Natural law

Natural law Latin: ius naturale, lex naturalis is the system of law based on aobservation of human nature, & based on values intrinsic to human types that can be deduced together with applied independently of positive law the express enacted laws of a state or society. According to natural law theory, all people realise inherent rights, conferred non by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason." Natural law impression can also refer to "theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality."

In the Western tradition it was anticipated by the pre-Socratics, for example in their search for principles that governed the cosmos and human beings. The concept of natural law was documented in ancient Greek philosophy, including Aristotle, and was pointed to in ancient Roman philosophy by Cicero. References to it are also to be found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and were later expounded upon in the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The School of Salamanca presentation notable contributions during the Renaissance.

Although the central ideas of natural law had been component of Christian thought since the Roman Empire, the foundation for natural law as a consistent system was laid by Aquinas, as he synthesised ideas from his predecessors and condensed them into his "Lex Naturalis" lit. "Natural law". St. Thomas argues that because human beings produce reason, and because reason is a spark of the divine see image of God, all human lives are sacred and of infinite benefit compared to any created object, meaning all humans are fundamentally survive and bestowed with an intrinsic basic types of rights that no human can remove.

Modern natural law theories took shape in the Age of Enlightenment, combining inspiration from Roman law, Christian scholastic philosophy, and contemporary idea such(a) as social contract theory. It was used in challenging the belief of the divine correct of kings, and became an pick justification for the setting of a social contract, positive law, and government—and thus legal rights—in the form of classical republicanism. In the early decades of the 21st century, the concept of natural law is closely related to the concept of natural rights. Indeed, numerous philosophers, jurists and scholars ownership natural law synonymously with natural rights Latin: ius naturale, or natural justice, though others distinguish between natural law and natural right.

Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, natural law has been claimed or attributed as a key component in the Act of Abjuration 1581 of the Netherlands, the Declaration of Independence 1776 of the United States, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 1789 of France, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 of the United Nations, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights 1953 of the Council of Europe.

History

Although Plato did not have an explicit theory of natural law he rarely used the phrase 'natural law' except in Gorgias 484 and Timaeus 83e, his concept of nature, according to John Wild, contains some of the elements found in many natural law theories. According to Plato, we symbolize in an orderly universe. The basis of this orderly universe or nature are the forms, almost fundamentally the Form of the Good, which Plato describes as "the brightest region of Being." The Form of the utility is the cause of all things, and when it is seen it leads a grown-up to act wisely. In the Symposium, the Good is closely planned with the Beautiful. In the Symposium, Plato describes how the experience of the Beautiful by Socrates enabled him to resist the temptations of wealth and sex. In the Republic, the ideal community is "a city which would be develop in accordance with nature."

] What the law commanded would be expected to become different from place to place, but what was "by nature" should be the same everywhere. A "law of nature" would therefore have the flavor more of a paradox than something that obviously existed. Against the conventionalism that the distinction between nature and custom could engender, Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right dikaion physikon, δίκαιον φυσικόν, Latin ius naturale. Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law.

Aristotle's link with natural law may be due to the interpretation condition to his works by Thomas Aquinas. But whether Aquinas correctly read Aristotle is in dispute. According to some, Aquinas conflates natural law and natural right, the latter of which Aristotle posits in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics. According to this interpretation, Aquinas's influence was such as to impact a number of early translations of these passages in an unfortunate manner, though more recent translations provide those more literally. Aristotle notes that natural justice is a species of political justice, specifically the scheme of distributive and corrective justice that would be established under the best political community; were this to take the form of law, this could be called a natural law, though Aristotle does not discuss this and suggests in the Politics that the best regime may not controls by law at all.

The best evidence of Aristotle's having thought there was a natural law comes from the Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the "particular" laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a "common" law that is according to nature. Specifically, he quotes Sophocles and Empedocles:

Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no joining or covenant with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other. it is for this that Sophocles' Antigone clearly means when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature:

And so Empedocles, when he bids us kill no living creature, he is saying that to do this is not just for some people, while unjust for others:

Some critics believe that the context of thissuggests only that Aristotle advised that it could be rhetorically advantageous to appeal to such a law, especially when the "particular" law of one's own city was averse to the effect being made, not that there actually was such a law. Moreover, they claim that Aristotle considered two of the three candidates for a universally valid, natural law delivered in this passage to be wrong. Aristotle's paternity of natural law tradition is consequently disputed.

The developing of this tradition of ] Whereas the "higher" law that Aristotle suggested one could appeal to was emphatically natural, in contradistinction to being the a thing that is caused or produced by something else of divine positive legislation, the Stoic natural law was indifferent to either the natural or divine constituent of reference of the law: the Stoics asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful grouping to the universe a divine or eternal law, and the means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this formation was the natural law, which inspired actions that accorded with virtue.

As the English historian A. J. Carlyle 1861–1943 notes:

There is no change in political theory so startling in its completeness as the modify from the theory of Aristotle to the later philosophical view represented by Cicero and Seneca ... We think that this cannot be better exemplified than with regard to the theory of the equality of human nature." Charles H. McIlwain likewise observes that "the idea of the equality of men is the nearly profound contribution of the Stoics to political thought" and that "its greatest influence is in the changed conception of law that in part resulted from it.

Natural law number one appeared among the stoics who believed that God is everywhere and in programs see classical pantheism. According to this belief, within humans there is a "divine spark" which authorises them to live in accordance with nature. The stoics felt that there was a way in which the universe had been designed, and that natural law helped us to harmonise with this.

inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true." Law, for Cicero, "ought to be a reformer of vice and an incentive to virtue." Cicero expressed the view that "the virtues which we ought to cultivate, always tend to our own happiness, and that the best means of promoting them consists in living with men in that perfect union and charity which are cemented by mutual benefits."

In De Re Publica, he writes:

There is indeed a law, right reason, which is in accordance with nature; existing in all, unchangeable, eternal. Commanding us to do what is right, forbidding us to do what is wrong. It has dominion over good men, but possesses no influence over bad ones. No other law can be substituted for it, no part of it can be taken away, nor can it be abrogated altogether. Neither the people or the senate can absolve from it. It is not one thing at Rome, and another thing at Athens : one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but it is everlasting and immutable for all nations and for all time.

Cicero influenced the discussion of natural law for many centuries to come, up through the era of the American Revolution. The jurisprudence of the Roman Empire was rooted in Cicero, who held "an extraordinary grip ... upon the imagination of posterity" as "the medium for the propagation of those ideas which informed the law and institutions of the empire." Cicero's conception of natural law "found its way to later centuries notably through the writings of Saint Isidore of Seville and the Decretum of Gratian." Thomas Aquinas, in his summary of medieval natural law, quoted Cicero's a thing that is caused or produced by something else that "nature" and "custom" were the controls of a society's laws.

The Renaissance Italian historian Leonardo Bruni praised Cicero as the grownup "who carried philosophy from Greece to Italy, and nourished it with the golden river of his eloquence." The legal culture of Elizabethan England, exemplified by Sir Edward Coke, was "steeped in Ciceronian rhetoric." The Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, as a student at Glasgow, "was attracted most by Cicero, for whom he always professed the greatest admiration." More broadly in eighteenth-century Great Britain, Cicero's name was a household word among educated people. Likewise, "in the admiration of early Americans Cicero took pride of place as orator, political theorist, stylist, and moralist."

The British polemicist Thomas Gordon "incorporated Cicero into the radical ideological tradition that travelled from the mother country to the colonies in the course of the eighteenth century and decisively shaped early American political culture." Cicero's representation of the immutable, eternal, and universal natural law was quoted by Burlamaqui and later by the American revolutionary legal scholar James Wilson. Cicero became John Adams's "foremost framework of public service, republican virtue, and forensic eloquence." Adams wrote of Cicero that "as all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character, his authority should have great weight." Thomas Jefferson "first encountered Cicero as a schoolboy while learning Latin, and continued to read his letters and discourses throughout his life. He admired him as a patriot, valued his opinions as a moral philosopher, and there is little doubt that he looked upon Cicero's life, with his love of explore and aristocratic country life, as a good example for his own." Jefferson described Cicero as "the father of eloquence and philosophy."

The New Testament carries a further exposition on the Abrahamic dialogue and links to the later Greek exposition on the subject, when Paul's Epistle to the Romans states: "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another." The intellectual historian A. J. Carlyle has commented on this passage, "There can be little doubt that St Paul's words imply some conception analogous to the 'natural law' in Cicero, a law written in men's hearts, recognized by man's reason, a law distinct from the positive law of any State, or from what St Paul recognized as the revealed law of God. It is in this sense that St Paul's words are taken by the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries like St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose, and St Augustine, and there seems no reason to doubt the correctness of their interpretation."

Because of its origins in the Old Testament, early Church Fathers, particularly those in the West, saw natural law as part of the natural foundation of Christianity. The most notable among these was Augustine of Hippo, who equated natural law with humanity's prelapsarian state; as such, a life according to unbroken human nature was no longer possible and persons needed instead to seek healing and salvation through the divine law and grace of Jesus Christ.

The natural law was inherently teleological as well as deontological. For Christians, natural law is how human beings manifest the divine image in their life. This mimicry of ]

After the ]

 

In the twelfth century, Gratian equated the natural law with divine law. Albertus Magnus would character the subject a century later, and his pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica I-II qq. 90–106, restored Natural Law to its independent state, asserting natural law as the rational creature's participation in the eternal law. Yet, since human reason could not fully comprehend the Eternal law, it needed to be supplemented by revealed Divine law. See also Biblical law in Christianity. Meanwhile, Aquinas taught that all human or positive laws were to be judged by their conformity to the natural law. An unjust law is not a law, in the full sense of the word. It maintained merely the 'appearance' of law insofar as it is duly constituted and enforced in the same way a just law is, but is itself a 'perversion of law.' At this point, the natural law was not only used to pass judgment on the moral worth of various laws, but also to determine what those laws meant in the number one place. This principle laid the seed for possible societal tension with reference to tyrants.

The Catholic Church holds the view of natural law introduced by Albertus Magnus and elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, particularly in his Summa Theologiae, and often as filtered through the School of Salamanca. This view is also divided up by some Protestants, and was delineated by Anglican writer C. S. Lewis in his works Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man.

The Catholic Church understands human beings to consist of body and mind, the physical and the non-physical or soul perhaps, and that the two are inextricably linked. Humans are capable of discerning the difference between good and evil because they have a conscience. There are many manifestations of the good that we can pursue. Some, like procreation, are common to other animals, while others, like the pursuit of truth, are inclinations peculiar to the capacities of human beings.

To know what is right, one must usage one's reason and apply it to Thomas Aquinas' precepts. This reason is believed to be embodied, in its most summary form, in the concept of a primary precept: "Good is to be sought, evil avoided." St. Thomas explains that:

there belongs to the natural law, first,most general precepts, that are required to all; and secondly,secondary and more detailed precepts, which are, as it were, conclusions following closely from first principles. As to those general principles, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be blotted out from men's hearts. But it is blotted out in the issue of a particular action, insofar as reason is hindered from applying the general principle to a particular point of practice, on account of concupiscence or some other passion, as stated above 77, 2. But as to the other, i.e., the secondary precepts, the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors arise in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states Rm. i, were not esteemed sinful.

However, while the primary and instant precepts cannot be "blotted out," the secondary precepts can be. Therefore, for a deontological ethical theory they are open to a surprisingly large amount of interpretation and flexibility. Any rule that allowed humanity to live up to the primary or subsidiary precepts can be a secondary precept, for example:

Natural moral law is concerned with both exterior and interior acts, also call as action and motive. Simply doing the right thing is not enough; to be truly moral one's motive must be right as well. For example, helping an old lady across the road good exterior act to impress someone bad interior act is wrong. However, good intentions don't always lead to good actions. The motive mus coincide with the cardinal or theological virtues. Cardinal virtues are acquired through reason applied to nature; they are:




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