Towards Modern Natural Law
What today’s lecture is about:
1. The basics of classical natural law – summary
2. Aristotle and the development of human moral perfectibility
3. Aquinas’s fourfold view of natural law
4. Aquinas’s view of human perfectibility – the basic goods and of the definition and function of
law
5. Attack on Natural Law 1 - Hobbes and the social contract
6. Attack on Natural Law 2 – Hume and Kant (empiricists)
7. Modern natural law – Fuller rationality and internal morality
8. Modern natural law – Finnis and his basic goods
Cicero 106-43 B.C.E.
A reminder of Cicero’s classical statement of Natural Law:
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging
and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions.
And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any
effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part
of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely (because it stands above human made law). We cannot
be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an
expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different
laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for
all times, and there will be one master and one ruler, that is God, over us all, for He is the author of
this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”
Classical Natural Law (NOT religious in its format, although it is expressed in religious language) has
these characteristics:
1. Universal and unchangeable
2. Higher law (a higher set of values which stands above any human institution and certainly
above the institution of law.)
3. Accessible to reason (it is accessible to us purely in virtue of our faculty of reason. All we have
to do is stop and think about things and we realise what the right thing is and what the wrong
thing is. Thus we know the difference between good and evil.)
4. Comprehensive (whatever it is that is the higher set of values, it's comprehensive and it can
address all situations.)
5. Internally consistent (if it is made up of parts, these parts must be internally consistent with
one another.)
6. Has own autonomy (We cannot change it, it is there.)
, Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274, 13th century)
Aquinas arguably broke Western society out of the dark ages.
He found a way to combine classical Greek philosophy (in particular Aristotle) and Western catholic
thought – this was dangerous because in the Middle Ages they were concerned to make sure that
people believed properly and any belief that was different from that accepted in Rome was heresy.
You could be put to the death for that and very often a death by burning on a stake so you really did
not want to challenge things to deeply. But, nonetheless, Aquinas did feel that Aristotle’s philosophy,
the philosophy of a non-Catholic, clearly an atheist, was useful to advance the ways of thinking of the
Western Catholic world. He succeeded in combining Aristotle’s philosophy with Catholic thought. It
was a remarkable achievement. He wrote a great book called The Summa Theologia, sometimes just
referred to as the Summa, which is an enormous book of over six million words, which is one of the
largest books ever written. It is extraordinarily well argued, a series of propositions with
counterarguments and then discussion.
In this way his philosophy dovetailed with theology and he developed both aspects. So again, though
religious in expression, his natural law theory makes a huge development forward. He is arguably the
first “modern” natural law theorist.
Aristotle was vitally important in his thought. Remember his Virtue theory of ethics? We develop in
virtue by living a good life and doing good acts. We become virtuous, we develop a good character. In
this way we become better people. In other words we have a nature that grows and changes as we
get older, becoming more good.
So we learn to be virtuous by doing good acts which are better for us and for the society we live in.
This is partly to do with a view that Aquinas held and Aristotle also held that things come in natural
kinds and they are impelled forwards from where they start to where they are purposed, where they
are intended to go.
Aquinas believed have a built in development tending towards a good end. Like an acorn develops
into an oak tree. It doesn't become anything else. It is impelled forwards to become the adult version,
the adult tree. We are very much the same. We start as infants and we are impelled forwards, you
might say, designed, you might say, in order that we are capable of becoming virtuous. This might be
described as human perfectibility. Both Aristotle in the moral realm and Aquinas in the realm of
natural law, considered that the nature of humans was to become virtuous, was to become
perfectible. This was also what the law set out to achieve. We become more perfect by doing good
acts and living well. It is out nature to tend towards our appointed end.
The religious framework of his natural law:
Thinking about Natural Law, Aquinas thought divine order, with God as the ultimate ruler, from whom
all the good values ultimate derive, having care over us and aiming at our common good. Aquinas
thought that God had created the earth and divine order, which God it imposed upon the Earth, not
just in ourselves, but the whole of nature gives us the laws of science and the other structures that we
perceive in the world around us. It gives the animals their impetus to form mates or make mates and
to reproduce and to bring up their young. The in the animal realm, that is. But in the plant realm,
plants grew from seeds into the form that they were designed to go into.
– The good of all nature, has 4 ways of imposing order:
