The jurisprudence of Robert P. George is twofold, in that he is one of the most important public law, and especially constitutional law, scholars of the late twentieth and so far in the twenty-first centuries, and, at the same time, he is America’s leading legal exponent of natural law. He is a devout Roman Catholic. But the relationship between his religious convictions and his jurisprudence will strike some readers as paradoxical. George writes: “I want to show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality.” “My criticism of secular liberal views is not that they are contrary to faith; it is that they fail the test of reason.” This chapter explains how the “paradox” is merely apparent.

Liberals rightly value truth and truthfulness. But natural law theories frequently treat any choice to lie as an attack on flourishing, and this apparently extreme position might seem to make natural law theory a poor fit with liberalism. Chapter 2 emphasizes that, while there are good reasons to object to lying, an attractive reading of natural law theory might allow for the moral acceptability of a limited range of lies.