Right Reason in Natural Law Moral Theory

2012 ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Lisska
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Right Reason

Reason as Reckoning: Hobbes's Natural Law as Right Reason

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Barnouw
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Actual Computation ◽  
Right Reason

AbstractHobbes conception of reason as computation or reckoning is significantly different in Part I of De Corpore (entitled Computatio sive Logica) from what I take to be the later treatment in Leviathan. In the late actual computation with words starts with making an affirmation, framing a proposition. Reckoning then has to do with the consequences of propositions, or how they connect the facts, states of affairs or actions which they refer tor account. Starting from this it can be made clear how Hobbes understood the crucial application of this conception to natural law, identified as 'right reason'.

Choosing a Legal Theory on Moral Grounds

1986 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Soper
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Practical Implications

I. INTRODUCTIONTwenty-five years is roughly the time that has elapsed since the exchange between H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller and the subsequent revival in this country of the natural law/positivism debate. During this time, a curious thing has happened to legal positivism. What began as a conceptual theory about the distinction between law and morality has now been turned, at least by some, into a moral theory. According to this theory, the reason we must see law and morality as separate is not (at least not entirely) because of the logic of our language, but because of the practical implications of holding one or the other of the two traditional views in this area. The natural law theorist, it is said, can connect law and morality only at the cost of investing official directives with undeserved moral authority, thus encouraging obedience where there should be none. The natural law position should therefore be rejected – and the positivist's accepted – on moral grounds.

Pirates, Kings and Reasons to Ad: Moral Motivation and the Role of Sanctions in Locke's Moral Theory

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
Moral Rules

Locke's moral theory consists of two explicit and distinct elements — a broadly rationalist theory of natural law and a hedonistic conception of moral good. The rationalist account, which we find most prominently in his early Essays on the Law of Nature, is generally taken to consist in three things. First, Locke holds that our moral rules are founded on universal, divine natural laws. Second, such moral laws are taken to be discoverable by reason. Third, by dint of their divine authorship, moral laws are obligatory and rationally discernible as such. Locke's hedonism, which is developed most fully in his later Essay Concerning Human Understanding, consists in the view that all good amounts to pleasure, with specifically moral good taken to consist in the pleasurable consequences of discharging one's moral duties.

Coke, Corwin and the Constitution: The “Higher Law Background” Reconsidered

1993 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Higher Law ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In recent years the debate over the nature and extent of judicial power in the United States has been dominated by questions concerning moral theory, unwritten constitutions, and natural law. In a significant sense, the contemporary discussion is but the continuation of the theory of judicial review first put forth by Edward S. Corwin in 1910–1911; it was this theory that the “higher law background” of American constitutional law derived from the dicta of Sir Edward Coke's opinion in Bonham's Case (1610) that was given its most complete expression in Corwin's famous two-part article in the Harvard Law Review in 1928–29. The fact is, the influence of Coke's opinion in Bonham's Case came from within the scholarly world; its significance stems not from history but from the historians; it was largely Corwin's creation. This paper seeks to correct the record and to show the deficiencies of Corwin's understanding about the relationship of the “higher law” to the American Constitution.

Is Society-Centered Moral Theory a Contemporary Version of Natural Law Theory?

Dialogue ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
David Copp
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Good Case ◽  
The Core ◽  
Important Idea ◽  
Natural Law Theory

ABSTRACT: David Braybrooke argues that the core of the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas survived in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Much to my surprise, Braybrooke argues as well that David Copp’s society-centered moral theory is a secular version of this same natural law theory. Braybrooke makes a good case that there is an important idea about morality that is shared by the great philosophers in his group and that this idea is also found in Copp’s work. The idea is captured by the Functionalist Thesis, the thesis that moral propositions are made true by facts about what, given the nature of human beings and their circumstances, enables people to live together in thriving communities. I argue that Copp can accept Braybrooke’s suggestion and use it to improve his formulation of the basic idea of the society-centered theory.

Explaining Value

1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Harman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Normative Account

I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do?A moral theory like (one or another version of) utilitarianism (or social-contract theory, natural-law theory, Kantianism, or whatever) may be put forward as offering the correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions.

Catholic Natural Law and Business Ethics

2001 ◽  
pp. 107-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Velasquez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
Basic Goods ◽  
Right Reason

This article describes Catholic natural law tradition by examining its origins in the medieval penitentials, the papal decretals, the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and seventeenth-century casuistry. Catholic natural law emerges as a flexible ethic that conceives of human nature as rational and as oriented to certain basic goods that ought to be pursued and whose pursuit is made possible by the virtues. Four approaches to natural law that have evolved within the United States during the twentieth century are then identified, including the traditionalist, proportionalist, right reason, and historicist approaches. The normative implications of these approaches are discussed in relation to ethical issues in the tobacco industry, ITT under Geneen, the marketing of pharmaceuticals, affirmative action, and bribery. It is argued that Alasdair MacIntyre is correct in claiming that the natural law tradition issuperior to the liberal ethics of modern deontology and utilitarianism.

Religious Conflict and Moral Consensus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Eggers
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Set Up

This chapter is devoted to Hobbes’s attempt to set up the moral theory that grounds his political argument in a way that makes it equally acceptable to proponents of quite different religious and ideological views. The purpose of the chapter is, first, to demonstrate that Hobbes does in fact pursue this strategy and appeal to a consensus omnium at various points of his derivation of the state of war and his doctrine of natural law and natural right; secondly, to systematically describe Hobbes’s underlying approach as an example of ‘extra-moral justification’ and contrast it with John Rawls’s appeal to an ‘overlapping consensus’ as an example of ‘intra-moral justification’; and thirdly, to assess the respective merits of the two types of moral justification with regard to the challenge of religious pluralism.

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