dissertation on natural law

Now, to say that human laws which conflict with the Divine law are not binding, that is to say, are not laws, is to talk stark nonsense. The most pernicious laws, and therefore those which are most opposed to the will of God, have been and are continually enforced as laws by judicial tribunals. Suppose an act innocuous, or positively beneficial, be prohibited by the sovereign under the penalty of death; if I commit this act, I shall be tried and condemned, and if I object to the sentence, that it is contrary to the law of God, who has commanded that human lawgivers shall not prohibit acts which have no evil consequences, the Court of Justice will demonstrate the inconclusiveness of my reasoning by hanging me up, in pursuance of the law of which I have impugned the validity (Austin 1995, 158).

Of course, as Brian Bix (1999) points out, the argument does little work for Austin because it is always possible for a court to enforce a law against a person that does not satisfy Austin’s own theory of legal validity.

Another frequently expressed worry is that conceptual naturalism undermines the possibility of moral criticism of the law; inasmuch as conformity with natural law is a necessary condition for legal validity, all valid law is, by definition, morally just. Thus, on this line of reasoning, the legal validity of a norm necessarily entails its moral justice. As Jules Coleman and Jeffrey Murphy (1990, 18) put the point:

The important things [conceptual naturalism] supposedly allows us to do (e.g., morally evaluate the law and determine our moral obligations with respect to the law) are actually rendered more difficult by its collapse of the distinction between morality and law. If we really want to think about the law from the moral point of view, it may obscure the task if we see law and morality as essentially linked in some way. Moral criticism and reform of law may be aided by an initial moral skepticism about the law.

There are a couple of problems with this line of objection. First, conceptual naturalism does not foreclose criticism of those norms that are being enforced by a society as law. Insofar as it can plausibly be claimed that the content of a norm being enforced by society as law does not conform to the natural law, this is a legitimate ground of moral criticism: given that the norm being enforced by law is unjust, it follows, according to conceptual naturalism, that it is not legally valid. Thus, the state commits wrong by enforcing that norm against private citizens.

Second, and more importantly, this line of objection seeks to criticize a conceptual theory of law by pointing to its practical implications ñ a strategy that seems to commit a category mistake. Conceptual jurisprudence assumes the existence of a core of social practices (constituting law) that requires a conceptual explanation. The project motivating conceptual jurisprudence, then, is to articulate the concept of law in a way that accounts for these pre-existing social practices. A conceptual theory of law can legitimately be criticized for its failure to adequately account for the pre-existing data, as it were; but it cannot legitimately be criticized for either its normative quality or its practical implications.

A more interesting line of argument has recently been taken up by Brian Bix (1996). Following John Finnis (1980), Bix rejects the interpretation of Aquinas and Blackstone as conceptual naturalists, arguing instead that the claim that an unjust law is not a law should not be taken literally:

A more reasonable interpretation of statements like “an unjust law is no law at all” is that unjust laws are not laws “in the fullest sense.” As we might say of some professional, who had the necessary degrees and credentials, but seemed nonetheless to lack the necessary ability or judgment: “she’s no lawyer” or “he’s no doctor.” This only indicates that we do not think that the title in this case carries with it all the implications it usually does. Similarly, to say that an unjust law is “not really law” may only be to point out that it does not carry the same moral force or offer the same reasons for action as laws consistent with “higher law” (Bix 1996, 226).

Thus, Bix construes Aquinas and Blackstone as having views more similar to the neo- naturalism of John Finnis discussed below in Section III. Nevertheless, while a plausible case can be made in favor of Bix’s view, the long history of construing Aquinas and Blackstone as conceptual naturalists, along with its pedagogical value in developing other theories of law, ensures that this practice is likely, for better or worse, to continue indefinitely.

3. The Substantive Neo-Naturalism of John Finnis

John Finnis takes himself to be explicating and developing the views of Aquinas and Blackstone. Like Bix, Finnis believes that the naturalism of Aquinas and Blackstone should not be construed as a conceptual account of the existence conditions for law. According to Finnis, the classical naturalists were not concerned with giving a conceptual account of legal validity; rather they were concerned with explaining the moral force of law: “the principles of natural law explain the obligatory force (in the fullest sense of ‘obligation’) of positive laws, even when those laws cannot be deduced from those principles” (Finnis 1980, 23-24). On Finnis’s view of the Overlap Thesis, the essential function of law is to provide a justification for state coercion (a view he shares with Ronald Dworkin). Accordingly, an unjust law can be legally valid, but it cannot provide an adequate justification for use of the state coercive power and is hence not obligatory in the fullest sense; thus, an unjust law fails to realize the moral ideals implicit in the concept of law. An unjust law, on this view, is legally binding, but is not fully law.

Like classical naturalism, Finnis’s naturalism is both an ethical theory and a theory of law. Finnis distinguishes a number of equally valuable basic goods: life, health, knowledge, play, friendship, religion, and aesthetic experience. Each of these goods, according to Finnis, has intrinsic value in the sense that it should, given human nature, be valued for its own sake and not merely for the sake of some other good it can assist in bringing about. Moreover, each of these goods is universal in the sense that it governs all human cultures at all times. The point of moral principles, on this view, is to give ethical structure to the pursuit of these basic goods; moral principles enable us to select among competing goods and to define what a human being can permissibly do in pursuit of a basic good.

On Finnis’s view, the conceptual point of law is to facilitate the common good by providing authoritative rules that solve coordination problems that arise in connection with the common pursuit of these basic goods. Thus, Finnis sums up his theory of law as follows:

[T]he term ‘law’ … refer[s] primarily to rules made, in accordance with regulative legal rules, by a determinate and effective authority (itself identified and, standardly, constituted as an institution by legal rules) for a ‘complete’ community, and buttressed by sanctions in accordance with the rule-guided stipulations of adjudicative institutions, this ensemble of rules and institutions being directed to reasonably resolving any of the community’s co-ordination problems (and to ratifying, tolerating, regulating, or overriding co-ordination solutions from any other institutions or sources of norms) for the common good of that community (Finnis 1980, 276).

Again, it bears emphasizing that Finnis takes care to deny that there is any necessary moral test for legal validity: “one would simply be misunderstanding my conception of the nature and purpose of explanatory definitions of theoretical concepts if one supposed that my definition ‘ruled out as non-laws’ laws which failed to meet, or meet fully, one or other of the elements of the definition” (Finnis 1980, 278).

Nevertheless, Finnis believes that to the extent that a norm fails to satisfy these conditions, it likewise fails to fully manifest the nature of law and thereby fails to fully obligate the citizen-subject of the law. Unjust laws may obligate in a technical legal sense, on Finnis’s view, but they may fail to provide moral reasons for action of the sort that it is the point of legal authority to provide. Thus, Finnis argues that “a ruler’s use of authority is radically defective if he exploits his opportunities by making stipulations intended by him not for the common good but for his own or his friends’ or party’s or faction’s advantage, or out of malice against some person or group” (Finnis 1980, 352). For the ultimate basis of a ruler’s moral authority, on this view, “is the fact that he has the opportunity, and thus the responsibility, of furthering the common good by stipulating solutions to a community’s co- ordination problems” (Finnis 1980, 351).

Finnis’s theory is certainly more plausible as a theory of law than the traditional interpretation of classical naturalism, but such plausibility comes, for better or worse, at the expense of naturalism’s identity as a distinct theory of law. Indeed, it appears that Finnis’s natural law theory is compatible with naturalism’s historical adversary, legal positivism, inasmuch as Finnis’s view is compatible with a source-based theory of legal validity; laws that are technically valid in virtue of source but unjust do not, according to Finnis, fully obligate the citizen. Indeed, Finnis (1996) believes that Aquinas’s classical naturalism fully affirms the notion that human laws are “posited.”

4. The Procedural Naturalism of Lon L. Fuller

Like Finnis, Lon Fuller (1964) rejects the conceptual naturalist idea that there are necessary substantive moral constraints on the content of law. But Fuller, unlike Finnis, believes that law is necessarily subject to a procedural morality. On Fuller’s view, human activity is necessarily goal-oriented or purposive in the sense that people engage in a particular activity because it helps them to achieve some end. Insofar as human activity is essentially purposive, according to Fuller, particular human activities can be understood only in terms that make reference to their purposes and ends. Thus, since lawmaking is essentially purposive activity, it can be understood only in terms that explicitly acknowledge its essential values and purposes:

The only formula that might be called a definition of law offered in these writings is by now thoroughly familiar: law is the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules. Unlike most modern theories of law, this view treats law as an activity and regards a legal system as the product of a sustained purposive effort (Fuller 1964, 106).

To the extent that a definition of law can be given, then, it must include the idea that law’s essential function is to “achiev[e] [social] order through subjecting people’s conduct to the guidance of general rules by which they may themselves orient their behavior” (Fuller 1965, 657).

Fuller’s functionalist conception of law implies that nothing can count as law unless it is capable of performing law’s essential function of guiding behavior. And to be capable of performing this function, a system of rules must satisfy the following principles:

On Fuller’s view, no system of rules that fails minimally to satisfy these principles of legality can achieve law’s essential purpose of achieving social order through the use of rules that guide behavior. A system of rules that fails to satisfy (P2) or (P4), for example, cannot guide behavior because people will not be able to determine what the rules require. Accordingly, Fuller concludes that his eight principles are “internal” to law in the sense that they are built into the existence conditions for law.

These internal principles constitute a morality, according to Fuller, because law necessarily has positive moral value in two respects: (1) law conduces to a state of social order and (2) does so by respecting human autonomy because rules guide behavior. Since no system of rules can achieve these morally valuable objectives without minimally complying with the principles of legality, it follows, on Fuller’s view, that they constitute a morality. Since these moral principles are built into the existence conditions for law, they are internal and hence represent a conceptual connection between law and morality. Thus, like the classical naturalists and unlike Finnis, Fuller subscribes to the strongest form of the Overlap Thesis, which makes him a conceptual naturalist.

Nevertheless, Fuller’s conceptual naturalism is fundamentally different from that of classical naturalism. First, Fuller rejects the classical naturalist view that there are necessary moral constraints on the content of law, holding instead that there are necessary moral constraints on the procedural mechanisms by which law is made and administered: “What I have called the internal morality of law is … a procedural version of natural law … [in the sense that it is] concerned, not with the substantive aims of legal rules, but with the ways in which a system of rules for governing human conduct must be constructed and administered if it is to be efficacious and at the same time remain what it purports to be” (Fuller 1964, 96- 97).

Second, Fuller identifies the conceptual connection between law and morality at a higher level of abstraction than the classical naturalists. The classical naturalists view morality as providing substantive constraints on the content of individual laws; an unjust norm, on this view, is conceptually disqualified from being legally valid. In contrast, Fuller views morality as providing a constraint on the existence of a legal system: “A total failure in any one of these eight directions does not simply result in a bad system of law; it results in something that is not properly called a legal system at all” (Fuller 1964, 39).

Fuller’s procedural naturalism is vulnerable to a number of objections. H.L.A. Hart, for example, denies Fuller’s claim that the principles of legality constitute an internal morality; according to Hart, Fuller confuses the notions of morality and efficacy:

[T]he author’s insistence on classifying these principles of legality as a “morality” is a source of confusion both for him and his readers…. [T]he crucial objection to the designation of these principles of good legal craftsmanship as morality, in spite of the qualification “inner,” is that it perpetrates a confusion between two notions that it is vital to hold apart: the notions of purposive activity and morality. Poisoning is no doubt a purposive activity, and reflections on its purpose may show that it has its internal principles. (“Avoid poisons however lethal if they cause the victim to vomit”….) But to call these principles of the poisoner’s art “the morality of poisoning” would simply blur the distinction between the notion of efficiency for a purpose and those final judgments about activities and purposes with which morality in its various forms is concerned (Hart 1965, 1285-86).

On Hart’s view, all actions, including virtuous acts like lawmaking and impermissible acts like poisoning, have their own internal standards of efficacy. But insofar as such standards of efficacy conflict with morality, as they do in the case of poisoning, it follows that they are distinct from moral standards. Thus, while Hart concedes that something like Fuller’s eight principles are built into the existence conditions for law, he concludes they do not constitute a conceptual connection between law and morality.

Unfortunately, Hart overlooks the fact that most of Fuller’s eight principles double as moral ideals of fairness. For example, public promulgation in understandable terms may be a necessary condition for efficacy, but it is also a moral ideal; it is morally objectionable for a state to enforce rules that have not been publicly promulgated in terms reasonably calculated to give notice of what is required. Similarly, we take it for granted that it is wrong for a state to enact retroactive rules, inconsistent rules, and rules that require what is impossible. Poisoning may have its internal standards of efficacy, but such standards are distinguishable from the principles of legality in that they conflict with moral ideals.

Nevertheless, Fuller’s principles operate internally, not as moral ideals, but merely as principles of efficacy. As Fuller would likely acknowledge, the existence of a legal system is consistent with considerable divergence from the principles of legality. Legal standards, for example, are necessarily promulgated in general terms that inevitably give rise to problems of vagueness. And officials all too often fail to administer the laws in a fair and even-handed manner even in the best of legal systems. These divergences may always be prima facie objectionable, but they are inconsistent with a legal system only when they render a legal system incapable of performing its essential function of guiding behavior. Insofar as these principles are built into the existence conditions for law, it is because they operate as efficacy conditions and not because they function as moral ideals.

5. Ronald Dworkin’s “Third Theory”

Ronald Dworkin’s so-called third theory of law is best understood as a response to legal positivism, which is essentially constituted by three theoretical commitments: the Social Fact Thesis, the Conventionality Thesis, and the Separability Thesis. The Social Fact Thesis asserts it is a necessary truth that legal validity is ultimately a function of certain kinds of social facts; the idea here is that what ultimately explains the validity of a law is the presence of certain social facts, especially formal promulgation by a legislature.

The Conventionality Thesis emphasizes law’s conventional nature, claiming that the social facts giving rise to legal validity are authoritative in virtue of a social convention. On this view, the criteria that determine whether or not any given norm counts as a legal norm are binding because of an implicit or explicit agreement among officials. Thus, for example, the U.S. Constitution is authoritative in virtue of the conventional fact that it was formally ratified by all fifty states.

The Separability Thesis, at the most general level, simply denies naturalism’s Overlap Thesis; according to the Separability Thesis, there is no conceptual overlap between the notions of law and morality. As Hart more narrowly construes it, the Separability Thesis is “just the simple contention that it is in no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality, though in fact they have often done so” (Hart 1994, 185-186).

Dworkin rejects positivism’s Social Fact Thesis on the ground that there are some legal standards the authority of which cannot be explained in terms of social facts. In deciding hard cases, for example, judges often invoke moral principles that Dworkin believes do not derive their legal authority from the social criteria of legality contained in a rule of recognition (Dworkin 1977, p. 40).

In Riggs v. Palmer , for example, the court considered the question of whether a murderer could take under the will of his victim. At the time the case was decided, neither the statutes nor the case law governing wills expressly prohibited a murderer from taking under his victim’s will. Despite this, the court declined to award the defendant his gift under the will on the ground that it would be wrong to allow him to profit from such a grievous wrong. On Dworkin’s view, the court decided the case by citing “the principle that no man may profit from his own wrong as a background standard against which to read the statute of wills and in this way justified a new interpretation of that statute” (Dworkin 1977, 29).

On Dworkin’s view, the Riggs court was not just reaching beyond the law to extralegal standards when it considered this principle. For the Riggs judges would “rightfully” have been criticized had they failed to consider this principle; if it were merely an extralegal standard, there would be no rightful grounds to criticize a failure to consider it (Dworkin 1977, 35). Accordingly, Dworkin concludes that the best explanation for the propriety of such criticism is that principles are part of the law.

Further, Dworkin maintains that the legal authority of standards like the Riggs principle cannot derive from promulgation in accordance with purely formal requirements: “[e]ven though principles draw support from the official acts of legal institutions, they do not have a simple or direct enough connection with these acts to frame that connection in terms of criteria specified by some ultimate master rule of recognition” (Dworkin 1977, 41).

On Dworkin’s view, the legal authority of the Riggs principle can be explained wholly in terms of its content. The Riggs principle was binding, in part, because it is a requirement of fundamental fairness that figures into the best moral justification for a society’s legal practices considered as a whole. A moral principle is legally authoritative, according to Dworkin, insofar as it maximally conduces to the best moral justification for a society’s legal practices considered as a whole.

Dworkin believes that a legal principle maximally contributes to such a justification if and only if it satisfies two conditions: (1) the principle coheres with existing legal materials; and (2) the principle is the most morally attractive standard that satisfies (1). The correct legal principle is the one that makes the law the moral best it can be. Accordingly, on Dworkin’s view, adjudication is and should be interpretive:

[J]udges should decide hard cases by interpreting the political structure of their community in the following, perhaps special way: by trying to find the best justification they can find, in principles of political morality, for the structure as a whole, from the most profound constitutional rules and arrangements to the details of, for example, the private law of tort or contract (Dworkin 1982, 165).

There are, thus, two elements of a successful interpretation. First, since an interpretation is successful insofar as it justifies the particular practices of a particular society, the interpretation must fit with those practices in the sense that it coheres with existing legal materials defining the practices. Second, since an interpretation provides a moral justification for those practices, it must present them in the best possible moral light.

For this reason, Dworkin argues that a judge should strive to interpret a case in roughly the following way:

A thoughtful judge might establish for himself, for example, a rough “threshold” of fit which any interpretation of data must meet in order to be “acceptable” on the dimension of fit, and then suppose that if more than one interpretation of some part of the law meets this threshold, the choice among these should be made, not through further and more precise comparisons between the two along that dimension, but by choosing the interpretation which is “substantively” better, that is, which better promotes the political ideals he thinks correct (Dworkin 1982, 171).

As Dworkin conceives it, then, the judge must approach judicial decision-making as something that resembles an exercise in moral philosophy. Thus, for example, the judge must decide cases on the basis of those moral principles that “figure[] in the soundest theory of law that can be provided as a justification for the explicit substantive and institutional rules of the jurisdiction in question” (Dworkin 1977, 66).

And this is a process, according to Dworkin, that “must carry the lawyer very deep into political and moral theory.” Indeed, in later writings, Dworkin goes so far as to claim, somewhat implausibly, that “any judge’s opinion is itself a piece of legal philosophy, even when the philosophy is hidden and the visible argument is dominated by citation and lists of facts” (Dworkin 1986, 90).

Dworkin believes his theory of judicial obligation is a consequence of what he calls the Rights Thesis, according to which judicial decisions always enforce pre-existing rights: “even when no settled rule disposes of the case, one party may nevertheless have a right to win. It remains the judge’s duty, even in hard cases, to discover what the rights of the parties are, not to invent new rights retrospectively” (Dworkin 1977, 81).

In “Hard Cases,” Dworkin distinguishes between two kinds of legal argument. Arguments of policy “justify a political decision by showing that the decision advances or protects some collective goal of the community as a whole” (Dworkin 1977, 82). In contrast, arguments of principle “justify a political decision by showing that the decision respects or secures some individual or group right” (Dworkin 1977, 82).

On Dworkin’s view, while the legislature may legitimately enact laws that are justified by arguments of policy, courts may not pursue such arguments in deciding cases. For a consequentialist argument of policy can never provide an adequate justification for deciding in favor of one party’s claim of right and against another party’s claim of right. An appeal to a pre-existing right, according to Dworkin, can ultimately be justified only by an argument of principle. Thus, insofar as judicial decisions necessarily adjudicate claims of right, they must ultimately be based on the moral principles that figure into the best justification of the legal practices considered as a whole.

Notice that Dworkin’s views on legal principles and judicial obligation are inconsistent with all three of legal positivism’s core commitments. Each contradicts the Conventionality Thesis insofar as judges are bound to interpret posited law in light of unposited moral principles. Each contradicts the Social Fact Thesis because these moral principles count as part of a community’s law regardless of whether they have been formally promulgated. Most importantly, Dworkin’s view contradicts the Separability Thesis in that it seems to imply that some norms are necessarily valid in virtue of their moral content. It is his denial of the Separability Thesis that places Dworkin in the naturalist camp.

6. References and Further Reading

Author Information

Kenneth Einar Himma Email: [email protected] Seattle Pacific University U. S. A.

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Home > Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects > DISSERTATIONS > AAI9014051

The first principles of natural law: A study of the moral theories of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas

Maria Theresa Carl , Marquette University

This dissertation is concerned with the problem of how to establish and justify the principles of natural law ethics. Specifically, this work critically examines the claim that the primary principles of natural law ethics are per se known or self-evident propositions. This is the position held by St. Thomas Aquinas, which he derived from Aristotelian logic and philosophy of science. Aristotle held that the starting points or first principles of demonstrative, theoretical science cannot themselves depend on demonstration to be known. Rather, he argued that such principles are immediate and indemonstrable and that they are apprehended through an inductive process which culminates in an intellectual intuition or insight. Aquinas explicitly extends this theory to practical science in his formulation of the primary precepts of the natural law (Summa Theologiae I-II, g. 94, a. 2). There Aquinas sets forth the basic goods which are the natural ends of human volition: i.e., life, society, knowledge. These self-evident goods correspond to the various natural inclinations which define the essence of what it is to be human. The major contemporary ethicians working within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition remain unclear about the precise meaning of the notion of self-evidence and disagree about which principles or basic values the criterion of self-evidence in fact justifies. Accordingly, in this work I first explain Aristotle's notion of science and his identification of the indemonstrable first principles of science with essential definitions. Next, I argue that Aristotle properly and unequivocally categorizes the practical sciences, including politics and ethics, as science, and I discuss the nature of practical science and the analogy between speculative and practical science. Third, I examine Aquinas' notion of self-evidence and show how he utilizes this notion to ground the speculative and practical sciences. Finally, I offer an exegesis of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2 and an account of its significance for Thomas' natural law theory.

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Carl, Maria Theresa, "The first principles of natural law: A study of the moral theories of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas" (1989). Dissertations (1962 - 2010) Access via Proquest Digital Dissertations . AAI9014051. https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations/AAI9014051

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Knowledge of the natural law in the theology of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas

This dissertation seeks to answer, by close reading of primary texts, the question of whether John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas share a common theory of natural law.

Calvin and Aquinas both use a common vocabulary of natural law inherited from antiquity. They both speak of a morally normative natural order, and appeal to nature as a morally evaluative standard when discussing practical questions. While they share a common vocabulary of natural law, however, it is not clear whether th...

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Few ideas have been as influential in the development of moral, political, legal, and economic thought in the broad Western tradition as the idea of natural law. It is also true that the understanding of natural law and its influence on specific norms and institutions—rights, justice, private property, rule of law, limited government, etc.—is not anywhere near as widespread in the twenty-first century as it was just 100 years ago. This book aims to help rectify this deficit by explaining the basic principles of natural law and highlighting significant contributions that key natural law scholars have made to ideas and concepts that have encouraged the growth of free societies.

The idea of natural law holds that all people, whatever their ethnicity, culture, or religion, can know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. The idea, for example, of the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is understood as a principle of moral conduct that everyone can know. While such beliefs are applied to different and changing conditions and problems, the core principles always apply.

However, natural law is not a static tradition of thought. It has developed over time, partly through natural law theorists clarifying particular concepts, and partly through its proponents responding to ongoing intellectual challenges to its positions and changes in the realm of politics, society, and the economy. Whether it was the encounter between Europeans and the peoples of the New World in the late fifteenth century, or questions about what justice meant in the context of emerging market economies in the late eighteenth century, natural law scholars have applied natural law principles to discern how people should choose and act in these changing contexts.

While this book seeks to introduce readers to how natural law thinkers have contributed to the enhancement of freedom in the political, legal, and economic realms, we will focus on some scholars more than others. These include individuals like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Francisco Suárez, and Hugo Grotius, to name just a few. Some focused their attention on very practical challenges arising from liberty of commerce within and across sovereign boundaries, while others explored the rights and obligations of individuals to each other as well as the state. All these endeavors helped to furnish an apparatus for thinking about the political, legal and economic institutions necessary for promoting freedom and justice.

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What is Natural Law?

The origins of the expression “natural law” are to be found in debates between the Greek philosopher Plato and those thinkers known as the Sophists. In broad terms the Sophists believed that politics was not about questions of right, wrong, justice, or injustice. They maintained that social arrangements reflected whoever was the strongest. Hence, it was “natural” for the strong to rule the weak. Such was the “law” of human “nature.”

Plato disagreed with the Sophists. For him, politics and justice could not be reduced to the rule of the strong. Nevertheless, Plato recognized the rhetorical power of the term “natural.” He thus decided to use it for his own purposes. In Plato’s thought, “natural” became a way of saying “human,” and one distinctive feature of humans is that we have reason. This is what makes humans different from animals. They act according to instinct alone. We do not.

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Rights and Justice

The legal obligation to respect rights has been formally recognized by most countries since the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Yet as one of the members of the Declaration’s drafting committee stated at the time, “We are unanimous about these rights on condition that no one asks why” (Thils, 1981: 51). The participants, it appears, decided that agreement on a common philosophical foundation for rights was unlikely to be achieved.

Rights are usually presented as a product of a modern post-Enlightenment world and associated with figures like John Locke and events such as the American and French Revolutions. There is, however, a strong case to suggest that the first substantive conceptions of rights were developed by medieval natural law thinkers whose ideas on this subject were clarified and developed further by their modern counterparts, some of whom were reacting to expansionist tendencies on the state’s part.

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Limited Government and Rule of Law

Any discussion of the nature and ends of liberty and justice inevitably touches upon the role of government and law in society. A good place to begin reflecting upon natural law’s approach to these questions is Aquinas’s understanding of law.

In his Summa Theologiae , Aquinas defined law “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (ST I-II, q.90, a.4). “Law” in this statement means laws formally made by the legitimate political authority. “Reason” means natural law, which signals the law itself must be reasonable rather than driven by whatever the authorities just happen to want. “Him” means the political authority: i.e., government and legal officials such as legislators, judges, and government ministers. Finally, the “common good” means the conditions that assist individuals and groups in a given political community to make free choices for the goods that promote human flourishing.

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Property and the Economy

If individuals and communities are to make free choices for moral goods and to be virtuous, they often require what might be called “instrumental goods.” These are goods that have their own value and which can be used to protect and promote the pursuance of fundamental goods like work and truth, but which are not in themselves fulfilling.

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The Law of Nations and International Trade

Prior to the eighteenth century, the dominant economic framework of post-medieval Western Europe was essentially mercantilism. This was a way of economic thinking and acting which held that nations became rich by encouraging exports and restricting imports (LaHaye, 2021). Governments acted to protect merchants from foreign competition by imposing tariffs and quotas on imports, as well as granting monopolies on the production of particular goods or trade routes to particular merchants. Trade by sea was especially restricted under mercantile arrangements. While it was rare for states to ban outright the importation of goods and services from abroad, governments introduced a number of restrictions that served to minimize competition.

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Over the centuries, natural law ethics and reasoning has proved extraordinarily resilient. The relative influence of different philosophical positions waxes and wanes. But natural law’s understanding of the character of reason and the human mind’s capacity to know the truth about reality remain immensely attractive to people living in very different social, political, economic conditions,

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About the Author

Samuel Gregg

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Feulner Institute at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and a Contributing Editor at Law and Liberty, part of the Liberty Fund Network in Indianapolis, Indiana. The author of 16 books—including the prize-winning The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010), Becoming Europe (2013), the prize-winning Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019), and over 400 articles and opinion pieces—he writes regularly on political economy, finance, American conservatism, Western civilization, and natural law theory. He served as President of the Philadelphia Society from 2019-2021. He is the General Editor of Lexington Books’ Studies in Ethics and Economics Series.

He also sits on the Academic Advisory Boards of Campion College in Sydney, Australia; the Fundación Burke in Madrid, Spain; the Instituto Fe y Libertad in Guatemala City, Guatemala; the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, United Kingdom; the Argaman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel; as well as the editorial boards of the Journal of Markets and Morality and Revista Valores en la sociedad industrial . In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 2004, and a member of the Royal Economic Society in 2008.

Additional Resources

Listed below are links to other websites where you can learn more about the basic principles of natural law..

The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy A detailed explanation of the natural law tradition in ethics, including its origins and defining features, and the central role of Thomas Aquinas in shaping the natural law tradition.

Wacks, Raymond (2014). Philosophy of Law: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press. An approachable historical introduction to the study of Natural Law, with an emphasis on the field of natural law within the greater context of the philosophy of natural law.

Natural Law , Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy An overview of the natural law theory and its core elements, including the Overlap Thesis, classical naturalism of scholars Thomas Aquinas and Sir William Blackstone, the four kinds of law as described by Aquinas, as well as an explanation of the distinction between natural law as a moral theory and as a type of legal theory.

Natural Law , Thinking Fellows (Podcast). On this episode of the Thinking Fellows, the podcast hosts are joined by Dr. Russell Dawn to discuss the origins of natural law, its influence on our everyday and its role as a tool for understanding human laws.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy A detailed overview of Thomas Aquinas, including his early life, education, major works, his contributions to the study of Christian philosophy and theology, and his influence on the natural law tradition.

The Natural Law (Aquinas 101) , The Thomistic Institute. A concise educational video that explores the roots of Thomas Aquinas's theory on natural law and its relation to human law. An emphasis on the influence of eternal law, and the five principal natural inclinations as defined by Aquinas.

Philosophy – Thomas Aquinas , The School of Life. An engaging educational video that discusses Thomas Aquinas's contributions to the study of moral philosophy, including his philosophy regarding the role of reason in human life, and his views on reconciliation of faith and reason, and religion and science.

Natural Law Theory: Crash Course Philosophy #34 , Crash Course. An introduction to natural law theory, with an emphasis on Aquinas's views on the moral universe and the place of human beings in it, the seven basic goods, and the role of instinct and reason in shaping the natural law.

The Natural Law Theory of Thomas Aquinas , Public Discourse: The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute, by Thomas D'Andrea. This article provides an introductory understanding of the fundamentals of Thomas Aquinas's natural law doctrine as described in his masterwork, "Summa Theologiae."

Natural Law is a philosophical and scholarly tradition that traces its roots back thousands of years. At its core, natural law posits that all humans possess reason, and as such, all people, whatever their ethnicity, culture, or religion, have the ability to know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. But people must also be free to choose to do good instead of evil, and so natural law scholars over the centuries have influenced the creation of the institutions of modern western democracies that we enjoy today, including individual rights, justice, private property, rule of law, constitutionalism, and limited government. Few ideas have been as influential in the development of moral, political, legal, and economic thought in the broad Western tradition as the idea of natural law. Watch this video to learn more.

Of all the thinkers, scholars and philosophers who have contributed to the natural law tradition over the centuries, none has been more influential than Thomas Aquinas. Born in 1225 in southern Italy, Aquinas was educated at the famous Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino. His work addresses critical questions such as the nature of human reason, the principles of morality, the character of justice, the origins and limits of government, and the relationship between man-made laws and natural law. For Aquinas and other natural law scholars who would follow him, the idea that all humans shared an inherent morality and could all understand what was intrinsically good and bad provided a moral restriction on the power of the state, and also created a rationale for why people were under no obligation to obey man-made laws that contravened natural law. Watch this video to learn more.

At its core, natural law is a centuries-old philosophical and scholarly tradition that argues all human beings are capable of reason and possess free will and, as a result, all people, whatever their ethnicity, culture, or religion, have the ability to know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, and to make free choices for the good and against evil. The idea that we are all guided by a universal moral code of conduct—and importantly that this natural law is more influential and binding than man-made laws—has had a significant impact on the development of moral, political, legal and economic thought throughout history. In fact, the principles of natural law have been at the heart of many of the world’s most important moments. Watch this video to learn more.

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Acknowledgements

Made possible by a generous donation from the Peter and Joanne Brown Foundation and with appreciation to the Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation for their support of the earlier volumes in this series.

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Aquinas distinguishes four kinds of law: (1) eternal law; (2) natural law; (3) human law; and (4) divine law. Eternal law is comprised of those laws that govern the nature of an eternal universe; as Susan Dimock (1999, 22) puts it, one can “think of eternal law as comprising all those scientific (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, etc.) ‘laws’ by which the universe is ordered.”
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An overview of the natural law theory and its core elements, including the Overlap Thesis, classical naturalism of scholars Thomas Aquinas and Sir William Blackstone, the four kinds of law as described by Aquinas, as well as an explanation of the distinction between natural law as a moral theory and as a type of legal theory.
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