Unnatural Intents: Willing and Acting in a New Natural Law Theory Sexual Ethic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The new natural law theory is best known for its narrow and exclusionary sexual ethic. This sexual ethic is underpinned not, as many critics contend, by an account of human nature or the requirements of human reproduction. Rather, it is relies on a sophisticated account of human willing, particularly the idea that acts are morally individuated by their intent. This paper argues that the new natural lawyers employ two distinct and contradictory models of moral intention: one which is disconnected from the wider moral projects in which the individual is engaged (which produces an narrow and exclusionary sexual ethic); the other, which acknowledges the transformative affect these wider projects have on the meaning of intent (which permits a much wider and inclusive sexual ethic). This paper shows how the tension between the two models might be resolved by turning to the new natural law theory’s own account of individual autonomy or self-constitution. In light of the demands of self-constitution, acts cannot be individuated by the proximate intent, but only by the intent as a moment of autonomy. This transformation of the new natural law theory account of the morality of intention allows the redrawing of its sexual ethic, particularly to allow the calibration of sexual acts to meet the demands of self-constitution: most significantly allowing a new natural law theory account of the morality of contraception and sex outside of marriage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".