It does not refer to the laws of nature, the laws that science aims to describe. In the case of human beings, our essence is what we really are. Rather, he argued, we simply name certain things trees because they resemble each other in certain ways. Consequently, natural law theory can be defined as its content is substantial intrisically arranged naturally, it is more important that everything and in valid, available and also effectual. But it is at least logically possible that the world works in certain ways and not others, irrespective of whether God exists. The Stoics, non-Christian thinkers who flourished between 200 B.C. All of this may seem a rather obscure academic debate, but the consequences of nominalism are devastating—once we follow them out to their logical extreme (as modern thinkers have done.) You can’t believe in human rights. Basically, by the seventeenth century, natural law became associated with two distinct ideas—one moral and one scientific. And, corresponding with this, we have seen in the last century a re-definition of “freedom” in the political sense. Science and morality, the “is” and the “ought” drifted apart and came be seen as two entirely separate spheres of reality. Subscribe today. For the former, the “natural” is simply what we do. We can decide for ourselves what our “end” is. Ockham sort of took the first important step in this direction but carefully cabined some of the consequences of his own doctrines. Kant would have agreed with St. Paul and disagreed with utilitarians that one should not do evil in the hope that good may come. Other Scholastic thinkers, including the Franciscan philosophers John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347/49) and the Spanish theologian Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), emphasized divine will instead of divine reason as the source of law. As new wine was put in the old “natural law” skin, its central idea slowly morphed, then decayed—before it was abandoned altogether. Dr. Hill: As you might expect, western thinkers in the early modern period did not throw out natural law theory, root and branch. You need to adopt some underlying decisions about what to achieve, and the reasons for doing so. Thus, he certainly believed in God and even thought that human beings have a natural end which God has built into us. Once we have this secured, then those who have consolidated their power, wealth and position seek their own self-aggrandizement at the sake of the less fortunate (as Rousseau observed.). There are only individual human beings with differing capacities. CWR: What are some of the common objections to natural law today? But there are several problems with this. Having lost nature and God’s plan as a foundation, the very idea of “objective moral truth” has become increasingly difficult to defend. However, devout Christians number in the hundreds of millions in the world today and the Protestant and Catholic Churches are significant players in almost every country’s moral discourse. Natural law tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths that we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. The other half of the tradition, represented by thinkers like Hobbes, thought of natural law as the empirical laws of human psychology. The very idea of human rights and human dignity become impossible to explain or defend. And you can’t even believe in that most vaunted of all liberal values—freedom. Lastly, a reasonable concept of natural law allows us to understand the intrinsic differences distinguishing natural law as such, the law of nations, and positive legislation. Even where two people may agree about general principles, there will frequently be disagreement about how to apply these principles on particular matters. ), Kant insisted that the rightness of an action cannot be gauged by its consequences. Natural law thinkers, however, hold that the “natural” is neither a purely static nor a purely descriptive idea. CWR: What, in a nutshell, is “natural law” and how has it developed from the classical era to today? But the old idea that there is a natural order to things in which we participate was largely gone. There is no essential nature that trees (or human beings) share. The book describes the cascading consequences of nominalism—but make no mistake about it: the moral and practical consequences of nominalism are enormous. Dr. Hill: The classical natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas and his followers builds on the idea that each thing in the world has a particular nature or “essence.” Plato taught that all classes of things—trees, stars, human beings—are similar to other things of their kind in virtue of their having a certain “form,” i.e., an archetype which represents the perfection of that kind of thing. He recently responded to questions from Catholic World Report about what natural law is and is not, common objections to natural law, how natural law developed and how it has been undermined, loss of faith in God in the West and the decline of natural law, and his journey from atheism into the Catholic Church. Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights (1981) is the most developed articulation of the new natural law. Natural law in the Enlightenment and the modern era. Yes, in a sense natural law is as important as it ever was. Natural Law. Philosophy, says Dr. John Lawrence Hill, “played a fundamental role in my conversion to Christianity. The “moral” portion of the tradition, associated with thinkers like John Locke, began to think of natural law simply as the moral order God had created and imposed on human beings. It depends on whether the principle applies only to innocent persons or to those convicted of a crime. What this objection fails to account for is that human beings were made free—free even to depart from the natural law. The greatest of all natural law thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, argued that the natural law is not only “out there” in the world—a set of binding norms that govern us—but is “in here.” We human beings have the natural law built right into us. The point is, the closer we come to tangible, practical ethical reality, the more variability we should expect. (In fact, where utilitarians tend to think in terms of good and bad, Katians think in terms of right and wrong. And even our natural desires are “ordered to the good.” Aquinas’s natural law theory holds that, when human beings are properly educated, we naturally develop into fully-functioning human beings. It also provides powerful clues to how we must live in order to achieve our “end” or purpose or specific form of fulfillment in life. The History, Enemies, and Importance of Natural Law. First, as Aristotle noted, ethical judgments (and practices) fall into the realm of phronesis, not sophia, i.e., practical, not theoretical wisdom.