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  • The Law of Nations as Developing Moral Law:Two Interpretations of ius gentium in the Thomistic Tradition
  • Barrett H. Turner

Il n'y a pas de notion plus épineuse pour un philosophe ou un juriste que la notion de droit de gens.

Jacques Maritain, La loi naturelle ou loi non écrite (1950)

SINCE THE Second Vatican Council, Catholic moral theology has increasingly wrestled with the question of development in the Church's moral and social doctrine. For example, scholars continue to dispute the nature, limits, and causes of the change in the Church's teaching on religious liberty and the death penalty. Yet discovering an adequate way of describing the development of moral doctrine has been difficult going. John T. Noonan, Jr., in his well-known explorations of change in Catholic moral doctrine, could find no more of a principled rationale for doctrinal developments such as those on usury, slavery, and religious liberty than the twofold love commandment of Christ, empathy, and experience.1 According to Noonan, not even human nature or the natural law limits how Church teaching can develop, for our knowledge of human nature is historically conditioned and changes.2 With respect to [End Page 339] the specific development of the Church's teaching on religious liberty as promulgated by Dignitatis Humanae, Noonan could only arrive at the bare conclusion that the Magisterium is capable of the "flat rejection of propositions once taught."3 In his response to Noonan, Avery Dulles argued that the development on religious liberty can be made intelligible by noting how changing social conditions call forth new applications of unchanging teaching, permitting the theologian to see "that there has been true progress without reversal, even on the plane of propositional declarations."4 While Dulles offered an important response to Noonan in noting how new conditions could change what the moral law demands, he did not offer a theory of the development of moral doctrine.

As St. John Paul II suggested in two encyclicals, any Catholic theory of the development of moral or social doctrine should attend to the changing relationship between the principles of moral theology and the changing conditions of human life. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) he wrote that the Church's "teaching in the social sphere" is both "constant" in regard to its "fundamental inspiration" and "ever new" on account of "necessary and opportune adaptations suggested by the changes in historical conditions and the unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of the life of people and society" (SRS 3). This is the case not merely within nations but also in regard to "the configuration of the world," which "has undergone notable [End Page 340] changes and presents some totally new aspects" (SRS 4). He similarly stated in Veritatis Splendor (1993) that while human nature is "the measure of culture" and that "some things do not change and are ultimately founded upon Christ," nonetheless the application of the unchanging core of Catholic moral teaching occurs "in the light of different cultural contexts" and "in the light of historical circumstances" (VS 53). A Catholic theology of the development of moral doctrine therefore must attend to the interplay between on the one hand the Church's authoritative exposition of the unchanging deposit of faith and the natural law, and on the other hand the changing conditions of human life.

Without giving a full treatment of a theory of the development of moral doctrine or of any particular case of it in detail, this article only offers a grounding for such a theory in the recovery of a concept from the Thomist tradition that relates the unchanging natural law to changing social conditions. This concept is the "law of nations" (ius gentium). Such a concept will be useful for later proposing a full treatment of development in moral doctrine in general, and specific doctrinal changes in particular. In fact, the law of nations has already begun to be used to explain doctrinal developments in religious liberty and the death penalty.5 Yet the precise meaning of ius gentium in the Thomist tradition is itself a matter of debate.

According to this debate, the law of nations is either a universal body...

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