposed to be the problem with that?

Anyone who isn’t converted to natural law after reading this is clearly just deceiving themselves because they can’t muster the courage to tell the wife that pegging-Tuesday has to end, seeing as it violates the exudative end of the sphincter; and the Pope and God hate it!

[Any apparent connection to recent debates is purely accidental]

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