DRAFT – Forthcoming in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Fall 2012) Vol. 86, Issue 4. 1 Objects of Intention: A Hylomorphic Critique of the New Natural Law Theory 1 Matthew B. O’Brien Villanova University Robert C. Koons The University of Texas at Austin Abstract. The “New Natural Law” Theory (NNL) of Grisez, Finnis, Boyle, and their collaborators offers a distinctive account of intentional action, which underlies a moral theory that aims to justify many aspects of traditional morality and Catholic doctrine. In fact, we show that the NNL is committed to premises that entail the permissibility of many actions that are irreconcilable with traditional morality and Catholic doctrine, such as elective abortions. These consequences follow principally from the NNL’s planning theory of intention coupled with an implicitly Cartesian conception of human behavior, in which behavior chosen by an agent has no intrinsic “intentionalness” apart from what he confers upon it as part of his plan. Pace the NNL collaborators, we sketch an alternative hylomorphic conception of intentional action that avoids untoward moral implications by grounding human agency in the exercise of basic powers that are either essential to human nature or acquired through participation in social practices. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 article “A Defense of Abortion” in Philosophy & Public Affairs is among the most widely anthologized and discussed articles in the history of analytic philosophy. In a reply to Thomson published in the same journal two years later, John Finnis argued against her defense of abortion, several times drawing upon Germain Grisez’s Abortion: the Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments. In the course of his argument, however, Finnis qualified his dependence upon Grisez’s work: For my part, I think Grisez’s reliance on such counter-factual hypotheses to specify the morally relevant meaning or intention of human acts is excessive, for it removes morally relevant ‘intention’ too far from common-sense intention, tends to unravel the traditional and common-sense judgments on suicide (someone would say: ‘It’s not death I’m choosing, only a long space of peace and 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and at a session on the “new natural law theory” at the American Catholic Philosophical Association Annual Meeting in Baltimore of November 2010. For the latter event, we are indebted to the organizer, Christopher Toner, along with Mark C. Murphy, our respondent, and Christopher Tollefsen, our co-presenter, as well as to the audience. We owe thanks to a number of colleagues who read and commented on complete or partial drafts of this paper, including Ryan T. Anderson, J. Budziszewski, Matthew Franck, Sherif Girgis, Luke Gormally, Robert T. Miller, David R. Oakley, Stephen Napier, David Pedersen, Nicholas J. Teh, Helen Watt, and three anonymous reviewers for the Quarterly.