Preview Response

Created Order / Medicine

John R. Peteet

Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

I respond to the Preview with three questions.

To what extent, and in what ways, can one argue for the basic human goods and the propositions of natural law that follow from a Christian understanding of the created order to effectively persuade those who are not themselves Christian?
To what extent can consensus be achieved not only with regard to those willing to engage in philosophical argument, but also with the general public?
With regard to arguments for establishing basic human goods, to what extent do the properties of (i) being an end and not only a means, and (ii) of empirically being (nearly) universally desired, play a role, and what other properties or principles are useful in trying to achieve broad consensus around basic goods?

VanderWeele, T.J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 31:8148-8156.