Against the Modern Culture of Artificial Subtraction
INTRODUCTION
Daniel hasn’t moved in forty minutes.
It is 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday. He is thirty-four. The apartment is clean, the fridge is stocked with the latest organic products, and his girlfriend is still waiting for him to reply to the texts he has left unanswered.
Three apps glow on his phone. One logged his morning run. Another offers a meditation he opened and abandoned. The last is his favorite dating app, where faces flicker past like doors he never dares to enter.
He enjoys comforts his grandparents never dreamed, freedoms his parents never knew, and choices neither could have pictured. Daniel has everything he could dream of, but he is miserable anyway.
He is healthy but restless. Connected but lonely. Free but adrift. His life is full of goods. But they just do not add up to anything.
Daniel is confused. He has lots of health choices, social access, and casual sex. But he often wonders: Why do I have so much, and still feel like none of it adds up to a life?
Daniel’s confusion points to the deeper crisis in today’s concept of progress. Modern culture has not abandoned nature or human goods; it still values the body, pleasure, safety, productivity, autonomy, and recognition. Its central mistake is treating these goods as independent and self-justifying, as if bodily life, desire, and social belonging could thrive without truth, virtue, worship, or ultimate purpose.
Aquinas’s account of natural inclinations in Summa Theologiae (ST) I-II, q. 94, a. 2 explains why the isolation of natural goods from higher goods fails. Humans are naturally inclined toward self-preservation, procreation, knowing the truth, living in society, and knowing God. These natural inclinations form an ordered whole. Lower goods are real and necessary but are fulfilled only when directed by higher goods.
ST I-II, q. 94, a. 5 sharpens the point. Aquinas teaches that natural law may change by addition, as human and divine law specify what promotes human flourishing. But it cannot change by subtraction. What belongs to natural law cannot simply cease to be good. Modern culture often attempts this subtraction. Today’s world seeks health without holiness, pleasure without structure, society without shared truth, and spirituality without God. This approach does not liberate individuals. It fragments them.
This essay argues that while Aquinas did not write about dating apps, wellness culture, expressive individualism, or modern autonomy, his account of natural inclinations identifies the goods that belong to human flourishing, and his distinction between addition and subtraction provides a vocabulary for judging whether later cultural developments specify those goods or sever them from their proper order.
ANALYSIS
1. The Three Inclinations: Aquinas’s Architecture of Human Flourishing
In ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2, Aquinas teaches that the first precept of natural law is that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” But the first precept does not stand alone. From it follow the other precepts of natural law, because reason naturally apprehends as good those things toward which man has a natural inclination.[1] The order of natural law, therefore, follows the order of natural inclinations.
Aquinas does not view natural inclinations as mere urges or impulses. Instead, inclinations reveal the basic goods that fulfill human nature. The good is understood teleologically, in relation to the end, fulfillment, and completion.[2] These inclinations matter because they identify the goods that practical reason recognizes, organizes, and directs.
The first inclination is the drive to preserve one’s being. Humans share this with all substances, as every existing thing seeks to remain in existence. In human life, the inclination toward self-preservation supports the goods of life, bodily integrity, nourishment, health, and protection from harm. Aquinas includes the preservation of human life within natural law.[3] Survival is not the highest good, but life is the foundation for all other human goods. Without life, there can be no family, pursuit of truth, social life, virtue, or worship.
The second inclination, shared with other animals, is toward sexual union, generation, and the care and education of offspring. Aquinas identifies “the union of male and female” and “the raising of children” as goods under natural law.[4] For humans, the sexual and generative inclination is not only biological but also extends to marriage, family, education, responsibility, and social continuity because humans are rational creatures.[5] Human procreation involves bringing children into being as persons capable of reason, virtue, friendship, and worship.[6]
The third inclination is unique to humans as rational beings. People are naturally inclined to seek truth, especially about God, and to live in society according to reason.[7] Aquinas includes within this inclination the avoidance of ignorance and the responsibility to respect others. The rational inclination toward truth, society, and God is critical because it gives human flourishing its rational and spiritual dimension.[8] Humans do not simply live or reproduce; they educate, govern, worship, promise, judge, forgive, and pursue the common good. The inclination to truth and society grounds religion, justice, friendship, law, education, virtue, and political life.
Aquinas presents the three inclinations as an integrated whole. The first secures the good of life, but life alone is incomplete. The second extends human good to generations, families, and education. The third directs both bodily and family life toward truth, society, and God. Human flourishing requires the integration of bodily, generative, rational, social, and spiritual goods. When the body is separated from generation, sex from responsibility, society from truth, or reason from God, the person is divided against his own nature.
2. Article 5 and the Limits of Natural-Law Development
ST I-II, q. 94, a. 5 demonstrates that natural law is neither frozen in every practical detail nor revisable in its first principles. Aquinas asks whether natural law can change and distinguishes two senses of change: change by addition and change by subtraction. The distinction between addition and subtraction is crucial for this essay because it allows genuine development while denying that the basic goods disclosed by natural inclination can simply be removed from the structure of human flourishing.
Change by addition allows natural law to be specified where its first principles leave practical details undecided. J. Budziszewski, in his Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, notes that Aquinas does not suggest adding new first principles.[9] Rather, existing principles permit new precepts to become right. For example, natural law requires public safety but does not dictate which side of the road to drive on. Once lawful authority decides, a new obligation arises.[10] Before the authority made the determination, either side was permissible. After the determination, only the specified side is allowed.
Addition is best understood as rational specification. Human and divine law do not invent the basic goods of natural law, but they may give those basic goods concrete legal, social, or institutional form. Road rules, evidentiary standards in court, property regimes, and public-health measures can therefore be understood as determinations of more basic goods such as life, safety, justice, social order, and the common good. Such determinations give practical form to natural-law principles without replacing those principles. John Boler similarly describes such rules as reasonable means to achieve broader ends, like orderly traffic.[11]
Addition can also occur when voluntary actions create new moral situations. For example, Budziszewski notes in an essay that while natural law does not require two individuals to marry, exchanging vows creates new duties because natural law requires fidelity.[12] In this way, natural law prepares the ground for matrimony, and the parties’ actions actualize new obligations. The marriage example demonstrates that addition is not limited to legislatures. Individual actions can generate new duties by activating existing moral principles.
Change by subtraction differs in that it does not allow the repeal of natural law’s first principles. Budziszewski emphasizes that Aquinas does not permit anything to be removed from the general principles.[13] Acts such as adultery, theft, or contempt for parents do not become acceptable due to changing circumstances. Subtractions, like additions, are limited to secondary and detailed matters.
The distinction between addition and subtraction is central to the essay’s argument. If the first principles and basic goods of natural law are stable, a culture cannot simply disregard life, generation, truth, society, or God. Humans may add legal, medical, social, and institutional specifications to support these goods, but they cannot remove the first principles and basic goods. A culture that tries to preserve health while denying holiness, preserve sex while denying generation, or preserve social recognition while denying truth is not developing natural law. Such a culture is attempting to retain selected natural goods while subtracting the order that makes them intelligible.
The flexibility of secondary precepts does not weaken the claim that natural law’s first principles cannot be subtracted. Aquinas acknowledges that some detailed precepts apply “for the most part” but may not hold in rare cases due to special circumstances. Randall Smith explains that Article 5 distinguishes unchangeable first principles from secondary precepts, which may vary in exceptional situations.[14] Boler’s analysis of Aquinas’s deposit example in ST I-II, q. 94, a.4 explains how a secondary precept of natural law can admit an exception without undermining natural law itself. The ordinary rule is that “goods entrusted to another should be restored to their owner.”[15] But because practical reason deals with contingent human affairs, the rule requiring restoration of entrusted goods may fail in exceptional cases. For example, if the owner seeks the property’s return to harm others or endanger the community, returning it would be irrational rather than just.[16] For Boler, the deposit example shows that some practical rules are generally binding but may be set aside only when a higher principle, such as reason, justice, or the common good, requires it.[17]
However, these exceptions do not render natural law arbitrary. Boler notes that without objective criteria for exceptions, practical reasoning would fail, as any moral crisis could be exempted from principle.[18] Budziszewski makes a parallel point, explaining that exceptions to more detailed natural-law precepts are not arbitrary departures from moral principle.[19] Aquinas does not permit anything to be subtracted from the general principles. Rather, exceptions arise only in “secondary and more detailed matters” when specific circumstances create an obstacle to following the ordinary rule. Thus, the rule requiring return of entrusted property ordinarily expresses a genuine moral duty, but that rule does not bind when the owner demands his car keys while “falling-down drunk.”[20] The exception is rationally bounded because the circumstances can be analyzed and counsel can reach a determinate judgment, but it is not a license to evade natural law whenever obedience becomes inconvenient.
Article 5 shows that authentic development occurs through addition and specification, as natural goods receive legal, social, institutional, and prudential form in changing circumstances. In contrast, modern distortion proceeds by subtraction, removing essential goods while retaining lesser ones. Aquinas’s framework supports development without relativism and stability without rigidity. Natural law can be specified but not dismantled.
3. Artificial Subtraction: When Fragments of the Good Pretend to Be the Whole
Artificial subtraction, as defined in this essay, is a modern moral concept that treats natural goods as isolated fragments rather than as parts of an ordered whole. Artificial subtraction does not refer to ordinary moral failure, inconsistency, or outright rejection of natural law. Rather, it describes a culture that continues to value goods rooted in human nature but reconstructs them, so they no longer serve their natural purposes. Thomistic scholarship already explains that natural law can develop in secondary matters without becoming relativistic, but artificial subtraction refers to a cultural attempt to present subtraction from the human good as progress.[21]
The term “artificial” applies because the separation is imposed rather than discovered. Once detached from its proper purpose, the natural good no longer explains itself. So, culture has to make the separated version seem normal and satisfying.
For example, sexual intercourse is naturally connected to generation, family, and responsibility. If sex is treated only as pleasure or self-expression, that view has to be supported by things like contraception, dating apps, pornography, slogans about empowerment, and entertainment that normalizes casual sex.[22] Otherwise, the enduring realities of sex, including pregnancy and other lasting consequences, make it difficult to sustain the claim that sex is only a moment of private pleasure. Modern culture, therefore, must surround sex with practices and messages that minimize those lasting consequences or present them as irrelevant to what sex means.[23]
Freedom is naturally connected to truth and the good. If freedom is treated only as a personal choice, that reduction must be supported by slogans like “my truth,” legal categories that treat identity as self-created, and social pressure against anyone who question the reduction of freedom to self-definition because choice alone cannot explain why one choice should be honored, protected, or treated as meaningful.[24] Without some appeal to truth or the good, freedom becomes only preference, and preference has difficulty justifying moral claims on others.[25]
Health is naturally connected to the good of the whole person. If health is treated only as appearance, control, or performance, that reduction must be supported by fitness influencers, body-image ideals, diet products, tracking apps, and advertising that make the body seem like a project to perfect because being healthy is not the same as living well.[26] Without a larger purpose in sight, people start measuring health by looks, numbers, discipline, comparison, and control rather than by whether their bodies help them live a good, meaningful life.[27]
Culture then must surround the detached natural good with technology, law, slogans, products, and images so that a partial good can appear to be the whole of human flourishing. This detachment of a natural good from its proper end is not a natural development of the good, but a manufactured redefinition. The selected good remains appealing because the good is real, but once removed from its proper order, the good becomes unstable and requires ongoing cultural support.
Artificial subtraction is also distinct from ordinary vice. While vice misuses a good, artificial subtraction reframes that misuse as a new moral norm. Artificial subtraction does not simply claim that people fail to live according to truth, generation, virtue, society, or God. Instead, the concept shows that these goods are no longer necessary for the goods people still seek. By denying that higher goods are necessary to the lower goods people still seek, artificial subtraction alters the structure of moral desire. Artificial subtraction does not abolish nature, which is impossible. Instead, it attempts to redefine nature by retaining what can be consumed, displayed, optimized, or chosen, and excluding what imposes form, obligation, permanence, or transcendence.
Artificial subtraction helps explain why modern culture can seem deeply concerned with nature while remaining fundamentally unnatural. Modern culture focuses on bodies, health, desire, identity, safety, and belonging, yet increasingly presents these goods as self-contained, without reference to the higher goods that give them coherence. None of these goods can justify itself when considered in isolation from the broader context of human flourishing. Lower goods become idols not because they are false, but because they are real goods forced to bear more weight than they can support.[28]
Higher inclinations cannot simply be erased. If the desire for truth is denied, it reappears as ideology, identity, or social consensus.[29] If the desire for God is denied, it emerges as spirituality, political ultimacy, aesthetic transcendence, or self-creation.[30] If the desire for a society oriented toward the common good is denied, it resurfaces as factional identity, digital affirmation, or public moral performance.[31] Artificial subtraction does not eliminate higher inclinations; it displaces them into weaker and more anxious forms.
The result is fragmentation rather than freedom. People still seek life, pleasure, love, recognition, truth, belonging, and transcendence, but these goods no longer form a coherent order. These goods compete rather than cooperate in the pursuit of a good end. Modern misery often arises not from a lack of goods, but from a lack of order among them.
4. Reintegrating the Inclinations: Natural Law Cannot Be Dismantled
The solution to artificial subtraction is not to reject the genuine goods recognized by modern culture. Aquinas does not call us to despise the body, deny pleasure, fear freedom, or withdraw from society. The Christian response is not hatred of creation, but a rightly ordered love for it because Scripture says, “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good.” (Gen. 1:31). The issue is not that people desire health, intimacy, choice, recognition, or belonging, but that these goods are increasingly treated as isolated fragments, detached from the whole person.
Bodily life must be restored to its place within the full human vocation. Health, safety, nutrition, and discipline are genuine goods, but the body is not an object to perfect, display, or control for its own sake. The human body is the body of a rational and spiritual person. Scripture says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). The body is meant to serve love, work, friendship, contemplation, worship, and sacrifice. A healthy body flourishes only when it serves a purpose beyond itself.
Sexuality must also be restored to its proper form. Sexuality in its proper form does not mean reducing sex to reproduction. It means rejecting the idea that sex is only about pleasure or self-expression. Human sexuality has personal, generative, social, and moral significance. Scripture presents sexual union as a covenantal and bodily union in which “the two shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24; Matt. 19:4-6). Sexuality involves attachment, vulnerability, fidelity, children, family, and responsibility. Sex, therefore, requires a form strong enough to support its full meaning. Desire alone is insufficient.
Freedom must also be grounded in truth. Choice gains value when directed toward what is true and good. Christ’s words are clear: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Without truth, freedom becomes mere preference. Without virtue, autonomy lacks direction. Without God, desire turns finite goods into substitutes for the infinite. The third inclination—toward truth, society, and God—does not eliminate bodily or sexual goods, but prevents them from becoming idols. As Augustine famously wrote, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[32] Scripture also expresses this innate desire for God: “My soul longs for you, O God.” (Ps. 42:2).
CONCLUSION
ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2 demonstrates that human beings are guided by natural inclinations toward an integrated hierarchy of goods. ST I-II, q. 94, a. 5 shows that the goods disclosed by natural inclination can be specified by addition but not eliminated by subtraction. Together, they reveal the failure of artificial subtraction and the way forward. Human flourishing is not the accumulation of satisfactions, but the ordered life of a rational being whose bodily, generative, social, intellectual, and spiritual goods are unified. The modern world’s attempt to live by fragments of natural law only shows how miserable human beings become when real goods are severed from the order that makes them whole.
[1] Germain G. Grisez, “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1–2, Question 94, Article 2,” Natural Law Forum 10 (1965): 171
[2] Steven J. Jensen notes how Aquinas assumes that “the first ratio that falls in practical reason is the human good,” not just the good of other beings. Steven J. Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 37.
[3] See ST I-II, q. 10, a. 1 (“man wills naturally not only the object of the will, but also other things that are appropriate to the other powers; such as the knowledge of truth, which befits the intellect; and to be and to live and other like things which regard the natural well-being; all of which are included in the object of the will”).
[4] Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law, 48.
[5] Augustine, De Bono Coniugali 3 (stating that marriage is good not only for begetting children but also for the natural society of man and woman).
[6] ST Supplement to the Third Part, q. 67, a. 1 (“marriage is directed to the rearing of the offspring, not merely for a time, but throughout its whole life.”)
[7] See ST I-II, q. 94, a. 4, ad 3 (“it is universally right for all men, that all their inclinations should be directed according to reason”).
[8] ST I-II, q. 93, a. 6 (“each rational creature has some knowledge of the eternal law . . . it also has a natural inclination to that which is in harmony with the eternal law; for we are naturally adapted to be the recipients of virtue”).
[9] J. Budziszewski, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 283.
[10] Ibid.
[11] John Boler, “Aquinas on Exceptions in Natural Law,” in Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 166.
[12] J. Budziszewski, “Of Course Human Law Develops: Can Natural and Divine Law Develop?,” Law and Justice, no. 183 (2019): 141.
[13] Ibid., 141-42.
[14] Randall Smith, “What the Old Law Reveals About the Natural Law According to Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 75 (2011): 123.
[15] ST I-II, q. 94, a.4.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Boler, “Aquinas on Exceptions in Natural Law,” 182-84.
[18] Boler warns that without objective, rational criteria for exceptions, “it would make a shambles of [principled reasoning] if there were no objective way—a way in some sense ‘the same for all’—to assess claims of exception in any area open to whatever sort(s) of mutability Aquinas means to allow.” Ibid. 162.
[19] Budziszewski offers a similar example to Aquinas’s deposit example: the duty to return entrusted property does not apply if the owner is dangerously drunk and requests his car keys. This exception does not reject property, promise-keeping, or justice, but recognizes that the detailed rule no longer serves its intended purpose in this situation. Budziszewski, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, 459.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Budziszewski, “Of Course Human Law Develops: Can Natural and Divine Law Develop?,” 153-54 (noting that natural and divine law remain unchanged in their “fundamentals or basics,” even as they “grow and ramify” through determination, dispensation, interpretation, addition, and subtraction in secondary matters); Boler, “Aquinas on Exceptions in Natural Law,” 162 (noting the risk of people viewing their own case as unique or relying on social pressure to justify exceptions).
[22] Eli Coleman, Esther Corona-Vargas, and Jessie V. Ford, “Advancing Sexual Pleasure as a Fundamental Human Right and Essential for Sexual Health, Overall Health and Well-Being: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Sexual Pleasure,” International Journal of Sexual Health 33, no. 4 (2021): 473–77; Allie White, Michele Boehm, Emma Glackin, and Amy Bleakley, “How Sexual Information Sources Are Related to Emerging Adults’ Sex-Positive Scripts and Sexual Communication,” Sexuality & Culture (January 7, 2023): 1–22 (study concluding that television was the only source significantly associated with stronger endorsement of sex-positive scripts such as viewing sex as a normal part of dating relationships, a “one-night stand” is “okay as long as both partners agree that’s all it is,” and “sex outside of marriage is okay as long as protection is used to prevent HIV, STDs, and pregnancy.”
[23] Justin R. Garcia, Chris Reiber, Sean G. Massey, and Ann M. Merriwether, “Sexual Hookup Culture: A Review,” Review of General Psychology 16, no. 2 (2012): 161–76.
[24] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 6. MacIntyre identifies emotivism as the dominant mode of modern moral discourse, where “what at first appears to be argument relapses so quickly into unargued disagreement,” suggesting that moral debate is often just a clash of arbitrary choices.
[25] Ibid., 68. MacIntyre argues that, without appeal to truth or the good, freedom becomes mere preference, and preference cannot justify moral claims on others: “The price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent.”
[26] Elizabeth V. Eikey, “Effects of Diet and Fitness Apps on Eating Disorder Behaviours: Qualitative Study,” BJPsych Open 7, no. 5 (2021) (study finding that diet and fitness apps trigger and exacerbate symptoms by focusing heavily on quantification, promoting overuse and providing certain types of feedback); Danielle Friedman, “Most Fitness Influencers Are Doing More Harm Than Good,” New York Times, May 10, 2023 (study finding “fitfluencers” on social media negatively affected people’s mental and physical health by promoting exercise as a tool to become skinnier).
[27] Jie Cai and Gang Li, “Exercise or Lie Down? The Impact of Fitness App Use on Users’ Wellbeing,” Frontiers in Public Health 11 (January 10, 2024) (study finding that fitness apps can affect users’ well-being, partly because the apps encourage people to compare themselves with fitter-looking users).
[28] In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis argues that the natural loves—Affection, Friendship, and Eros—are genuine goods, but they become dangerous when treated as ultimate. When these lower loves are made to bear the weight that belongs only to Charity, or divine love, they become distorted and destructive. As Lewis famously writes, “Love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.”
[29] Nietzsche is helpful here precisely because he shows the logical endpoint of denying truth. If there are no facts “in themselves,” but only interpretations shaped by needs, drives, and power, then the human desire for truth does not disappear. It is displaced into ideology, identity, social consensus, or the effort to make one interpretation rule over others. Nietzsche therefore illustrates the error of artificial subtraction: truth cannot be removed without something else rushing in to imitate its authority. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 267; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 45; Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1915), 24, 44.
[30] Linda Mercadante, “Spiritual Struggles of Nones and ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’ (SBNRs),” Religions 11, no. 10 (2020): 513. Scholars like Charles Taylor suggest that even in a secular “immanent frame,” the ineradicable human need for the sacred remains because there is a longing for “deeper connection” to oneself, nature, or humanity—a fundamental drive toward self-transcendence that persists even without a specific deity. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539–93.
[31] MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Prologue, xiv-xvi.
[32] Augustine, Confessions, 1,1.5.