Related topics which may also have relevant evidence: Rule of Law, Rights, and The State

Related topics which may also have relevant evidence: Rule of Law, Rights, and The State.

Scope of natural law

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 2

“Objectively speaking, natural law, as a term of politics and jurisprudence, may be defined as a loosely knit body of rules of action prescribed by an authority superior to the state. These rules variously (according to the several differing schools of natural-law and natural-rights speculation) are derived from divine commandment; from the nature of humankind; from abstract Reason; or from long experience of mankind in community. But natural law does not appertain to states and courts merely. For primarily it is a body of ethical perceptions or rules governing the life of the individual person, quite aside from politics and jurisprudence.”
Natural law is distinct from any law of science

John Macquarrie (prof. of philosophy, Oxford Univ.), Three Issues in Ethics, 1970, p. 92

“It is very important to make plain that natural law, as an ethical concept, is quite distinct from any scientific law of nature.”
Natural law is different from both statutory law and the laws of nature

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 77

“On the one hand, natural law must be distinguished from positive or statutory law, decreed by the state; on the other, from the ‘laws of nature’ in a scientific sense — that is, from the propositions expressing the regular order of certain natural phenomena. Also, natural law is sometimes confounded with assertions of ‘natural rights,’ which may or may not be founded upon classical and medieval concepts of natural law.”

Natural law is a good standard for moral decisions

John Macquarrie (prof. of philosophy, Oxford Univ.), Three Issues in Ethics, 1970, p. 92

“The expression ‘natural law’ refers to a norm of responsible conduct and suggests a kind of fundamental guideline or criterion that comes before all rules or particular formulation of law.”
Natural law is a product of human experience

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 80

“Unlike my German correspondent, the sustainer of natural law knows that there is law for man, and law for things; and that our moral order is not the creation of coffee-house philosophers. Human nature is not vulpine nature, leonine nature, or serpentine nature. Natural law is bound up with the concept of the dignity of man, and with the experience of humankind ever since the beginnings of social community.”
Civil law largely is founded on — and supported by the principles of — natural law

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 8

“As Brownson remarks, the natural law (or law of God) and the American civil law are not ordinarily at swords’ points. Large elements of natural law entered into the common law of England — and therefore into the common law of the United States — over the centuries; and the Roman law, so eminent in the science of jurisprudence, expresses the natural law enunciated by the Roman jurisconsults.”
Natural law is the foundation for the Social Contract

Charles Larmore (W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown Univ.), “Behind the Veil,” The New Republic, February 27, 2008, p. 47

“For Locke, the contract that brings about legitimate government is rooted in natural law. Though he traced natural law back to God, the essence of the idea, as Rawls realizes, is that there exists a body of moral obligations binding on us independently of any act of our own — obligations which we can discern by reason, but of which we are not ourselves the author. Thus Locke argued that the reason we ought to seek mutually acceptable terms by which to regulate our common affairs is our antecedent duty to preserve the life and liberty of ourselves and others.”
Natural law is superior to the state

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 77

“Objectively speaking, natural law, as a term of politics and jurisprudence, may be defined as a loosely knit body of rules of action prescribed by an authority superior to the state. These rules variously (according to the several differing schools of natural-law and natural-rights speculation) are derived from divine commandment; from the nature of humankind; from abstract Reason; or from long experience of mankind in community.”
Thomas Aquinas first identified natural law as a moral force

Anthony Quinton (emeritus prof. of philosophy, Oxford Univ.), “Political Philosophy” in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy, ed. by Anthony Kenny, 1994, p. 301

“The most carefully worked-out part of Aquinas’ political philosophy is his account of the varieties of law. They are four in number. First, there is God’s eternal law, the general system of order God has imposed on the universe at large. Secondly, there is divine law, what God has revealed to man by way of the scriptures. Thirdly, there is natural law, universally applicable rules of conduct, evident to reason at all times and places. Finally, there is human law, which consists of specific rules either deduced from natural law or applied, in accordance with natural law, to particular circumstances.”
Locke determines at least the outlines of natural law

Charles K. Rowley (prof. of economics, George Mason Univ.; General Director of the Locke Institute), “What is Living and What is Dead in Classical Liberalism?” The Independent Review, Spring 1996, p. 18

“Locke’s definition of the state of nature clearly incorporate moral elements, making use of such notions as legitimacy and voluntary agreement. Individuals are endowed with full-blown moral rights and obligations defined by the external and immutable law of nature (Bk. II, para. 135). Although the particulars of the law of nature are not defined in any detail, their general form is clear. They consist of duties to preserve oneself and other by not harming persons in their lives, liberties, and properties. In the state of nature, persons enjoy their full complement of ‘natural rights,’ which correlate with the natural duties of others to respect those rights.”
Natural law prevents domination by the powerful

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 80

“Positive and customary law, in any country, grows out of a people’s experience in community; natural law should have its high part in shaping and restraining positive and customary laws, but natural law could not conceivably supplant judicial institutions. Yet were natural law concepts to be abandoned altogether — why, then, indeed, the world would find itself governed by ‘The good old rule, the good old plan, That they shall take who have the power, And they shall take who can.’”
Political leaders now misunderstand and ignore the Natural Law

Larry P. Arnn (president, Hillsdale College; board of directors member of the Heritage Foundation, the Army War College, and the Claremont Institute), “Education, Economics, and Self-Government,” Imprimis, December 2009, p. 3

“America’s founders understood themselves to be bound and limited by something higher. And it is precisely this understanding that is missing among our political leadership today. Nearly 20 years ago now, when Clarence Thomas was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings, several senators questioned him about the idea of natural law, which seemed to them a foreign and dangerous idea. And why would it seem that way? These senators have been taught to understand government as a means by which they can do marvelous things, changing society for the better in countless and unlimited ways. And in this light, the old-fashioned idea of natural law - which, as we saw in the passage from Madison, leads to the idea of limited government - becomes simply an impediment to progress.”
Natural law is essential for just statutory law

Martin Luther King, Jr. (American clergyman and civil rights leader, 1939-1968), “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Ethics in America: Source Reader, ed. by Lisa H. Newton, 1989, p. 153

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
Even if natural law cannot settle disputes, it should guide lawmakers

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 8

“No civilization ever has attempted to maintain the bed of justice by direct application of natural-law doctrines by magistrates; necessarily, it is by edict, rescript, and statute that any state keeps the peace through a system of courts. It simply will not do to maintain that private interpretation of natural law should be the means by which conflicting claims are settled. Rather, natural law ought to help form the judgments of the persons who are lawmakers — whether emperors, kings, ecclesiastics, aristocratic republicans, or representatives of a democracy. The civil law should be shaped in conformity to the natural law — which originated, in Cicero’s words, ‘before any written law existed or any state had been established.’”

Natural law is a poor standard for moral decisions

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 2

“The natural law should not be taken for graven Tables of Governance, to be followed to jot and tittle; appealed to in varying circumstances, the law of nature must be applied with high prudence. As Alessandro d’Entrevès writes, ‘The lesson of natural law is in fact nothing but an assertion that law is a part of ethics.’ And, he concludes ‘The lesson of natural law [is] simply to remind the jurist of his own limitations ... This point where values and norms coincide, which is the ultimate origin of law and at the same time the beginning of moral life proper, is, I believe, what men for over two thousand years have indicated by the name of natural law.’” [Brackets and ellipsis in original text]
Natural law cannot be enforced

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 3

“No code of the laws of nature ever having existed, it is ineffectual to try to enforce that body of ethical principles through courts of law; no judge hands down decisions founded directly upon the admonition, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land’ — or the Commandment’s equivalents in the Babylonian List of Sins, the Egyptian Confession of the Righteous Soul, the Manual of Epictetus, Leviticus, the Analects, or Hindu books of wisdom. Nevertheless, such perpetual precepts lie behind the customs and the statutes that shelter father and mother.”
Critics argue that law derives from the state, not from nature

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 4

“Permit me to turn now to the case against natural law, as expressed by the legal positivists — most strongly, perhaps, by the German scholar Hans Kelsen. They regard natural law as a body of sentimental fictions; they hold that the state is the only true source of law. The views of John Austin and the Analytical Jurists are similar: all law is decreed by the political sovereign, they hold.”
Bentham discounts the idea of natural rights

Amartya Sen (economics and philosophy teacher at Harvard; Nobel Prize in economics in 1998), “The Power of a Declaration,” The New Republic , February 4, 2009, p. 30

“Jeremy Bentham dismissed the non-legal approach to rights almost immediately after the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. In Anarchical Fallacies, written in 1791-1792, Bentham insisted that ‘natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights (an American phrase), rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts’ (which, I assume, is some kind of artificially elevated nonsense). That dichotomy remains very alive today, and there are many commentators who regard the idea of human rights as no more than ‘bawling upon paper’ (to use another of Bentham’s derisive descriptions).”
Natural law provides no guidance for everyday legal disputes

Russell Kirk (Distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation), The Case For and Against Natural Law: The Heritage Lectures #469, 1993, p. 5

“When determining a disputed boundary between two farms, a justice of the peace does not repair to theories of natural law and meditate upon which of two claimants is the more worthy of judicial compassion; rather, the justice of the peace turns to statute, common law, possibly to local custom — and to the files of the recorder of deeds at the county seat. And so it is with the ordinary administration of law at every level. Statute, charter, and prescription ordinarily are sufficient to maintain the rule of law — the end of which, we ought not to forget, is to keep the peace.”
Natural law has largely been ignored as a basis for ethical judgments

Peter Singer (prof. of philosophy, Monash Univ., Australia), The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, 1981, p. 69

“So biological theories could have an important effect on those who make their ethical judgments on the basis of some theory of ‘natural law.’ This does not, however, amount to an important impact on ethics as a whole, since natural law systems of ethics are not widely held outside religious, and especially Roman Catholic, circles.”
Positive or statutory law, rather than natural law, is how communities are governed

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 82

“No civilization ever has attempted to maintain the bed of justice by direct application of natural-law doctrines by magistrates; necessarily, it is by edict, re-script, and statute that any state keeps the peace through a system of courts. It simply will not do to maintain that private interpretation of natural law should be the means by which conflicting claims are settled.”
The concept of natural law is inherently vague

John Macquarrie (prof. of philosophy, Oxford Univ.), Three Issues in Ethics, 1970, p. 104

“The fact that natural law cannot be precisely formulated is already implied in some of the classic definitions and descriptions quoted above. The natural law is ‘unwritten’ (Aristotle). In fact, the very term ‘law’ is misleading, if it is taken to mean some kind of code. The natural law is not a code or system of laws in addition to all the actual systems, but simply our rather inaccurate way of referring to those most general moral principles against which particular rules or codes have to be measured. It is well known that St. Thomas formulated the first precept of the natural law in extremely general terms: ‘Good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided.’”
Natural law has been condemned as a “sentimental fiction”

Russell Kirk (1918-1994, American political theorist and educator), “In Memoriam: A Lecture on Natural Law,” Policy Review, Summer 1994, p. 79

“Permit me now to turn to the case against natural law, as expressed by the legal positivist — most strongly, perhaps, by the German scholar Hans Kelsen. They regard natural law as a body of sentimental fictions; they hold that the state is the only true source of law. The view of John Austin and the Analytical Jurists are similar: All law is decreed by the political sovereign, they hold.”
Even theologians are backing away from Natural Law

John Macquarrie (prof. of philosophy, Oxford Univ.), Three Issues in Ethics, 1970, p. 83

“But natural law — like the corresponding natural theology — is in bad repute nowadays. For a long time it has been under fire from many Protestant moralists, who prefer a christocentric approach. More recently, even some Roman Catholic theologians have begun to doubt whether in their tradition too much stress has been laid on natural law and too little on the New Testament.”
It’s not clear that natural law is a foundation for American government

Richard E. Morgen (prof. of constitutional law, Bowdoin College), Disabling America, 1984, p. 174