Abstract
In the ongoing philosophical conversation about the appropriate moral boundaries and conceptual grounds for civil marriage, the new natural lawyers (Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Gerard Bradley, Robert George, and Patrick Lee) have had slight influence. At most, as Stephen Macedo remarks, [t]he natural lawyers are fundamentally right in their insistence that we must make value judgements in the realm of sexual morality.1 More frequently, though, the new natural lawyers and the new natural law theory (NNLT) are dismissed with varying degrees of brevity,2 despite offering a theoretically complex and systematic de fense of traditional marriage. The rationale for this dismissal is not diffi cult to discern. As well noted by their critics, the new natural lawyers seem to make a number of unpalatable moves: grounding marriage—and their sexual ethic more broadly—in the biological facts of human repro duction,3 employing a bad phenomenology of sexual desire4 in which
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