Ontologiczne podstawy prawa naturalnego

Abstract

The idea of natural law in recent Catholic moral teaching did not change its ethical relevance in spite of some criticisms after the publication of the encyclical “Humanae vitae” by Paul VI. These criticisms concerned a mainly naturalistic interpretation of natural law. In answer to this, some Catholic ethicists, including Karol Wojtyła, developed a metaphysical interpretation of principles of natural law. In this way we have two contradictory interpretations: naturalistic and metaphysical. This paper suggests a third interpretation – ontological, which leads to the reconciliation of the biological and spiritual sides of reality. On the basis of existential and personalistic analysis we receive a more complete concept of being, whose ontological structure lets us see the fundamental demands of being. In such a way we attend to built imperatives of natural law in strict connection with biological foundations and their metaphysical explanations. Approaching the modus essendi of reality and especially of the human being in their ontological structures we get a normative vision of life in the world. When the, human being is seen as corpore et anima unus, it is also a proper criterion for the interpretation of the unity of nature and its natural postulates and their metaphysical constitution.