The rational foundations of human living: Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law and modern rights theory in the political thought of Charles N. R. McCoy.

摘要

Charles N. R. McCoy's interpretation of Aquinas's natural law teaching is rationally superior to that of the most well-known and influential thinker of the neo-Thomist revival, Jacques Maritain. McCoy's effort to recover the natural law better captures both the letter and the spirit of Aquinas's original teaching and carefully shows us how and why that teaching was rejected, and then replaced, in modernity. Compared to his neo-Thomist contemporaries, McCoy's Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the natural law more clearly demonstrates the need to recover natural teleology, emphasizing man's rational and political nature while resisting the temptation to modernize Aquinas's teaching, thus avoiding errors in its application or identifying it too closely with errant modern rights theories. In response to modern man's "insane search for a substitute infinity," McCoy unequivocally asserts the Divine Lawgiver as the foundation for natural law and provides us with a scrupulous account of the thread of tradition in political philosophy, the "clue of Ariadne," which we can use, if we so choose, to recover our lost "intellectual center" and to secure "the rational foundations of humane living."