Natural Law

NATURAL LAW

NATURAL LAW. Natural law is a contribution to the perennial discussion of the nature of justice and morality; it is an attempt to root them in something beyond human convention and creation. The notion has had various meanings and contents—no less than the word nature itself—most of which can be traced back to Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Roman Stoicism, and ultimately, Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.). Constant to all its meanings is that natural law is coherent, suprahuman, objective moral order that contains the standards of what is good and just; and that it contains the standards by which human or positive law is to be judged from the perspective of a harmonious and coherent universe and is inherent in the "nature" of the world. It was born of attempts by ancient philosophers and jurists to discover—or determine—what was common to all legal systems in order to eliminate what would today be seen as the problems of "relativism" and cultural and legal "diversity." The presumption that there is a common core to all systems of morality and law that provides the standards by which they are to be evaluated leads to the issues of discovery, validation, and enforcement.

UNIVERSALITY AND PERMANENCE

Natural law, like justice, aims at universality and permanence. Operationally, like all law, it is duty-contradict, a series of moral prohibitions, permissions, and requirements. It proclaimed the union of morality and politics and emerged from an ancient worldview that saw a singular harmony in nature, manifested in the universal jus (or ius ) gentium (international law). That universality was subsequently incorporated by Christianity into its conception of the divine ordering of all creation. Aquinas separated this classical understanding into the eternal, the divine, the natural, and the human (or positive) laws. The natural was still common to all humanity and was part of God's will and was the direct source for human law. In keeping with its Stoic roots, the natural law as conceived by Aquinas was discoverable through the use of natural reason, with the difference that for Aquinas that reason had been planted in everyone by God. Justice was an irresistible, rational necessity of naturally sociable human beings.

In this Aristotelian-Thomist form, for the most part, natural law continued into the early modern period. Even Jean Bodin (1530–1596), famed for his conception of political sovereignty as the absolute power to make and enforce law, held in his Six livres de la République (1576; Six books of the commonwealth) that the state in general was under the moral aegis of the overarching law of nature and limited sovereign absolutism to the positive law.

Protestant and secular natural-law theorists retained the understanding of humans as naturally sociable and rational and viewed the natural law as that which superintended human laws. The Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos (1579; Defense of liberty against tyrants; written by Philippe de Mornay, known as Duplessis-Mornay [1549–1623], but published anonymously) pointed to violations of the natural law as one of the signs of tyranny, and the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1553 or 1554–1600) espoused a conception of natural law that was heavily indebted to Scholasticism in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593, et seq.).

REASON AND NATURAL SOCIABILITY

The seventeenth century witnessed the beginnings of a series of remarkable changes in natural-law theory, starting with the Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), whomadereasonandnaturalsociability, rather than divinity, central to the conception developed in his De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the law of war and peace). So strong was his reliance upon these two that he suggested that the natural law would obtain even without God. Grotius was certainly not an atheist, but that charge was hurled at Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the English philosopher whose understanding of natural law shared many features with that of Grotius.

Sociability, Grotius argued, drove humanity into society from its prepolitical, state-of-nature beginnings; people were capable of understanding the ruling law of nature through their natural reason. Aquinas and the early-seventeenth-century Jesuit natural-law philosopher Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) had seen rationality as a reflection of divinity that enabled humans to understand God's will. Grotius appeared to have minimized that relationship, treating reason as a semiautonomous—albeit divinely implanted—and extremely important aspect of human nature. In his hands and those of his successors, this radically secularized and rationalized natural law was potentially removed from the realm of experience in which it had previously been rooted. The inherent human capacity to reason and the use of "right reason" independent of actual experience could lead to universal moral, social, and political principles by which human life was to be governed.

Perhaps the most important and influential proponent of this Grotian view of natural law was Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), the first holder of a chair in natural law in a German university. In his De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672; On natural and civil law), Pufendorf went even further and separated the natural, sociable world of human affairs and the natural law that governed it from the spiritual realm of theology. In this form, the new, secular natural law was adopted by many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, especially Richard Cumberland (1631–1718), bishop of Peterborough (whose De Legibus Naturae [On natural laws] was published the same year as Pufendorf's work) and Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744), the translator of Grotius and Pufendorf into French and historian of moral philosophy.

Cumberland had reached his conclusions independently of Pufendorf and was acknowledged in later editions of De Jure Naturae. Paradoxically, perhaps, Cumberland had developed some of his argument in opposition to the writings of Thomas Hobbes, who had denied natural sociability and ignored, if he did not actually deny, divinity. But Hobbes was subsequently to be ranked by Barbeyrac in the company of Grotius and Pufendorf as one of the great innovators in natural law theory.

STATE OF NATURE

Hobbes's theory, most notably in Leviathan (1651) and earlier in his De Cive (1642; On citizenship), began with an utterly undeveloped, fiercely competitive, and dangerously uncertain state of nature in which the natural law gave everyone the right to all things within their reach. People escaped this state of nature by voluntarily establishing a conventional absolutism in accord with the natural law requirement of self-preservation. Where traditional natural-law doctrine had provided a natural and rational basis for rights and liberties that persisted in some form in political society and had imposed varying limits on political authority, in Hobbes's hands, the inevitable destructiveness of natural freedom led only to a rationally established absolutism in which subjects had only as much freedom as their rulers permitted. It was the conceptual genius of Hobbes to subvert the appeal to natural law by many of his contemporaries—especially the Levellers—to attack the rule of Charles I as antithetical to their natural rights.

This Hobbesian reworking of natural law created great difficulties for his successors—he was frequently attacked and his books were subsequently banned in England—especially John Locke (1632–1704), who sought to establish a notion of secular natural law as leading to limited government. Locke is better known for his doctrine of natural rights than for his theory of natural law. The state of nature described in his Two Treatises of Government (1690) was sociable and far more peaceful than that of Hobbes, precisely because it was governed by the God-given natural law that people recognized and generally obeyed. The establishment of political—or "civil," as Locke often called it—society, accomplished by consent, was fully in accord with the law of nature and enabled people to achieve their natural ends by overcoming the uncertainties and insecurities of the state of nature. Locke's political state was to be limited by the natural justice contained in the natural law, and prolonged violations of that justice legitimated—in some cases, even required—a resort to revolution.

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE WILL

There is a paradox inherent in a natural law theory that depends on divine will. Grotius and those who followed him recognized this problem. If God is the author or legislator of the law of nature, and its validity is a consequence of his will, then things are right or wrong because God has so directed, which makes him into something of an arbitrary but benevolent ruler. If, on the other hand, there are principles according to which God has decreed the natural law, as Aquinas seemed to have implied, then God is not omnipotent. Consigning all this to the realm of divine mystery severely limits its applicability to human affairs. The role of reason is crucial, but reason that is God-dependent simply pushes the problem one step further away. Aquinas, following Aristotle, argued for the relationship between divine natural law, reason, and human experience. But an independent reason of the sort advocated by Pufendorf requires some standard of validation. Locke tacitly sidestepped the issue in his Two Treatises, but at an earlier period in his life, in a series of lecturers he delivered in 1664 but refused to publish (published from the manuscripts in 1954 as Essays on the Law of Nature ), he had agonized over the source of natural law and how and whether it could be known.

This series of questions was faced by Pufendorf, who concluded that the will of God in matters of natural law could be determined by consulting what is humanity's long-term and therefore best interests, thereby opening the door to a rational natural law that could be professed without any direct reliance upon divine will and revolution, which was ultimately a major break from the Scholastic tradition. He further urged that the author of this break was Grotius. The focus of natural law for Pufendorf—and Grotius—shifted from the morally requisite duties of individuals to the preservation of society, a view that was passed on to the eighteenth century by Barbeyrac. He published French translations of Grotius and Pufendorf that were translated into English and enjoyed wide popularity in both languages. His Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality (English translation, 1729), which prefaced his edition of Pufendorf, accepted and furthered Pufendorf's understanding of Grotius as the author of the radical break in natural-law theory. Barbeyrac argued for a new school of natural-law theory that included Grotius, John Selden (1584–1654), Pufendorf, Hobbes, Cumberland, and Locke, and his view became the accepted history of modern moral philosophy.

HUMAN WILL

These moves would make human will the determiner of natural-law precepts, leaving altogether open the issue of how to resolve conflicting accounts. Ultimately, this would be dealt with by the reintroduction of experience as that upon which reason operated. And, in keeping with the precepts of natural sociability, a standard of social utility extended over time would become the measure of justice as secular natural law gave place to utilitarianism. The Scholastic doctrine of natural law remained alive in Roman Catholic philosophy and theology.

Yet another and not unrelated direction for the development of natural law thinking was already present in Locke's conception of natural rights, for his emphasis was upon the natural entitlements as limits on the behavior of others and on the actions of government. The popularity of this doctrine represents the triumph of what has been called "individualism." This part of the natural law story ends with Thomas Jefferson's (1743–1826) invocation in the Declaration of Independence of the "law of Nature and Nature's God," a cosmetic reversion to the earlier theistic conception, from which he quickly moved to the self-evident, God-given "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as the only legitimate ends of government. Expanded into the universal "human rights" of contemporary international politics, the modernized version of natural rights has become one of the primary alternatives to utilitarianism and social good as the test for good and just government.

See also Bodin, Jean ; English Civil War Radicalism ; Enlightenment ; Free Will ; Grotius, Hugo ; Hobbes, Thomas ; Locke, John ; Rights, Natural .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Gierke, Otto Friedrich von. Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, by Otto Gierke, with a lecture on The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity, by Ernst Troeltsch. Translated and with an introduction by Ernest Barker. Cambridge, U.K., 1958.

Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Johnson, Harold J., ed. The Medieval Tradition of Natural Law. Kalamazoo, Mich., 1987.

Krieger, Leonard. The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and the Acceptance of Natural Law. Chicago, 1965.

Gordon Schochet