Principles Of Natural Law Research Articles

Judicial Review: Still in Search of True Foundation

The paper is a contribution to the debate on the true foundation of judicial review. The paper argues that since most of the common law grounds of review had their origin in the principles of natural law, common law can not be the true origin. It is also contended that intention of the legislature, whether directly or otherwise can not be the foundation. Where the court can not find justification in the constitution, particularly in countries with written constitution, it should look for source in the formal constitution. A constitution, though written is a codification or the positivisation of unwritten norms. Britain has unwritten constitution, yet that does not mean that there is no constitutional norms that are for long and since time out of mind been known to people as the governing rules. Therefore, whether in a written or unwritten constitutional environment the power of the court to review executive or legislative actions must be traceable to the written or the formal constitution.

Jacques Maritain's Personalistic Society and Pluralism

Jacques Maritain's concept of ttte personalistic society describes a democratic unity of the body politc that mitigates the tension between the material and spiritual aspects of human existence. This unity, grounded in the principles of natural law, makes possible in our terrestrial existence a communion of good living and a rectitude of life--what Maritain calls the bonum honestum. The good he envisions both facilitates and reacts the ideals of an integral Christian humanism, but it necessarily requires for its realization the infusion of Christian ideals into the body politic. It is crucial to Maritain that the process by which this infusion occurs allow for a wide participation of diverse actors, bothh religions and non-religious. But it is also crucial that they are able to converge from their different perspectives into an agreement on "Christianly inspired" practical principles that will subsequently guide public policy. This essay argues that the collective character of the moral personally represented by Maritain in this unity describes a problematic corrtext tor public dialogue that risks undermining the social and political pluralism it presupposes.

The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century: A Question of Collective Guilt (review)

Reviewed by: The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century: A Question of Collective Guilt R. H. Helmholz The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century: A Question of Collective Guilt. By Peter D. Clarke. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pp. x, 300. $117.00. ISBN 978-0-199-20860-9.) Bishop Stubbs once described the interdict as the medieval Church's most suicidal weapon (p. 171)—suicidal because it all but invited the laity to turn [End Page 800] its back on the Church. An interdict was a penal sanction in the medieval canon law barring everyone subjected to it from participation in most of the Church's sacraments. It could be imposed on an individual, but more typically it fell upon a locality, even (as in the famous case of the English King John) upon an entire kingdom. Its design was to put pressure on a person responsible for an offense against the Church by depriving those who were connected with that person of access to the services of the Church. This book is a useful study of the subject, although it is a limited one. Its author sticks resolutely to evidence from the thirteenth century. The curious reader will probably want to know more about the origins of the interdict, its relation to the Roman law interdict, and its history in later centuries. The book deals with the subject in two parts. The first is the interdict's place in the canon law of the thirteenth century. The initial task of the jurists was classification: fixing the different forms of the sanction, distinguishing it from excommunication, clarifying its consequences, and listing the exceptions that were being carved out to soften its effect. For example, crusaders, charitable workers, and noblemen were often given freedom to hear religious offices in interdicted locations (pp. 136–38). The subsequent task of bringing interdicts within principles of divine and natural law proved harder. Interdicts touched the innocent, thus violating the established rule that punishment should be reserved for the guilty, and they were often imposed by aggrieved parties, thus posing a conflict in acting as judge in their own cause that was contrary to principles of natural law. Could any reason but practical advance of the Church's material interests be given for allowing interdicts? Yes, as it turns out, reasons were found. Biblical example and exploration of the nature of collective guilt provided answers of a sort. Indeed, interdicts led the canonists into some fruitful discussions of the right relation between kings and their subjects. The book's second part consists of an examination of the interdict in action. Those placed on San Gemignano, Dax, and Béziers are examined in detail. Others are noted more briefly. Countermeasures taken by secular rulers are explored, and reactions common within the laity are discussed. There is enough evidence to show that the laity resented the imposition of these interdicts. Why should they continue to pay tithes to a clergy that had gone out on strike? Why should a mortuary payment be due when burial in consecrated ground was forbidden? All the ingenuity of the canonists fell short of providing convincing answers to such questions, although they certainly tried. It must have been at least in part the result of such resentment that territorial interdicts were imposed less frequently as time went on. The thirteenth century seems to have been the high watermark. The question remains: Did the interdict work? The book faces it squarely and gives a qualified but affirmative answer. Medieval men thought the interdict "worth being free from" (p. 218). They were willing to give up their own interests in favor of those of the Church to escape it. It thus turned out to be less than suicidal in practice. Longer term results are harder to assess, and [End Page 801] Clarke wisely avoids speculating about them. The result is a balanced presentation of a controversial subject. R. H. Helmholz University of Chicago Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Natural Law Liberalism

Natural Law Liberalism. By Christopher Wolfe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 268p. $75.00 cloth.Although natural law theory and liberal political philosophy signify two realms of thought typically regarded as at loggerheads, Christopher Wolfe's provocatively titled book not only argues for their theoretical compatibility but also sets forth a new synthesis intended to furnish the basis for an inclusive American public philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the fact that modern liberalism fought its way into historical existence as a radical alternative to political excesses sanctioned by traditional versions of natural law theory, Wolfe maintains that the political character of this initial confrontation has given rise to unnecessarily narrow and antagonistic understandings of the relationship between them. Natural law and modern liberalism are in fact products of two richly varied and complex intellectual traditions. By disentangling the essential features of natural law theory from the historical circumstances within which it developed, and by setting out the full array of political philosophies that constitute the tradition of liberalism, Wolfe advances a serious and thoughtful account of the way in which the objective moral principles of natural law can and ought to be reconciled with modern liberalism's distinctive commitments to liberty and equality. By challenging the underlying premises of contemporary debate about the proper relationship between religion and politics, he opens a new and constructive path for future dialogue among often polarized and combative participants.

The third era of human rights: global accountability

This article argues that the trend in the current protection of human rights may be seen as a revival of an old idea: governments are accountable for their actions. The protection of human rights has gone through three eras. In the first era, the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages claimed to rule from a divine mandate. This principle of natural law was a unifying factor in western Europe because it created a standard system of morality. The second era, beginning in the seventeenth century with the doctrine of state sovereignty, rejected that natural law. Rulers wanted to run their own territories and not be subject to foreign influence. Laws were created by the ‘national sovereign’ (king, queen, president, parliament, congress and so on). This legal doctrine survived for about three centuries, but the excesses of leaders such as Hitler in the middle of last century forced a re-think. Although the term ‘natural law’ is not used, there has been a revival of its essential meaning: that governments have to be answerable to a higher authority for their behaviour.

The Universal Common Good and the Authority of International Law

The Universal Common Good and the Authority of International Law Paolo G. Carozza (bio) "If we are to avoid descending into chaos . . . we must rediscover within States and between States the paramount value of the natural law, which was the source of inspiration for the rights of nations and for the first formulations of international law."1 These words, which Pope John Paul II addressed to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, provide the starting point for serious reflection on and renewal of Catholic thought regarding international law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Modern international law did indeed first take root in the fertile soil of natural law thinking, and from its firm stand on that ground the Catholic Church has consistently provided international law with strong intellectual and moral foundations. Yet, despite that constant tradition, the Holy Father rightly spoke of the need to rediscover the value of the natural law between states, for it is undoubtedly the case that the dominant currents of juridical thinking today at least ignore and often reject theories of natural law as viable bases for judging the value and authority of international law in the contemporary world. To reinvigorate and reassert the distinctive contribution of the Church to [End Page 28] international law for the twenty-first century thus coincides with a return to the first principles of natural law. Therefore, I propose to begin by raising some basic questions about the foundations and ends of modern international law from the perspective of the Catholic intellectual tradition. What is "authoritative" about international law and international legal institutions in the contemporary world, seen in the light of natural law reasoning and in the light of the concrete global realities of the beginning of the twenty-first century? In particular, I would like to examine carefully the proposition that international law and international legal institutions should be considered to have a special moral status in the contemporary global order in virtue of the existence and requirements of the universal common good. I. The Basic Theoretical Dilemma of Modern International Law To begin to ask about Catholic thought and international law requires first setting aside some of the basic premises of legal positivism that prevail in legal theory today. If we are to consider international law to be "law" in any significant sense at all, we must be able to reasonably claim that it provides grounds for constraining and directing the behavior of states, the principal subjects of that law. Yet, contemporary theories of the modern international legal system have consistently had difficulty articulating and defending the basis for that authority. How can a system of norms that emerges exclusively from the will and narrowly conceived self-interest of states also stand outside those states as an objective reason for limiting and controlling them? To the extent that the ultimate source of authority of international law is regarded merely as the actual behavior and the consent of states, every attempt to ground the authority of international law has become an exercise in obscuring the circularity of the argument. That prevailing positivism of modern international legal theory is typically sustained either by an intellectual sleight-of-hand [End Page 29] and deliberate truncation of the question of the ultimate authority of law (as in Kelsen) or else by reducing the phenomenon of law to a sociological reality without real normative force (as in Hart). It is no wonder that in this intellectual and moral vacuum, the most theoretically attractive postpositivist accounts of international law today both in Europe and in the United States, consistently conclude that it is nothing other than a linguistic game, a discursive construct to clothe the reality of raw willfulness and self-interest with the illusion of necessity and legitimacy. If the state, considered as a purely sociological reality, is all that there is at the foundation of international law, then there is ultimately no real reason or truth to it, and what passes for law becomes a form of violence toward what is truly human. As John Paul II observed, Human values, moral values, are at the basis of everything. Law cannot set them aside, neither in...

Americanization of Natural Law: A Historical Perspective

Americanization Of Natural Law:A Historical Perspective Herman Belz (bio) The role and significance of natural law in the twenty-first century are the same as they have always been: namely, to constitute a moral order favorable to the existence and flourishing of human beings in the world. Within the framework of laws of nature that govern the physical environment, natural law is a historically known and time-honored philosophical system that has regard for human beings in particular. Furnishing means of thinking and acting through the faculty of practical reason, natural law enables humans to thrive in ways consistent with the kind of being they are. Natural law presents itself as a comprehensive account of human existence and provision. Insofar as age and generation—temporality and secularity—are properties of the world, natural law recognizes memory and historical reflection as essential features of human experience. Accordingly, to understand its role in secular society we are permitted, if not required, to take into account the historical dimension of natural law. This means recognizing the existence of natural law in history without historicizing it—without assuming, that is, that its meaning is exhausted by consideration of the changing historical contexts in which natural law texts are written.1 Controversy over the meaning of natural law throughout history parallels its apparent indispensability in political rhetoric and moral discourse since ancient times. A threshold difficulty is to explain what is "natural" and what "law-ful" about natural law thinking. In this context, the idea of nature means essence, form, kind, or category. Concerned mainly with ethics and morality, it has reference primarily to mental-intellectual rather than physical-biological features of human existence. The element of law in the equation refers to the binding and obligatory character of natural law principles. Further to define its basic meaning, it is pertinent to observe that although always subject to challenge by doubters and skeptics, until the early twentieth century natural law was recognized as a theory of objective moral reality.2 If natural law is an objective moral order for human flourishing, its enforcement might be assumed to be in some sense necessary and irresistible, comparable to the ordering of the physical world. An approximation of the idea of self-enforcement is expressed in descriptions of natural law as "the law written on the human heart," and as the reasoning faculty of "common sense" by which human beings distinguish right from wrong. In fact, the need constantly to recur to the natural law in a more explicit theoretical sense suggests the imperfectness of these means. Nevertheless they help to clarify the fact that, taken on its own terms as an objective moral order existing outside the mind and will of human beings, natural law implicates, if it does not depend upon, the personal responsibility of the individual for his or her actions.3 Natural law is the study of being, existence, what is. An advance beyond primitive religious speculation about the cosmos, it emerged when critical reason observed changing customs, laws and conventions in human society. Natural law inquiry sought to identify the unchanging and essential basis of the positive rules that regulated social organization. Natural law was the "moral reflex of the metaphysical order of the universe," disclosed to human reason by the gods of antiquity or the Hebraic and Christian God in the creation of the world.4 To the extent that it requires recognition through human reason, the efficacy of natural law is always subject to qualification and challenge from human willfulness. This problem is historically illustrated in the conflict between Platonism and Sophism in fifth-century Greek philosophy, and between nominalism and realism in twelfth-century European philosophy. The metaphysical realism of natural law, in part no doubt because of its dependence on human nature, is always at risk of producing its positivist opposite or alternative. As approaches to moral reasoning, both natural law and positivism have intellectual appeal and lend themselves to a wide range of practical applications.5 With the advent of modernity in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the natural law tradition was relegated to premodern intellectual standing. Cartesian rationalism shifted philosophical investigation from the ontological...

Finnis and Aquinas on the Good of Life

In his Natural Law and Natural Rights, Fundamentals of Ethics, and other works, the Oxford professor of jurisprudence and moral theologian John Finnis has elaborated a theory of ethics and natural law that he presents as being based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Finnis has been influenced in this project by the moral theologian Germain Grisez, and has worked in cooperation with Grisez and Joseph Boyle on these issues, but I will confine myself to a discussion of Finnis’s thought, while noting that my conclusions will have implications for the views of Grisez and Boyle as well.) His account of natural law incorporates a particular account of human life as a good for practical reasoning, from which he concludes — in disagreement with Aquinas — that capital punishment is immoral. This conclusion has gained wide acceptance among Catholics, partly because of the influence of Finnis and Grisez’s moral theories. I want to examine his understanding of the good of life, contrasting it with the actual views of St. Thomas, and argue that it is mistaken. I will then explain why I think his mistake is an important one that needs to be avoided.Finnis presents his account of natural law as being modelled on St. Thomas’s account of the first principles of natural law, which is given chiefly in the Summa Theologiae, la2ae q.94 a.2. It may be helpful to sketch St. Thomas’s understanding of practical as opposed to theoretical reason. Theoretical reason aims at knowledge of how things are, and its activity terminates in belief about how things are.

La conformidad de decisiones en el Código de 1983

Canon 1641 gathers together the various ways in which the formal effect of an adjudged matter can come about. This effect has priority and the material effect of the res iudicata totally depends on it. Therefore, the impossibility of right of appeal carries with it as a consequence the right of that which has been decided be put into effect since it has become an adjudged matter. In the canonical process the adjudged matter is a juridical institution directly based in the search for the truth, the most important reason for the process itself. This certainty is lawfully obtained by virtue of the two conforming judgements when this double conformity refers to the same action, constituted by the effective coincidence of the elements of the action. Moreover, the said action has to be fully identified in the lawsuit, and above all, in the legal summing up which determines the content of the sentence. With respect to the adjudged matter in cases concerning the status of persons, in spite of the exception established in Can. 1643, in fact in all instances when two conforming judgements have been made in this type of case the formal efrect and the material effect of the adjudged matter have been made operative anyway. When the said double conformity does not exist the presentation of a new proposition of the case not linked to new and serious arguments is possible. Nevertheless, the preclusion of double conformity ought to be extended to all cases in which there has been at least one decision made in the case (fundamentally the assumptions of numbers 2° and 3° of Canon 1641), so that greater juridical security would be assured in this type of case which, nonetheless, could always be reopened with new argumments with the purpose of preventing whatever possible injustice may have arisen from the unsoundeness of a previous decision. With regard to double conformity in matrimonial cases, this procedural principle is very closely linked to three other principles of Natural Law;

"The Law Written in Their Hearts"?: Rutherford and Locke on Nature, Government and Resistance

In a familiar passage, R.H. Tawney has spoken of the transformation of natural law in the seventeenth century—an age in which the concept of “Nature” came to “connote not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.” “Natural rights” replaced “natural law” in the context of an ongoing inquiry into the sources and limits of political authority. Central to this discussion remains the enigmatic figure of John Locke. A common refrain in the literature identifies Locke—that many-faceted “man in whose name the American Revolution was made, … the man above all whom hysterical conservatives all over Europe would blame for the collapse of the Ancien Regime”—as, in addition, a religious thinker whose Christianity colors the entire fabric of his political philosophy; as, even more specifically, the “heir of puritan political theorists.” In this vein, at least one writer has ventured to connect Locke with a now largely forgotten piece of 17th century political theory, Lex, Rex, the work of puritan pastor, theologian and political controversialist, Samuel Rutherford. The general impression seems to be that Locke's Calvinist upbringing places him in a long line of Reformed Christian resistance theorists. On the other hand, Lex, Rex has been called “a deeply Thomistic book” for its close adherence to natural law principles in the scholastic tradition.

Theorizing the Racialization of Global Politics and the Caribbean Experience

Hilbourne Watson (*) This article on the racialization of global politics addresses questions of the making of the modern world, as reflected through economic exploitation, racial, ethnic, and gender oppression, struggles against commodification and for liberation, and the role of philosophical and theoretical debates in the historical process. Global white supremacy has played an important role in the racialization of global politics, and while it continues to be contested it remains a key ideological rallying factor around the invention of the white race, which developed along several interconnected streams. Those streams have included politics, class, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, law, private property and property rights, slavery and abolition, labor market, employment and compensation strategies, enfranchisement and disfranchisement, racial privilege, and political patronage. (1) The racialization of global politics is a dialectical process of construction and reconstruction. I argue that race is a socially constructed phenomenon. In other words, while I recognize that there are ethnic differences among human groups, I contest the claim of race as an irreducible biological category that equates with culture, understood as the nature and embodiment of humans that are to be found in a timeless history. The social construction of race means that, for a variety of ends, humans invent the category of race and assign meanings to it and to racial hierarchies. Modern forms of race and racism acquire meaning within capitalist social relations of production, ideologically, politically, culturally, and materially, through slavery, indenture, sharecropping, and wage labor, under colonialism and imperialism. State policies of segregation such as Jim Grow in the United States and apartheid in South Africa gave particular meanings to race and racism. Race works through different claims, for example, ancestry, blood, color, and a number of retrospective illusions that help to frame right, status, and privilege for some at the expense of others. The project of white supremacy has complex articulations that range from denying the humanity of certain groups to strategies that trace humanity to a common mother source out of which nonwhites preceded whites as lower orders to pave the way for whites to assume the mantle of civilization. Liberal philosophy is implicated in this perspective, which assumes that it is the civilizing mission of whites to elevate all others. All whites benefit from the historically ascribed privilege of whiteness, whether or not they endorse or practice white supremacy. I highlight the construction of a specific form of racial contract, which I take, following Mills's The Racial Contract, to be a subset within the Western social contract. I discuss the tendency of Enlightenment and romanticist representations to define class differences in biological racial terms in relation to forms of property-sanctioned inequality, where biology and race are equated with culture. This is where the strategy of normalizing and naturalizing inequality was made into a constant across the spectrum of Western philosophy and social and political thought. I draw on racial perspectives from Immanuel Kant, G. W. Hegel, Cecil Rhodes, Theodore Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann, among others, to show how attempts were made to derive white supremacy from natural-law principles. I pay attention to the role of culture in shaping international relations (IR) representations of the nature of the world and human nature by explaining, following Beate Jahn and Roger Bartra, (2) among others, how IR historicized nature and naturalized history and culture with the effect of normalizing European cultural (racialized) accounts of the world. In addition, I focus on the place and role of race in the making of the United States of America and on how the United States used race to forge its own self-concepts and export Jim Crow as white supremacy, with fundamental impacts on, and implications for, the entire Caribbean. …

Tomo Akviniečio žmogaus laisvės teorijos tyrimai XX amžiuje (I)

Straipsnyje apžvelgiami Tomo Akviniečio laisvės teorijos tyrimai XX amžiuje. Pirmiausia aptariami Tomo prigimtinio įstatymo sampratos, arba jo etikos statuso, tyrimai. Tai tyrimai, orientuoti į žmogaus laisvės problemos sprendimo prielaidas. Čia analizuojama, kiek pagrįsta tradicinė neotomistinė pozicija laikyti Akviniečio etiką prigmtinio įstatymo teorija, o prigimtinį įstatymą - laisvos žmogaus veiksenos principu. Kita straipsnyje apžvelgiama kryptis - bendroji jo laisvės ir laisvos žmogaus veiksenos teorija. Analizuojamas labai platus problemų spektras, apimantis laisvo veiksmo struktūrą, valios ir intelekto santykį.

“The Wages (and Hours) of Sin: Rerum Novarum, Lochner v. New York, and Natural Law Constitutionalism”

Lochner v. New York is often considered, by liberals and conservatives alike, a monument to the perils of using natural law principles to guide judicial decision making. In fact, Lochner stands as one of the few Court decisions—like Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson—which is virtually universally reviled, regardless of political orientation, for liberals see in it the obduracy of the court committed to protecting the interests of the propertied against the modest efforts of the state to ameliorate the conditions of the workers (in Holmes’ stinging words, to “enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics”), where conservatives see in it the beginning of the Court’s forays away from the protection of textually-based constitutional rights, into the realm of judicial creativity in inventing new ones and so undermining democratic decision making. In fact, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case in which a statute outlawing the distribution of contraceptives was found unconstitutional on the basis of a right to privacy found in the “penumbras and emanations” of the Bill of Rights, Justice Black’s dissent, ignoring the penumbras and emanations language for the nonsense that it is, specifically castigates the court for inventing the constitutional right to privacy out of whole cloth, using “the same natural law due process philosophy found in Lochner v. New York.”1 It is undeniably true that the Supreme Court’s forays into this line of natural law jurisprudence in reality undergird the abortion decisions (which initially relied heavily on Griswold and the right to

Aquinas's Two Doctrines of Natural Law

This paper examines the role which the concept of natural law has to play in the political thought of Aquinas, as this is to be found in the Summa Theologiae. It focuses particularly on Aquinas's understanding of the relationship which exists between natural and positive law. It argues that Aquinas's views are inconsistent and that the Summa actually contains two quite different positions regarding this subject. One of these is inherited from the Stoic natural law tradition and the other from Aristotle. The former considers natural law to be a critical standard by means of which positive law can be evaluated by individuals, whereas the latter does not. On the contrary, it maintains that according to Aquinas the principles of natural law require interpretation, and that this interpretation is to be provided, not by the conscience of the individual moral agent, but by positive law. Focus on either one or the other of these two documents leads to quite different interpretations of Aquinas's political thought as a whole. One such interpretation sees Aquinas as being a distant forerunner of the liberal political tradition. The other associates Aquinas much more closely with the notion of authority and hence with conservatism in politics. The article concludes by commenting on the relevance of these different interpretations of Aquinas for the contemporary debate between liberals and communitarians.

Hobbes and the Liberalization of Christianity

AbstractHobbes regarded traditional Christianity as one of the leading threats to the preservation of civil peace. This article argues that he responded to this threat by developing an innovative reinterpretation of Christianity designed to tame it from within. This reinterpretation involved the reshaping of leading Christian doctrines around the same liberal principles that underlie his conception of political authority, the natural law principles of equality of right and inalienable rights. Although this political “liberalization” of Christianity may well have enhanced the prospects of civil peace, it did so by undermining doctrines central to Christianity's biblical roots.

Corporate Decisionmaking and the Moral Rights of Employees: Participatory Management and Natural Law

Participatory management--the philosophy of involving employees in corporate decisionmaking--arguably is the most important industrial relations phenomenon of the last three decades. It has been endorsed by such disparate figures as President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Thousands of U.S. firms have adopted one form of employee involvement or another. Insofar as the academic literature on participatory management is concerned with normative questions, it is dominated by calls for some form or another of government-mandated employee participation in corporate decisionmaking. Normative analyses of participatory management by pro-mandate scholars have developed two justifications for government intervention: One sounds in the language of economics, typically arguing that participatory management is an efficient system of organizing production that is nevertheless being thwarted by various market failures requiring governmental correction. I have explored this argument elsewhere, concluding that government-mandated employee involvement cannot be justified on economic grounds [Stephen M. Bainbridge, Privately Ordered Participatory Management: An Organizational Failures Analysis, Del. J. Corp. L. (forthcoming 1998)]. In this Article, I evaluate the other set of pro-mandate arguments; namely, the claim that employees have a right to participate in corporate governance. On close examination, much of the normative literature on employee participation amounts to little more than talk, i.e., political rhetoric dressed up in legal and/or moral rights terminology. For ideologically motivated proponents of employee participation, this is a useful debating tactic because our culture's fixation with individual rights imbues any rights-based claim with an air of legitimacy and incontrovertibility. Using rights-based terminology to phrase the question, however, often impedes or even precludes meaningful analysis. The task before us is thus two-fold. First, we must subject the claim that employees have a right to participate in corporate governance to a rigorous process of specification and assessment. Second, we must ask whether this right--as so specified--merits codification into positive law. I have two principal foils in this article. The first is Roman Catholic social teaching on work and capitalism, which offers the most fully realized statement of natural law principles applicable to the problem at hand. The second is a body of literature to which I will refer as secular humanist. This literature consists mainly of rights talk drawing on precepts of humanistic psychology. Although scholars approaching the problem from this angle thus are not working within a natural law paradigm, their work deserves examination both because it has certain superficial similarities with Catholic social teaching and because it represents the other dominant theory upon which rights-based claims are made in support of government-mandated participatory management. Although both the relevant Catholic social teachings and secular humanist arguments are complex and nuanced, both fairly can be said to emphasize two basic claims. First, participation is asserted to be an essential mechanism for full development of human personality. Self-realization and self-actualization are the conceptual engines driving this claim. Second, participation is posited to be an essential feature of human dignity. I have identified three basic ways in which participation might be related to human dignity: Participation may promote trust between employers and employees. Participation promotes workplace democracy. Participation rights protect employees from opportunistic conduct by employers. I argue only the latter theory rises to the level of plausibility, and it cannot justify government-mandated employee participation.

Ethical Standards in Advertising: A Worldwide Perspective

An empirical study indicates how close advertisers from all the continents have been from the natural law and other fundamental moral principles. In their professional activities, many advertisers assumed the philosophical relativism as the framework for fundamental concepts. The ethical problems have not been equated with objectivity and the realist approach is appointed as a solution.

Lo jurídico en la filosofía luliana

Raimundo Lulio sees law, and all created things in the world, from the philosophical viewpoint and the kind of reasoning favoring theology, since that reasoning gets the arguments to prove christian faith. Law is an unclair, although necessary, science, due to the absence of charity. To Raimundo Lulio, who seems to know this very well, the legalized activity is complex and complicated. And that's why he proposes in his Arte a guiding methodology, which is a simplified and mechanic system to apply law and do justice, based on principles of theology and natural law. Raimundo Lulio plays utopia.

Principles of Criminal Legislation in Post Modern Society: The Case of Environmental Law

Comparing the US and Germany with respect to the basic principles behind legislative measures in the field of criminal law reveals a considerable similarity. While in the US causation of social harm or danger of social harm are necessary requirements for punishing conduct, in Germany it is the violation of a legal interest ("Rechtsgut"). As a consequence, the legitimacy of an environmental law is questionable within postmodern fun and consumer society. Because the consumption of natural resources under the economic conditions of unleashed global capitalism in its huge dimensions is mostly legal, it is not feasible to see the environment as the genuine legal interest the criminal law has to protect. In view of contemporary reality which will inevitably result in an ecological Holocaust this paper argues for a distribution of goods based on principles of natural law: each generation has to pass on the natural resources to the next generation in a condition which has not been deteriorated compared to the condition it was obtained from a prior generation. Therefore, disproportionate consumption of non-renewable resources or wasting renewable resources are offenses by natural law which are of much more significance than the property order of produced goods and the corresponding offense of theft.

Changing course: civil rights at the crossroads

Course traces the rise and fall of the civil rights movement in the United States. It locates the origins of the civil rights vision firmly in the intellectual soil of the American Revolution. This vision carried the day through the abolition of slavery to the triumph of equal opportunity in the 1960s. Throughout, Bolick argues, the efforts of the civil rights movement were rooted in principles of natural law, and anchored in concern for fundamental rights and equality under the law. Bolick explores the movement's sudden abandonment of those principles during the 1960s, and examines the nature and consequences of the revised civil rights agenda during the past two decades. The book is particularly timely, appearing in the midst of growing polarization over civil rights and at a time when both liberals and conservatives are grappling to set a course of action for the post-Reagan years. Changing Course identifies clearly real civil rights problems of today as government-erected barriers to entrepreneurial and educational opportunity as well as a vicious cycle of dependency and despair. Bolick outlines a vigorous course of action that would eliminate those barriers based on traditional principles of civil rights. The book provides an intellectual and practical framework for a positive alternative to the agenda of the present-day civil rights establishment. It challenges advocates of individual liberty to reclaim leadership in the quest for civil rights for all.