Contemporary Natural Law Theory

Abstract

Recent work in natural law theory, both in moral theory and jurisprudence, is by any account burgeoning. The last third of the twentieth century witnessed a burst of energy by philosophers sorting out its many-faceted claims. Natural law, with extensive resources rooted in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics andwith Stoic modifications, was developed and systematized in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas; his Summa Theologiae (Ia-IIae, QQ. 90-7, see Thomas Aquinas 1996) became the classical canon for much natural law thinking. The insights of Aquinas focused on the role of the human person possessing a unique essence or nature as a necessary condition for a cogent theory of ethical naturalism and a foundational theory for human law. But since natural law is based on human nature, both the Kantian objections to the possibility of a naturalist moral theory together with Moore’s naturalistic fallacy cast a death-knell on natural law philosophy. As a result, throughmost of the twentieth century ethical naturalism as found inAristotle and developed in natural law theory was not a vibrant component of significant moral discussions in Anglo-American philosophy. But the tide has changed. While the concept of natural law plays an essential role in the historicaldevelopment of Western moral and political theory, nonetheless there is no one theory of natural law. What is common to natural law accounts, for the most part, is that its fundamental principles are in some sense objective, knowable by human reason, grounded in human nature, and not related necessarily although sometimes connected historically with divine command theory. Nonetheless, there are different ways that these principles have been adopted and adapted over the course of the development of Western philosophy.