Dr. Erik Dempsey explores whether we make morality or discover it by unpacking Aquinas’s three natural inclinations and arguing that they ground objective, inescapable moral obligations rather than mere social conventions.

This lecture was given on October 11th, 2025, at Michigan State University.

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About the Speakers:

Professor Erik Dempsey an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Departments of Government, Classics, and Religious Studies, and is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin for over ten years, during which time he has offered classes in the history of political philosophy, on the Bible and its interpreters, on American political thought, on classical philosophy and literature, and others. His favorite classes to teach are Jerusalem and Athens, a class comparing the political, moral, and theological ideas of the Hebrew Bible to Aristotle's, and the Question of Relativism, a class on what he considers the central quandary of our time. He writes primarily about Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and he is currently studying John Locke's commentaries on St. Paul's epistles. Last but not least, he is an Eagle Scout.

Keywords: Conventionalism and Justice, Human Moral Inclinations, Modern Science, Morality, Natural Law, Objective Moral Obligation, Rational Order of Goods, Self-Preservation and the Common Good

Do We Make Morality, or Discover It? An Examination of the Basis of Natural Law – Dr. Erik Dempsey

The Thomistic Institute