Natural law

• Natural Law appears to give strong support to marriage with an absolute that adultery is wrong. Extra-marital sex does not support Aquinas’ precepts as it is not good for sustaining a flourishing human society. Extra-marital sex might feel good, but this is an apparent good, not a real good, because the primary purpose of sex are frustrated.
• Natural Law ethics sees right and wrong as fixed things. They do not change according to the situation or what might happen as a result, but are linked to some greater idea of an eternal law devised to help humans flourish.
• Acts are judged right or wrong in relation to the extent to which they meet their ultimate end. The process of judging what is right or wrong involves the use of reason, and reason leads us towards doing good. According to Aquinas, reason, reflecting on the world, reveals that certain primary precepts are good: protecting life, ensuring reproduction, education and loving God.
• what are strengths?


  •Adultery is considered wrong, not just by Christians but secular people as well.

  •An argument could be made that under natural law, extramarital sex could be moral, as a way of resolving infertility. For example, in the OT, Abraham sired a child by his servant girl Hagar when his wife Sarah was believed to be barren (Genesis 16). In this way, surrogate mothers offer the possibility of reproduction when infertility prevents it. Surrogate sex may be extramarital sex, but it is not necessarily against natural law. This is not a conclusion that Catholic thinking could reach.