Contraception and the Natural Law: a Recent Study

Germain Grisez, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown, married and father of four, has published an extraordinarily important philosophical study of the moral evil of contraception. It is not the topics treated that would distinguish the study from others on the same subject. In the Introduction, Grisez criticizes the increasingly popular attitude among Catholics that appealing to experience and neglecting ethical reasoning would justify the practice of contraception under certain circumstances. On the other side, he points out the inadequacy of many arguments urged against contraception, both those developed along traditional lines and the recent "phenomenological" analyses (chap. 2). Probing more deeply, he outlines two prevalent but unsound general theories of moral law which underlie many of the arguments advanced for or against contraception. He develops a more adequate theory of moral law, found in the later works of Thomas Aquinas (chap. 3). Applying the general principles, he shows why contraception is intrinsically and therefore always immoral, and in the process makes clear what is meant here by "contraception" (chap. 4). After meeting objections that concern rather his general theory of morality (chap. 5), he pinpoints more concretely what constitutes contraception and therefore makes an act immoral, and under what conditions there could be, not contraception, but mere conception-preventing or conception-avoiding behavior, which might be permissible or even obligatory (chap. 6). Similarly, any contraceptive use of drugs is seen as intrinsically immoral (chap. 7), although for some conception-preventing drugs there is a legitimate use (Appendix). From the objective conditions of morality thus far discussed, he sharply distinguishes the question of subjective responsibility and morality (chap. 8). In an epilogue he prophesies a new age of Christian asceticism, when through God's grace, genuine charity, and proper training, perfect chastity will be attained and easily maintained both in and out of the married state. A full-page précis of the book, prepared by the author himself, is found in the National Catholic Reporter of April 21,1965, pp. 6 and 10. However, no précis will do justice to his complex and nuanced philosophical development nor indicate the breadth of his discussion of other writers on the subject, from Aquinas and Suárez to de Lestapis, Dupré, Janssens, Van der Marck, Ford, and Kelly. But the extraordinary importance of Grisez's study does not lie in the intelligent and thorough way he goes over well-trodden ground, nor in his