Project Details
Projekt
Autonomy of law or ius divinum? Critique of natural law from a power-theoretical perspective
Applicant
Professor Dr. Thomas M. Schmidt
Subject Area
Roman Catholic Theology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534685649
The sub-project aims to develop a philosophical critique of theological natural law as a reaction to the crisis of power and abuse in the Catholic Church. On the one hand, the appeal of the ecclesiastical magisterium to natural law serves to self-sacralize the institution of the Church and its offices. The legitimacy of the institutional constitution of the Church invokes a basis of legitimacy that contradicts the principle of individual, moral and political autonomy. On the other hand, arguments based on natural law, particularly in the area of sexual morality, lead to normative stipulations that not only run counter to sexual self-determination, but also establish conditions of subordination and defenselessness. The current strategies of defending the idea of divine law aim to assert natural law no longer as the metaphysical basis of human rational law, but as its protective limitation. Human rational law is to be protected from inhuman arbitrariness and auto-aggressive tendencies by a substantive concept of human dignity. An effective critique of theological natural law cannot therefore be purely destructive. From a constructive point of view, it must take seriously the concerns of those positions that consider a natural law justification of law to be indispensable. This position can essentially be categorized into two groups of arguments: There is a concern that democratic procedures and processes of law-making can lead to positive arbitrary law with inhumane consequences in the absence of natural law-based, super-positive constraints on law. Procedures of legality must be contained by substantial criteria of ethical legitimacy, such as those provided by super-positive natural law, in order to avert the risk of the possibility of legally established injustice and to prevent positive law slipping into injustice. Particularly in a theological context, both with regard to a theological reflection on the form of law and the legal constitution of the ecclesiastical institution, it seems indispensable to take into account the structural and conceptual difference between autonomously founded rational law and theonomically interpreted natural law. The sub-project therefore pursues two central goals: 1. the analysis of the paradox of autonomy, which serves to determine the appropriate relationship between formal self-determination and unavailability in terms of content. In this context, systematic recourse to the definition of the basic conceptual relationship between nature and reason in the sense of the Hegelian concept of a second nature is also appropriate. 2. the development of a theory of difference between law and religion that does justice to the inherent logic of autonomous rational law on the one hand and the theological justification and reflection of law on the other.
DFG Programme
Research Units
