It's from his book on sexual ethics, One Body. The section I quoted from discusses personalist, new natural law, and traditional natural law approaches to the question of contracepted nonmarital sex. 

Why can't scientists temporarily turn off a subject's sense of smell to study the interaction between this sense and other senses, or the subject's psychological state? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong or 'perverted' with doing so. 

Last edited by musiclover (7/20/2015 2:06 am)

musiclover wrote:

Why can't scientists temporarily turn off a subject's sense of smell to study the interaction between this sense and other senses, or the subject's psychological state? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong or 'perverted' with doing so. 

When you close your nostrils because of the overpowering smell of fecies, for example, you are not acting against nature and the same effect results.

Anyone who has had the terribly unfortunate experience of losing hearing in even only one ear can tell you everything eccentric scientists only belatedly confirmed about the senses that Aristotle taught. You experience an unnatural pain just trying to do the most tedious tasks of life. Your sense of orientation and distance is thrown into utter chaos, which again makes the most ordinary things of life terribly painful; but the pain isn't strictly physical or, indeed, even physical at all. It's mental. The 'work' required to do the most basic things is exponentially multiplied because it's like you're a teenager trying to grow (again) into your own ever changing size and, as it were, skin. You wake up at 8 and by 9:15 you are totally exhausted.

The problem with destroying a thing's natural function to see what happens as a result is that we a presuming to have a right to contradict nature. We don't have any such right; in fact of law, our rights come from nature at least.

Now we all know that people who abuse animals will end up abusing people. Nothing less is true of nature. Those who raped nature ended up raping man; and now, tragically in modern society, civil and intelligent men are trapped like Lot in Soddom. However, we are not without help or hope. Many naturally feel and also feel attached to the goodness of the natural world and its necessity for our existence and happiness, hope and progress. The latter is a sign and cause for hope. It is truly reasonable and natural, which is all too lacking these days. Therefore we should ally ourselves with such. Yes, let us become environmentalists. Let us point to nature as she is. Let us focus our study in wonder at her. Such is better than despoiling her and despoiling each other in ever increasing depravity and degradation.
 

Last edited by Timocrates (7/20/2015 9:59 am)

Alexander - So would you say it's permissible to frustrate the function of an organ for the sake of a higher faculty?