NATURAL LAW

Early Modern
 In contemporary parlance, “natural
law” most commonly refers to a core
doctrine of the Catholic Church and
its educational institutions, according
to which God has imbued nature,
including human nature, with certain
fundamental values or purposes
which humanity can understand and
which are consonant with the values
taught by the Christian revelation.
 God is awesome, so he made you
awesome, it is better to not to forget
to be awesome
Natural law:
the “new” natural law (Protestantism)
 The idea of natural law embodied in Rerum Novarum assumes that there is
a universal law to which people of all races, classes, cultures, and religions
have access by their natural reason. Natural law thus serves as a bridge
category on ethical and social questions between church and world,
between those with a priori commitment to sacred Scripture and the
Christian creed and those outside the community of faith.
 Modern Protestantism
Protestant
states where the “new” natural law tended to converge with positive civil law.
In fact, this idea of a “higher” natural law has been one of the major stumbling
blocks for our understanding of significant thinkers of the period in question.
Natural law fall in Protestants theology

 One might plausibly imagine that the reason lies deeply embedded in the
Reformation theology of Martin Luther and to other thinkers and historians

 The church needs to respect the common search for justice and law and to
promote cooperation between Christians and non-Christians in all spheres of
public life. Nonetheless, even with such half-hearted concessions to natural
law, it seems clear that these Protestant theologians could not make
significant contributions to its renewal and furtherance in society.

 Natural law also lacks the eschatological perspective that relegates all orders
of life to provisional status, always ambiguous and incomplete, moving along
in history in the realm of contingency and novelty.
The Great 13th Century
Philosopher Thomas Aquinas
 ITALIAN

 CHRISTIAN MONK

 PHILOSOPHICAL SUPERSTAR OF THE 13TH

CENTURY

 GOD MADE US PRE LOADED WITH ALL THE

TOOLS TO KNOW WHAT’S GOOD

 MORALITY IS IMPORTANT FOR EVERYONE AND

BEING A BAD PERSON IS A VITAL PART OF
GODS PLAN FOR EACH OF US

 HOW COULD PEOPLE FOLLOW GOD’S MORAL

RULES WHEN THE PEOPLE DOESN’T KNOW
THE GUY WHO MADE THE COMMANDMENTS .

Sanctus Thomas aquinas

The Great 13th Century Philosopher
Thomas Aquinas
 He argued that God created the world according to natural laws- predictable, goal-
driven systems whereby life is sustained, and everything functions smoothly
 The insights of Aquinas focused on the role of the human person possessing a unique
essence or nature as a necessary condition for a cogent theory of ethical naturalism and a
foundational theory for human law.
 God made certain things that were good for his various creatures
 He instilled all his creatures with an intuitive desire, for the things that he designed to be
best for them
Continuation…

Preserving our lives

Make more life
Educate
Naturally part of the pack

We want to be right
The formation of early modern natural
law
 Modern developments in economics, politics and religion all had a formative
influence on natural law theories. The growth of domestic trade between
country and city, of European trade and, most dramatically, of transoceanic
trade and colonialism all required an ever greater ability to deal with other
people outside one’s cultural, moral and, often, political and religious
community who yet had status as personal agents.

 By these and similar means, thinkers tried to assemble a body of law that could
be said to belong to humanity as such and which might be substantial enough
to provide guidance in solving the problems in economic, political, international
and religious matters that we indicated earlier. However, these ambitions were
of course not philosophically or theologically neutral, and Protestant natural law
was in fact characterized by quite fundamental divisions that were fought over
with considerable vehemence
 Vehemence (showing a strong feeling)
Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes
Hugo Grotius
The earliest such attempt of real consequence was that of the Dutch humanist
scholar and lawyer
 posited the idea that any form of social interchange can be understood in
contractual terms, contracts being understood as the bargaining of rights,
and rights as natural properties (or their derivatives) of each person.
 The most extreme case of such supposedly contractual relations was that
of slavery, in which the basic right to liberty would have been exchanged
for some other good, such as being left alive, given sustenance, offered
protection, etc.
 In other words, the moral openness of the subjective rights idea was
curtailed by the traditional idea (neo-stoic or scholastic) of a moral law of
justice to which we are obligated simply through our rational insight
(though the interpretation is disputed).
Thomas Hobbes
 Hobbes maintained (at least in the final statement of his political philosophy,
Leviathan, Hobbes 1991/1651) that humanity was universally characterized by
limitless passions, thus potentially laying claim to, o asserting rights to, anything
and everything.
 Only the artifice of government and positive law could prevent the state of
natural conflict by curbing our limitless natural rights, and the law of nature was
a rule of prudence arising from the rational insight that it was necessary to lay
down all our rights (except that to self-defense when directly threatened on our
life) in order to achieve a sociable life enforced by an absolute sovereign.
 Hobbes tried to solve the problem of obligation by modern political means, in
contrast to Grotius’s reliance on moral intuition. According to Hobbes, natural
law was to be made obligatory, not by God, but by the will of the political
sovereign.
 Bellum omnium contra omnes “WAR AGAINST ALL” which he describes the
natural state humankind would be in, where it not for political community
Baruch Spinoza and Richard
Cumberland
Baruch Spinoza
 the Jewish-Dutch Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)
 one central Hobbesian theme to such an extent that he is rarely counted
as a natural lawyer (1989/1670)

 Spinoza dispensed with the idea of a divine will in the ordinary meaning
and explained the laws for human behavior as the scientific “laws” of
physics and psychology that bind the world together.
 This “scientific” ambition was also meant to provide a basis for ethics that
was beyond traditional religion and which thus was immune to its
confessional divisions, a tolerationist standpoint of particular relevance to
Spinoza’s own situation and to Dutch society in general.
Richard Cumberland
 15 July 131 or 32 – 9 October 1718 was an English philosopher, and a Bishop
of Peterborough from 1691 - 1672
as a system in which every part in some way was connected with every other
part, Cumberland sought to show that the good of each individual person is
bound up with that of the whole of the human community, so that sociability is
a natural duty.

“ immutably true propositions regulative of voluntary actions as to the choice

of good and the avoidance of evil, and which carry with them an obligation
to outward acts of obedience, even apart form civil laws and from any
considerations of compacts constituting government”
John Locke and Samuel Pufendorf
 John Locke and Samuel Pufendorf
 (1632–1704) English men
 considered as the classic representatives of modern Protestant natural law theory because they
combine several of the central ideas of their predecessors into forceful formulations of great
clarity.
 At the root of this was an idea that Locke and Pufendorf had in common with Hobbes, namely
the fundamentally anti-scholastic one that morality was not inherently part of the natural world or
human nature, but was somehow superimposed upon or introduced into nature.
 The immediate cause of morality was human action, and consequently Hobbes, Locke and
Pufendorf thought that moral ideas were singularly open to certainty, for we know that which we
ourselves make in a way that we do not know anything else
There was the “political law”
made by political authority and enforced by courts; there was the “law of opinion,”
i.e. the social norms of the various groups in which we live; and as a basis for all,
there was the divine law prescribed by the deity. This last was a natural law in as
much as human reason alone could prove the existence of the divine legislator
and his imposition on us of duties towards the world and each other, namely the
basic duty of preservation and the more specific duties and rights that this entailed:
individual property rights delimited by duties to the common good, rights to
self-governance in the service of peace and safety, etc.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian
Wolff
Germany, Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
 Ambition was to articulate a “universal jurisprudence” that set out the
relations of justice between all moral agents from humans, through angels
to God (1988).
Justice is the “charity of the wise,” which is based upon pleasure in the
happiness
of others, and since this pleasure arises from perfection, the system of justice
is in fact an ideal of spiritual perfectibility through cognitive insight.
Christian Wolff
 Working from similar metaphysical foundations
 Maintained that the perfectibility of ourselves and of the parts of the world
within our grasp was the basic law of nature
In this way
the law of nature was supposed to provide us with a moral norm that is objective
also in the sense of being independent of God’s will. We were under an
obligation to the law because our intellection of perfection with rational inevitability
would draw our will towards this goal, and moral freedom in fact consisted
in our insight into this condition of our life.
Enlightenment rights theory
 The two approaches were by
no means entirely separate, for it was common to see a person’s apprehension of
obligation to the law of nature as an internalization of the law that enabled the
person to make moral judgements.

 In other words, in this rights tradition, which often refers back to Grotius, we end up with a
fundamental ambiguity between right as a sphere of moral freedom and right as morally
rightful (or obligatory) action. Since rights were the common basis for contractarian theories
of social relations, including civil society and sovereignty, this ambiguity had wide-ranging
implications. At one extreme was the notion that society was an artificial construction by
individuals trading in their subjective rights or liberties; at the other, the view of society as part
of the implementation of a naturally given moral vision for humanity at large. The rights
tradition from Barbeyrac, through Hutcheson and Burlamaqui, to the American revolutionary
thinkers (e.g., James Madison) and beyond was closer to the latter extreme, and this calls
into question its continuity with modern secular ideas of human rights.
Separation of Church and state
 In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of an explosion of
philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines and
dogmas. The philosophic movement was led by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who argued for a society based upon reason rather than faith
and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for
science based on experiments and observation. The political
philosopher Montesquieu introduced the idea of a separation of powers in
a government, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by the
authors of the United States Constitution. While the Philosophes of the
French Enlightenment were not revolutionaries and many were members of
the nobility, their ideas played an important part in undermining the
legitimacy of the Old Regime and shaping the French Revolution.