The two passages you have brought together point toward a common philosophical problem: what happens when reason, law, science, and politics are detached from an objective understanding of human nature and become instruments for reconstructing human life?: Both questions lead back to a classical concern: human reason is most fully rational when it seeks to understand reality and the good, rather than presuming that reality must conform to the systems reason constructs. For Catholic philosophy, that means neither rejecting rights nor abandoning science, but recovering their proper foundations in truth, human nature, justice, virtue, and the ultimate end of human life.
My conclusion
The strongest synthesis of these passages is this:
Modernity's central danger may be not the excessive use of reason, but the narrowing of reason to calculation, control, and the construction of systems.
Fortin's historical argument asks whether modern rights theory has replaced an objective, teleological account of justice with a framework centered on individual self-preservation. Desmet asks whether the modern pursuit of mastery over nature has encouraged a culture unable to accept the uncertainty and limits inherent in human existence.
Both questions lead back to a classical concern: human reason is most fully rational when it seeks to understand reality and the good, rather than presuming that reality must conform to the systems reason constructs.
For Catholic philosophy, that means neither rejecting rights nor abandoning science, but recovering their proper foundations in truth, human nature, justice, virtue, and the ultimate end of human life.
The important caution is that the historical connections among nominalism, modern natural law, Machiavellian politics, and scientism are interpretive theses that need to be established individually. Fortin provides a substantial argument for examining those connections; he does not make every subsequent development an inevitable consequence of Ockham.
The two passages you have brought together point toward a common philosophical problem: what happens when reason, law, science, and politics are detached from an objective understanding of human nature and become instruments for reconstructing human life?
The first passage, from the Claremont Review of Books discussion of Mattias Desmet, examines the modern ambition to master uncertainty through scientific method, technical control, and rational rules. The second, from Ernest L. Fortin's Classical Christianity and the Political Order, traces a related transformation in natural law and political philosophy: the movement from an understanding of justice grounded in human nature and the ends of human existence toward theories that begin with individual rights, self-preservation, and the formal organization of law.
Read together, they offer a powerful framework for your broader critique of modernity. But there is an important distinction: Desmet is diagnosing the psychological and cultural consequences of the modern project, while Fortin is tracing its philosophical and theological foundations. Their arguments can reinforce one another without being identical.
1. Fortin's central argument: the replacement of natural law by rights theory
Fortin is not simply objecting to the language of rights. He is questioning whether modern rights theory preserves the philosophical foundations of classical natural law at all.
The distinction can be summarized as follows:
Classical natural law
Human nature has an intelligible structure and purpose. Reason discovers moral principles grounded in what human beings are and what constitutes their good. Justice involves giving each person what is due, in accordance with the good and the order of things.Modern rights theory, as Fortin characterizes it
The individual becomes the starting point. The theory asks how the individual's claims, particularly the claim to self-preservation, can be protected through principles of law. Natural law increasingly becomes a system of deductions designed to secure those claims.Fortin's concern is that the second approach can appear to preserve natural law while quietly changing its foundations. Rather than deriving rights from an objective account of human goods and duties, it risks reconstructing morality around the protection of individual claims.
That is why his opening question is so pointed: why would Catholic thinkers defend their threatened philosophical heritage by identifying it with ideals that were once considered antithetical to it?
The issue is not whether rights can ever be legitimate. It is whether rights remain intelligible without the natural law that explains their moral foundation.
2. Ockham and the loss of an objective moral order
Your quotation about William of Ockham is particularly important because it identifies a deeper metaphysical problem.
In the Thomistic understanding, things possess natures that are intelligible to reason. Human beings are not simply collections of desires that happen to exist. There are objective goods appropriate to human nature, and the moral life involves recognizing and pursuing them.
Fortin contrasts this with the nominalist position he attributes to Ockham, in which universal natures do not exist as objective realities in the way Thomistic metaphysics maintains.
The theological consequence, in Fortin's account, is radical: if no necessary moral order constrains the divine will, God could conceivably command what would otherwise be contrary to the moral law.
This needs a qualification. Ockham did not simply deny that particular things or individual realities exist, nor did he deny every kind of moral truth. His nominalism concerns the status of universals, and his voluntarist theology gives divine freedom a distinctive role. Fortin is tracing the implications of that position, not offering a complete account of every aspect of Ockham's thought.
Nevertheless, the philosophical question is profound:
Is goodness grounded in an intelligible order of reality, or does it ultimately depend on an act of will?
That question connects directly with your earlier interest in the contrast between Thomistic natural law and modern conceptions of law based on command, individual choice, and self-definition.
If human nature has an objective structure, neither an individual nor a political authority can simply redefine the human good by decree. If the objective structure is abandoned, however, moral and legal theories must find another foundation.
3. From nominalism to modern rights: Fortin's historical argument
Fortin does not claim that Ockham single-handedly invented modern rights theory. His argument is more nuanced: the nominalist challenge helped create a philosophical environment in which later transformations of natural law became possible.
He identifies two subsequent developments.
The early-modern reconstruction of natural law. Thinkers such as Grotius sought a more systematic and formally organized account of law. Fortin argues that this development risked separating jurisprudence from the practical wisdom and concern for justice traditionally associated with it.
The emergence of rights-centered natural law. Moral and political theory increasingly began from the individual's right of self-preservation and sought to deduce the arrangements necessary to protect it.
Fortin's criticism of Grotius is especially revealing. His concern is that jurisprudence can become an elegant technical system while losing its passionate concern with justice.
This is where your quotation from Desmet becomes relevant. The two authors are describing different fields, but they identify a similar danger: the substitution of a technical method for an adequate understanding of the reality being studied.
In Fortin's case, the danger is a theory of law that is formally coherent but insufficiently grounded in the ends of human existence. In Desmet's case, it is a scientific and political mentality that tries to eliminate life's uncertainty by organizing it through rational systems and rules.
4. Desmet and Fortin: two dimensions of the same modern problem
Bacon: knowledge as power
The modern scientific project increasingly emphasizes the practical power of knowledge to transform nature and relieve the human condition. The problem emerges when this legitimate ambition becomes a promise of comprehensive mastery over reality.
Hobbes: political order and security
Hobbes makes self-preservation and security central to political philosophy. This is relevant to Fortin's discussion of rights theories that begin from self-preservation, although Hobbes's political theory should not be treated as identical to every modern natural-law theory.
Aquinas: reason discovers an objective order
The Thomistic alternative is not to reject reason, science, law, or political authority. It is to understand them in relation to reality, human nature, and the good. Practical reason must judge what should be done, not merely calculate effective means to a predetermined objective.
The deepest contrast is therefore not between reason and unreason. It is between reason that recognizes an order it did not create and reason that attempts to reconstruct reality according to its own systems.
Desmet's criticism of the attempt to squeeze life into logic and theories is compatible with this concern, although it would be a mistake to infer that he endorses every aspect of classical Thomism.
The classical tradition also values rational argument and definite moral rules. Its objection would be to the assumption that formal rules and technical procedures can replace prudence, moral formation, and an understanding of the human good.
5. The paradox of control: why greater mastery can produce greater anxiety
Desmet's central paradox is that a civilization seeking to eliminate uncertainty can become increasingly anxious about it.
The pattern runs something like this:
1. Fear and uncertainty
Human life contains suffering, limits, and unpredictable events.
2. The promise of technical mastery
Scientific methods, systems, regulations, and expert control promise to eliminate uncertainty.
3. Intolerance of what remains uncontrollable
The persistence of uncertainty appears as a failure that demands further intervention.
4. More control, more anxiety
The effort to guarantee security can generate new fears, dependencies, and demands for control.
This is an interpretive summary of Desmet's argument, not a universally established law of psychology. Technical systems can reduce genuine dangers, and reasonable regulations can protect people. The problem arises when the desire to manage risk becomes an ideology that treats every uncertainty as intolerable and every human problem as technically solvable.
Fortin's argument suggests a philosophical explanation for why that temptation arises: once human goods are no longer understood within an objective account of human nature, the search for the good can be replaced by the search for security, control, and measurable outcomes.
That connection is illuminating, even though Fortin's historical thesis and Desmet's psychological account require separate evaluation.
6. The Catholic implications: rights, social justice, and the natural law
This brings us to the most important question for your research: what happens when Catholic thinkers adopt modern rights language to defend Catholic moral and political principles?
Fortin is concerned that the Church might preserve the vocabulary of natural law while gradually changing its substance. If natural law is reconstructed as a system of rights, or as a theory of social justice insufficiently grounded in objective human goods, the resulting account may no longer perform the same philosophical work.
Yet three distinctions are necessary.
First, rights are not necessarily opposed to natural law. A natural-law account can recognize genuine rights as claims grounded in human dignity, justice, and the goods appropriate to human beings. The question is whether rights are derived from an objective moral order or treated as foundational claims independent of it.
Second, social justice is not necessarily a departure from classical morality. Fortin challenges its ambiguity and the difficulty of defining it precisely. That is a challenge to conceptual clarity, not proof that every use of the concept is incompatible with Thomism.
Third, the Church's adoption of modern terminology does not, by itself, establish doctrinal surrender. The decisive issue is what the terminology means, what philosophical assumptions it carries, and whether those assumptions can be reconciled with Catholic teaching.
Fortin's essay is Natural Law and Social Justice, originally published in 1985.
7. How this connects with your Machiavelli argument
There is a useful distinction between Fortin's argument and the stronger claim that modernity is fundamentally Machiavellian.
Machiavelli is relevant because he represents a major shift in political thought toward the practical acquisition and preservation of power, rather than the classical question of how political life should be ordered toward virtue and the common good.
Bacon's emphasis on the relief of man's estate and the technological transformation of nature, Hobbes's concern with security, and the later development of rights-centered theories are not identical to Machiavelli's political philosophy. They can, however, be examined as related expressions of a modern tendency to prioritize effective control over an inherited account of objective ends.
The connection becomes especially strong when a system's success is judged primarily by its capacity to produce a desired outcome, while moral limits are treated as obstacles to be managed.
That is a more precise thesis than saying that every modern development is Machiavellian.
It also explains why your earlier concern about Amoris Laetitia raises a related philosophical question. If a moral norm is grounded in divine law and the objective goods of human nature, a proposed pastoral accommodation cannot be justified simply because it produces a desirable practical result. One must establish that the accommodation genuinely serves the good within the moral order, rather than treating that order as an obstacle to be overcome.
That is an analogy in philosophical structure, not proof that a particular papal document is Machiavellian. The theological and doctrinal question must still be evaluated on its own evidence.
My conclusion
The strongest synthesis of these passages is this:
Modernity's central danger may be not the excessive use of reason, but the narrowing of reason to calculation, control, and the construction of systems.
Fortin's historical argument asks whether modern rights theory has replaced an objective, teleological account of justice with a framework centered on individual self-preservation. Desmet asks whether the modern pursuit of mastery over nature has encouraged a culture unable to accept the uncertainty and limits inherent in human existence.
Both questions lead back to a classical concern: human reason is most fully rational when it seeks to understand reality and the good, rather than presuming that reality must conform to the systems reason constructs.
For Catholic philosophy, that means neither rejecting rights nor abandoning science, but recovering their proper foundations in truth, human nature, justice, virtue, and the ultimate end of human life.
The important caution is that the historical connections among nominalism, modern natural law, Machiavellian politics, and scientism are interpretive theses that need to be established individually. Fortin provides a substantial argument for examining those connections; he does not make every subsequent development an inevitable consequence of Ockham.
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