Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

476 REVIEWS / RECENSIONESGraham, Mark, Josef Fuchs on Natural Law. Georgetown UniversityPress, Washington, 2002, 276 p.Graham’s analysis of Josef Fuchs’s understanding of the naturallaw begins with the latter’s understanding of the term in what theauthor calls his “pre-conversion” stage, that is prior to the importantchanges in Fuchs’s thinking occasioned by the controversies surroundingcontraception in the nineteen sixties. At this period, Fuchsunderstood himself as a defender of what he took to be the traditionalCatholic position on natural law. He presented this defenceparticularly in his debates with Karl Barth’s divine command ethics,and various forms of “situation ethics.”In his critique of Fuchs’s thinking at this period Graham notesmany shortcomings, for example a failure to give an adequateaccount of nature, and to explain how more particular norms werederived from nature. These shortcomings were common to most, ifnot all, accounts of natural law given by Catholic moral theologiansof the period. In retrospect, it is surprising that so basic a notion inmoral theology was not given a more coherent and convincing presentation.As Graham rightly notes, the key problems are on the levelof metaphysics, and the relations between metaphysics and history,and universality and particularity.The impression is given, although the author does not state thisexplicitly, that the moral theologians wanted universal and absolutenorms, and constructed, or rather borrowed from the past, metaphysicaland ontological notions which they believed would sustainthese. Closely linked with these issues was the question of moralepistemology. If this reviewer may be permitted to add a further note:neither the theologians nor the documents of the Magisteriumthought it necessary to specify what they meant by “reason.” Themeaning of the term seems to have been considered self-evident.In dealing with these issues, Fuchs, like most, if not all, moraltheologians of the period, accorded a decisive role to certain declarationsof the Magisterium, on the capacity of reason in general, andits capacity to know the natural law in particular. There is a tensionbetween a formal, theoretical acknowledgment of the capacity of reasonto know the principles of the natural law, and people’s actual historicalabilities. The tension becomes more acute, of course, if weconsider the effects of the fall and the perduring effects of sin on thehuman ability to grasp and understand truth. In this epistemological