Foundations of a Queer Natural Law

Abstract

The queer natural law is an ethical framework at the intersection of queer theory, queer theology, and the natural law ethical tradition largely used in Roman Catholic moral theology. As a framework, queer natural law adopts the eudaimonist, realist, and teleological emphases of the natural law virtue ethics tradition exemplified by Thomas Aquinas and restored by revisionist natural lawyers, and it refines the operations of these normative emphases through queer theory’s critical investigation of conceptual normativity. Conceived as a dynamic dialectical enterprise, queer theory offers to the natural law tradition a toolset for a more comprehensive assessment of human nature, specifically by taking a critical look at the operation of heteronormativity in normative frameworks. Symbiotically, the natural law tradition offers to queer theory a scaffold for conceiving of an ethics based in equality and nondiscrimination that allows queer theory’s ethical impulses to avoid postmodernity’s tendency towards circularity in ethical reasoning, precisely by grounding queer theory’s ethical motivations in a participatory discourse based in universal human goods. Using sexuality as a test case, this dissertation proceeds in four chapters. In the first, the notion of a queer natural law is explained in more detail. In the second, an account of human flourishing compatible with the queer natural law is articulated. In the third, a review of two natural law accounts of sexuality—magisterial and revisionist—is conducted. In the fourth and final chapter, differences between a revisionist natural law account of sexuality and a queer natural law account of sexuality are explored, defending the queer natural law thesis that the telos of sex is inter/personal pleasure.