Should rename it "Natural Law & Catholic Doctrine"

Don't get me wrong. It is completely expected that a course on natural law would talk about Catholic theology, but this goes far beyond that.

We are presented here with a one-sided view. Other approaches to natural law, other philosophers who have conceptualised it outside the tradition, are hardly mentioned and where they are (Kant, Hobbes) it is very brief. Indeed, even within the Catholic tradition, we don't get much more than Aristotle and Aquinas. You'd be forgiven for thinking that nothing else had been written on the subject other than these two.

The rest of the subject material is comprised of an attempts philosophical argumentation, but alternate lines of reasoning are summarily dismissed. The course is more the presenter's views of natural law, rather than a well-rounded, academic argument.

And finally, as other reviewers have noted, the presenter cannot resist the urge to go on repeated tangents as to why Catholic law could shed light on the marriage equality debate ("Is there a natural definition of marriage?" he invites us to consider), why it's justified to suspend the civil rights ("which are, properly speaking, only for citizens") of "aliens", abortion, and evolution. This latter is particularly egregious - he goes on a 10-15 minute tangent about why we should doubt evolution, before adding that it makes no difference either way to the argument he makes. Last I checked, Catholics aren't obliged to be young-earth creationists, so this really is a matter of the presenter's personal biases.

All in all, this seems more like campaign materials from the GOP than the kind of academic course I've come to expect from The Teaching Company.

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