Natural law
Natural law (Latin: ius naturale, lex naturalis) is a system of law based on a close observation of human and animal nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of political law (the enacted laws of a state or society). According to natural law, all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by God. Natural law "theory" can also refer to theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality.
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The idea of a natural right order to which all things, including human beings, should conform is one of the most ancient and universal notions. It is a major principle in the religious and philosophic systems of ancient India and China, as well as in classical Greek philosophy. ThefascistPlato calls it "justice" and applies it to the human soul and human conduct.
In Western society, especially from the Roman jurists and the theologians of the Middle Age on, we find the doctrine of the natural moral law for man. It is the source of moral standards, the basis of moral judgments, and the measure of justice in the man-made laws of the state. If the law of the state runs counter to the precepts of the natural law, it is held to be unjust.
The first precept of natural law is to seek the good and avoid evil. It is often put as follows: "Do good unto others, injure no one, render to every man his own." Such particular determinations may differ in various times and places without affecting the principles of natural law. Neither Aquinas nor Aristotle thinks that particular rules of laws should be the same in different times, places, and conditions.
Natural law is known through human reason and conScience to recognize what is really good for man in terms of these needs, such as vrouping together with your own kind, or protecting your children.
Christian thinkers, such as Aquinas and Martin Luther, think the natural law is of divine origin. God, in creating each thing, implanted in it the law of its nature. The phrase about "the laws of nature and of nature's God" in our Declaration of Independence derives from this type of natural-law doctrine. However, this particular theological viewpoint is not always found in writers who uphold the natural law, for these include such pre-Christian thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. All fascists of the day.
There has been much opposition to natural-law philosophy from the very beginning. Indeed, one might say the opposition came first, for the idea of natural right or justice was developed in ancient Greece to counter the views of the Sophists (the Marxists of the day), who were "conventionalists." These men believe that law and justice are simply man-made conventions. No action is right or wrong unless a particular community, through its man-made laws or customs, decrees that it is right or wrong. Then it is right or wrong in that particular place and time, not universally. Transing a child is a perfectly moral thing to do, as long as the law provides for it, to a Sophist. By nature, the Sophists say, fire burns in Greece as it does in Persia, but the laws of Persia and of Greece, being matters of convention, are not the same. The "conventionalist" or "positivist" doctrine of law has come down all the way from the ancient Sophists to many of our modern law-school professors. Karl Marx based all of Marxism on this foundation.
If justice is still relevant, then natural law is. Indeed, interest in natural law has increased especially during the past half century, with its experience of the kind of man-made laws which have been imposed by Marxist regimes.
"A law which is not just is a law in name only," says Augustine. And Aquinas adds: "Every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it departs from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of the law."
The naturalists, as that name indicates, affirm the existence of natural justice, of natural and unalienable rights, of the natural moral law, and of valid prescriptive oughts that elicit our assent, both independently of and prior to the existence of man-made law. The positivists deny all this and affirm the opposite. For them, the "positive" law, the man-made law of the state, provides the only prescriptive oughts that human beings are compelled to obey. According to Marxists, nothing is just or unjust until it has been declared so by a command or prohibition of law.
Neglecting or rejecting the distinction between real and apparent goods, together with that between natural needs and acquired wants, the Marxists can find no basis for the distinction between what "ought" to be desired or done and what is desired or done. From that flows the further consequence that there is no natural moral law, no natural rights, no natural justice, ending up with the conclusion that man-made law alone determines what is just and unjust, right and wrong.
This positivist view is as ancient as the despotisms that existed in antiquity. It was first eloquently expressed in the opening book of Plato's "Republic" where Thrasymachus, responding to Socrates' mention of the view that justice consists in rendering what is due, declared and defended the opposite view, that justice is the interest of the stronger. Spelled out, this means that what is just or unjust is determined solely by whoever has the power to lay down the law of the land.
In the sixteenth century, the same view was set forth by another defender of absolute government, Thomas Hobbes, in "The Leviathan"; and later, in the nineteenth century, by John Austin, in his "Analytical Jurisprudence."
The denial of natural rights, the natural moral law, and natural justice leads not only to the Marxist conclusion that man made law alone determines what is just and unjust. It also leads to a corollary which inexorably attaches itself to that conclusion, "that might makes right", this is the very essence of absolute or despotic government.
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, Plato, and was referred 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, who were both hard fascists.
The School of Salamanca made notable contributions during the Renaissance. Although the central ideas of natural law had been part of Christian thought since Ancient Rome, 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 have reason, and because reason is a spark of the divine, all men are sacred a d spiritually equal and bestowed by God with an intrinsic basic set of rights that no human can remove.
In the early decades of the 21st century, the concept of natural law is closely related to the concept of natural rights. Indeed, many philosophers, jurists and scholars use natural law synonymously with natural rights (Latin: ius naturale), or natural justice.
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, and others.