J. Budziszewski (born 1952) is an American philosopher and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 1981.
[1] Budziszewski has written widely, in both scholarly and popular venues, about a variety of moral and political issues including abortion, marriage, sexuality, capital punishment, and the role of judges in a constitutional republic.
[1] Apart from his scholarly philosophical work, Budziszewski is known for articles and books of Christian apologetics, addressed to a broad audience including young people and college students.
Known as one of the prominent evangelical intellectuals in America and former atheist, Budziszewski was received into the Roman Catholic Church on Easter Sunday 2004.
[5] The problem arises from a theoretical tenet defended by Thomas Aquinas, who he said "we must say that the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.
However, Budziszewski suggests that even when remorse is absent, guilty knowledge generates objective needs for confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification.
Calling these other four "Furies" the "greater sisters of remorse," he argues that they are "inflexible, inexorable, and relentless, demanding satisfaction even when mere feelings are suppressed, fade away, or never come.
"[7] He argues that [t]he normal outlet of remorse is to flee from wrong; of the need for confession, to admit what one has done; of atonement, to pay the debt; of reconciliation, to restore the bonds one has broken; and of justification, to get back in the right.
Failure to break out of the vicious circle leads to a variety of moral pathologies in the individual, the culture, and the body politic.
Indeed, argues Budziszewski, the proponents of neutralist theories actually suspend judgment only selectively, using a facade of neutrality in order to smuggle their moral views into policy without having to defend them.
[12] In his book, The Line Through the Heart, Budziszewski attempts to show us how the natural law continues to illuminate the ethical and political dimensions of human existence today despite our best efforts to ignore it.
[13] A Thomist, Budziszewski has most recently undertaken an ongoing series of publications on the work of Thomas Aquinas, especially line-by-line commentaries on the Summa Theologica.