natural law

natural law theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is opposed to positive law, which is human-made, conditioned by history, and subject to continuous change. The concept of natural law originated with the Greeks and received its most important formulation in Stoicism . The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations were reducible to the dictates of natural law. This idea became particularly important in Roman legal theory, which eventually came to recognize a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples and existing alongside the individual codes of specific places and times (see natural rights ). Christian philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas perpetuated this idea, asserting that natural law was common to all peoples—Christian and non-Christian alike—while adding that revealed law gave Christians an additional guide for their actions. In modern times, the theory of natural law became the chief basis for the development by Hugo Grotius of the theory of international law. In the 17th cent., such philosophers as Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz interpreted natural law as the basis of ethics and morality; in the 18th cent. the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau , especially as interpreted during the French Revolution, made natural law a basis for democratic and egalitarian principles. The influence of natural law theory declined greatly in the 19th cent. under the impact of positivism , empiricism , and materialism . In the 20th cent., such thinkers as Jacques Maritain saw in natural law a necessary intellectual opposition to totalitarian theories.

Bibliography: See J. Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943, repr. 1971); J. Fuchs, Natural Law (1965); J. Stone, Human Law and Human Justice (1965); A. Battaglia, Toward a Reformulation of Natural Law (1981).

natural law The ambiguity of the term natural law rests upon a metaphorical link between regularities in nature and the authoritative regulation of human activity. In its latter use, ‘natural law’ refers to principles of law and morality, supposedly universal in scope and binding on human conduct. In medieval Christian theology natural law was held to be a God-given system, but from the Reformation onwards, attempts were made to give natural law secular foundations in human nature and reason. In the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, for example, ‘laws of nature’ provide rational grounds for the social contract, and so for the establishment of political authority. Since the eighteenth century, legal theory has tended to be hostile to the notion of natural law—the conventional, socially and historically formed character of law being more commonly emphasized. However, the increase in moral authority attaching to human rights since the Second World War owes much to the natural law tradition.

The idea of the natural world as created by God, and so being subject (like human society) to God's authority, led to the metaphorical extension of the notion of natural law to refer to regularities in nature. Here, again, the idea had its religious and its secular adherents, though from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the principal division was between rationalists and empiricists. The former tended to attribute necessity to the laws of nature, some of them (such as Leibniz) supposing these to be rationally demonstrable from a priori principles. The empiricists held that knowledge of the laws of nature could be established only on the basis of observation and experiment. On this view the regularities summarized in laws of nature could not justifiably be held to have any necessity about them. Our expectation that such regularities would continue into the future, however unavoidable in practical life, was ( David Hume argued) nevertheless rationally ungrounded, and a mere habit of mind.

nat·u·ral law • n. 1. a body of unchanging moral principles regarded as a basis for all human conduct. 2. an observable law relating to natural phenomena: the natural laws of perspective. ∎  such laws collectively.