From “Epicurean” Physics to Ethics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
De Legibus ◽  
Natural Law Theory

This chapter discusses Baxter’s theory of natural law and his polemics against Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza on ethical matters. Baxter’s natural law theory drew on Francisco Suárez’s De legibus, which grounded the obligation of the natural law in the divine will and the content of the natural law in the divine wisdom. Baxter responded to the necessitarianism and natural law theories of both Hobbes and Spinoza, but engaged with Spinoza’s arguments more fully. His response is noteworthy for drawing lines of continuity between their physical and ethical views. Unlike most contemporary responses to Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, which focused on his denial of miracles and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Baxter addressed Spinoza’s natural law and political theory, which was central to the argument of the Tractatus.

Biblical Discourses of Law

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
The Law ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Divine Law

This chapter describes biblical discourses of divine law. It begins by examining those biblical texts that emphasize the emergence of divine law from the divine will. These texts stand as resources for later readers who seek to construe biblical divine law as positive law. It then turns to texts that emphasize elements of divine wisdom in the Law. These texts stand as resources for later readers who seek to construe biblical divine law in terms of natural law. Finally, it examines texts that narrate the historical circumstances under which this multifaceted law came into being and its role in the divine plan for Israel and humankind.

Natural Law in the Positive Laws: A Legislative or Adjudicative Issue?

1993 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Hittinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Single Method ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Written Law ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Different Levels

Debates over natural law routinely confuse three quite different sets of issues. First, there are the properly philosophical questions of (i) whether a natural law exists, and (ii) whether positive laws are valid completely apart from their moral specifications. Second, there are questions that properly belong to political theory. These include, (iii) how a constitution ought to allocate responsibility to make natural justice effective, and (iv) how a particular system of positive law handles this issue. Third, assuming that a judiciary is limited by written law, it can still be asked whether this necessarily prohibits judicial uses of natural law theory. Questions at these different levels are sufficiently different that what it takes to solve a question at one level does not necessarily carry over to the others. It is vain, therefore, to search for a single method that brings closure on these issues.

From Hobbes to Shaftesbury

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.

The Acceptance of a Legal System

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Roger A. Shiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Separation Thesis ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Right ◽  
Independent Account

The interest of political theory in the acceptance of law is obvious. If one believes that a regime is legitimate only if it governs with the consent of the governed, then the notion of acceptance is deeply linked with the notion of legitimacy, a fundamental concern of political theory. The interest of legal theory in the notion of acceptance is less obvious. I construe it to arise in the following way. One central tradition in legal theory is that of positivistic or content-independent theories of law. Positivism, crudely speaking, is characterized by some form of the Separation Thesis—that the existence of law is one thing and its merit or demerit another. But if it is important for positivistic legal theory to mark the separation of law and the merits of law, then it must also be important to mark the separation between law and the acceptance of law. The existence of law must be one thing and its acceptance as meritorious another. In deference to the separation of existence and merit, positivism tries to find a content-independent account of the validity of law. Equally, in deference to the separation of law and acceptance, positivism tries to find a content-independent account of the acceptance of law. The topic of this paper is whether the separation of law and the acceptance of law is possible. I shall try to suggest, in service of a non-positivistic or content-dependent approach to law, that this separation is not possible. I will attempt to argue on the basis of points which legal positivism itself has acknowledged to form valid constraints on any theory of acceptance. My ambitious thesis is that positivism has presented us with the reasons for rejecting it. Even if that thesis is not made out, I have a less ambitious thesis which I am confident of securing, that the demand for an account of law which permits law to be accepted ‘for any reason whatever’ is not a theoryneutral demand which might decide between positivism and natural law theory. Rather, it is an expression of a prior commitment to positivism. It is the familiar demand of natural law theory that the convergence of attitudes towards law which makes for acceptance of law must be a convergence for the right kind of reasons; ones that have to do with the value of law.

scholarly journals Aquinas and Scotus on the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
J. Clanton ◽  
Kraig Martin
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Divine Command Theory ◽  
Source Theory ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Divine Law

This paper retraces some of the contrast between Aquinas and Scotus with respect to the metaphysical foundations of morality in order to highlight how subtle differences pertaining to the relationship between the divine will and the divine intellect can tip a thinker toward either an unalloyed natural law theory (NLT) or something that at least starts to move in the direction of divine command theory (DCT). The paper opens with a brief consideration of three distinct elements in Aquinas’s work that might tempt one to view him in a DCT light, namely: his discussion of the divine law in addition to the natural law; his position on the so-called immoralities of the patriarchs; and some of his assertions about the divine will in relation to justice. We then respond to each of those considerations. In the second and third of these cases, following Craig Boyd, we illustrate how Aquinas’s conviction that the divine will follows the ordering of the divine intellect can help inform the interpretive disputes in question. We then turn our attention to Scotus’s concern about the freedom of the divine will, before turning to his discussion of the natural law in relation to the Decalogue as a way of stressing how his two-source theory of the metaphysical foundations of morality represents a clear departure from Aquinas in the direction of DCT.

scholarly journals Natural Law and Civilizational Progress: Assumptions of a Political Theory in Simonas Daukantas’s Historiography

Politologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Saulius Pivoras
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Conjectural History

This article aims to identify and reconstruct a few main elements of political theory upon which the works of Simonas Daukantas, the founding father of the national Lithuanian written history, are based. Daukantas’s major works on Lithuanian history were researched while identifying and closely analyzing the passages where Daukantas specifically speaks about natural law and civilizational progress. Daukantas’s history works were considerably influenced by authors of Neostoic natural law theory, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Antoine-Yves Goguet. This influence shows in the adopted conceptions of natural needs, natural sociability, and a characterization of the emergence of private property rights in Lithuania with the help of conjectural history methods. Daukantas traces natural law elements in the oldest customs of the people and therefore gives most attention to reconstructing and describing the mores of the ancient Lithuanians. In describing historical evolution, he applied in his works the concepts of bright and dark periods as well as the distinctions of other separate stages of civilizational progress as discussed in Enlightenment historiography and conjectural history in particular.

On the Artifactual—and Natural— Character of Legal Institutions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corrado Roversi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Legal Realism ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Law ◽  
Theory Of Law

Are legal institutions artifacts? If artifacts are conceived as entities whose existence depends on human beings, then yes, legal institutions are, of course, artifacts. But an artifact theory of law makes a stronger claim, namely, that there is actually an explanatory gain to be had by investigating legal institutions as artifacts, or through the features of ordinary artifacts. This is the proposition explored in this chapter: that while this understanding of legal institutions makes it possible to find common ground between legal positivism and legal realism, it does not capture all of the insights offered by these two traditions. An artifact theory of law can therefore be necessary in explaining the law, but it will not suffice to that end. This chapter also posits that legal artifacts bear a relevant connection to certain conceptions of nature, thus vindicating one of the original insights behind natural law theory.

scholarly journals God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Full Theory ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Epistemological Dimension

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

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