James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount of Stair, on Legal Normativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-157
Author(s):  
Laurent Jaffro
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Will ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Legal Normativity ◽  
Will Of God

The chapter concentrates on Stair’s understanding of laws, whether human-made or divine. Scots law is a particular application of a rational legislation, which ultimately rests upon God’s perfections. However, positive law cannot be entirely derived from natural law, mainly because of the Fall and also for pragmatic reasons. One important aspect of Stair’s contribution to legal and moral philosophy is his distinction between conventional and obediential obligations (from the will of God only), and his account of the principle of ‘engagement’ at work in conventional obligations. Also, Stair’s view that a promise is binding per se, without acceptance by the promisee, deserves attention.

Wild Justice, Justice as Virtue, and Natural Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-168
Author(s):  
Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Will ◽  
Natural Law Ethics ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter begins to link the earlier discussion on the evolution of justice with debates about what justice as a human virtue means and in relationship with different varieties of natural law ethics. How far are accounts of human justice as a virtue of the will still reasonable in an evolutionary age or where contemporary psychological studies deny the presence of the will? Should theologians and philosophers insist on an objective as well as a subjective account of natural law in spite of strong evolutionary and philosophical objections? What is the relationship between reason and revelation in classic accounts of justice as virtue and how might this compare with an evolutionary or systems approach? This chapter explores theoretical scientific frameworks in systems theory and argues that a modest version of natural law could be viewed as a normative aspect of a complex system. More recently, understanding the earth as a single Earth System that has planetary boundaries has gained traction in current debates on the Anthropocene. The author argues that this approach is the culmination of the turn to systems theory in science. Adopting the Earth System as a paradigm has profound ethical implications for humans and other creaturely kinds. Therefore, a discussion of the tensions that come to the surface in navigating a scientific and theistic account is not overlooked. While natural law also has a rich history in positive law, the thoughts of Jean Porter and Thomas Aquinas are drawn on to recover a scholastic version of natural law that is theistic, rather than stripped to its Aristotelian bones.

Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. By T. J. Hochstrasser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 246p. $54.95.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Seidler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Ius Gentium

This detailed historical study focuses on Protestant natural law theories in the early German Enlightenment (explicitly excluding the French and British sectors) and traces their influence, or fate, through Kant. Despite its title, it is more than a specialist tome devoted to an historically isolable development, and it is not merely a subsidiary, underlaborer's attempt to recount the prehistory of Kant's achievement. Rather, by tracing several important background currents through the period concerned, Hochstrasser illuminates the odd historical fact that German enlighteners at the end of this span knew or thought so little of those at its beginning. The central topics are eclecticism; the so-called “histories of morality” that were part of its self-conscious legitimation method; the rationalism-voluntarism split in early modern natural law; and the associated distinction among moral philosophy (ethics), natural (positive) law, and international law (ius gentium) that developed out of these debates.

On the Primacy of Duties

Philosophy ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 70 (274) ◽  
pp. 513-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rom Harré ◽  
Daniel N. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Per Se

The concept of rights is among the more thoroughly examined in political philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains ontologically elusive and morally problematical. In the form of an allegedly natural endowment bequeathed by the Stoic philosophers, it was famously dismissed by Bentham as ‘nonsense on stilts’. Chiefly by way of natural law theory and versions of Kantian moral philosophy rights arise at once from the presupposed autonomy of rational beings and from certain duties others have to beings of such a kind. Within this tradition it is argued that morality itself is grounded in the autonomy of rational beings and that whatever overrides this autonomy converts such beings to instrumental means. Accordingly, there is a basic right to be regarded as a moral being and it is this right that generates or is foundational for the rest. Debate continues, of course, on such questions as to whether autonomy per se either logically or morally requires dutiful respect and whether rationality per se is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for autonomy itself.

scholarly journals Teorii despre dreptul natural în Antichitate și Evul Mediu

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-566
Author(s):  
Arthur Mihăilă ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Of God

Natural law philosophers believe that human laws must be defined by moral principles that have origins in human nature or the will of God. In this paper the author analyzes the most important natural law theories from Antiquity and Middle Ages. Natural law tradition has its roots in the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. That philosophy was resuscitated in the twentieth century after the Holocaust and continues to be influential to the present day.

scholarly journals Funciones normativas y voluntad de signo

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (44) ◽  
pp. 27-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto J. Vernengo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Empirical Expression ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Relationship

Legal philosophers and logicians study problems related to the syntactical and semantical aspects of norms, without worrying about the ilocutionary aspects of their use. With Kelsen 's posthumous work, the Allgemeine Theorie der Normen, and the new preoccupations of deontic logicians, it seems that what is called the "normative functions" of norms are becoming a central point of the discussions between logicians and philosophers of law and moralists. Traditionally, the ilocutionary aspects of norms has been construed as the question of the empirical manifestation of the will, as it is suppossed that every norm expresses somebody's will. Nevertheless, that thesis -although traditional in legal and moral thought- implies some metaphysical presuppositions concerning the ontological status of what is called "the will" which must be brought to light if jurisprudence is going to attain a modern scientific approach. In Kelsen's work it seems clear that the relationship between das Sollen and das Wollen is where that old metaphysical idea regains strength. It can be found in Thomas Aquinas -and the c1assicalscholastics- a sort of theory on the empirical expression of acts of will, know as signa voluntatis, which keeps close and analogy with the normative functions of modern jurisprudence. Perhaps the theory of positive law, as manifestation of signa voluntatis, would establish a bridge between modern legal positivism and some forms of classical natural law.

Achenwalls Theorie der Verbindlichkeit. Quellen- und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Erkundungen

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-351
Author(s):  
Clemens Schwaiger
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Of God

Achenwall’s textbook on ‘ius naturae’, first published in 1750 and subsequently often reprinted, was certainly one of the most powerful lecture-compendia in the second half of the 18th century in Germany, not at least because of its momentous reception by Kant. If one takes a closer look, it turns out - according to the thesis of the present con­tribution - not to be a finished product from the beginning, but a typical ‘work in progress’. Its incessant process of growth across the various editions is to be demon­strated and followed up here by means of the guiding concept of ‘obligatio’, a key term of natural law in general during the time of the Enlightenment. What will be in detail analysed is the definition, the classification of obligation and its role as the highest prin­ciple. As a result of this investigation we see a change from an ethic of perfection, ori­ginally marked by Wolff, to an ever stronger emphasis on the will of God.

“I Saw a Kingfisher”: Grace and Ruin in Golding's The Spire

Horizons ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
D. M. Yeager
Keyword(s):  
Apple Tree ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Ambiguity ◽  
William Golding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Of God

AbstractWilliam Golding, in The Spire, invites us to ask how we may know the will of God, and suggests that what we take to be the will of God is often simply the projection onto history of the disguised image of our private and self-absorbed desires. Though contemporary critics tend to interpret the novel as a sympathetic exploration of moral ambiguity rather than as a compelling condemnation of Jocelin's mortifying and death-dealing sin, the novel turns on the contrast between the drive toward dominion and the capacity for assent. The final salvific discovery, given form in Jocelin's mind by the experience of the apple tree and the kingfisher, is the overthrow of the will, its panicked drowning, in terrified apprehension of implacable glory and squandered gifts.

On American Values, Unalienable Rights, and Human Rights: Some Reflections on the Pompeo Commission

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Risse
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
American Values ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The U.S

AbstractIn July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with a reexamination of the scope and nature of human rights–based claims. From his statements, it seems that Pompeo hopes the commission will substantiate—by appeal to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and to natural law theory—three key conservative ideas: (1) that there is too much human rights proliferation, and once we get things right, social and economic rights as well as gender emancipation and reproductive rights will no longer register as human rights; (2) that religious liberties should be strengthened under the human rights umbrella; and (3) that the unalienable rights that should guide American foreign policy neither need nor benefit from any international oversight. I aim to show that despite Pompeo's framing, the Declaration of Independence, per se, is of no help with any of this, whereas evoking natural law is only helpful in ways that reveal its own limitations as a foundation for both human rights and foreign policy in our interconnected age.

scholarly journals Human Rights and Human Nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-534
Author(s):  
Jean Rhéaume
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Positive Law

At least two important consequences follow from the fact that human rights are based on human nature. First, they exist according to natural law even in cases where positive law does not recognize them. Secondly, they cannot evolve because the nature and purpose of the human being does not change: only their formulation and level of protection in positive law can vary according to the socio-historical context.

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