Ethics Through History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Rational Basis ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Ethical Knowledge ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Just Society

This book is a selective discussion of the tradition in moral philosophy that runs from Socrates to the present. The main themes: (1) Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics take different positions in debates the relation between morality (including right action and the character of virtuous agents) and the human good. Aquinas’ version of an Aristotelian view identifies the human good with the fulfilment of human nature and capacities in a just society. These facts about the human good can be discovered by rational reflexion on human nature and human needs. (2) These views both about the content of ethics and about the sources of ethical knowledge are questioned by Scotus and later writers on natural law. Voluntarists take the principles of natural law and moral right to be the products of will; naturalists take them to be discovered by reason. (3) The dispute about will and reason is the source of the long dispute between sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume) and rationalists (Butler, Price, Reid) about whether moral judgment has a non-rational or a rational basis. Kant tries to resolve this dispute. (4) These arguments lead to further discussion about what makes morally right actions right. Sentimentalists, followed by Mill and Sidgwick and by later utilitarians, argue that actions are right in so far as they maximize pleasure. Others, including the rationalists, Kant, Ross, and Rawls, argue that moral principles are not subordinate to utility.

Morality and Social Human Nature

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Basis ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Important Link ◽  
Moral Basis ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

One important link that connects mediaeval and modern moral philosophy is the theory of natural law and the natural basis of moral rightness and wrongness. Suarez claims to defend a ‘middle way’ between the views of Aquinas and the voluntarists (Scotus and Ockham). Since natural law is genuine law, it depends on commands, and therefore on divine commands. But the precepts of natural law are not the principles of morality. Right and wrong are constituted by facts about human nature, and not by any commands, divine or human. Suarez therefore is to some extent a voluntarist about natural law, but a naturalist and objectivist about morality. Grotius agrees with Suarez that the moral basis of natural law consists in facts about human nature. These facts support objective moral principles that do not depend on the laws of any particular state.

scholarly journals FROM NATURAL LAW TO THE GOLDEN RULE

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Damiano Simoncelli
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Human Good

These days, the Thomistic account of natural law is the object of renewed interest and criticisms. A number of objections are usually lodged against the idea of a human nature and a shared human good, in that it might seem that these ideas are unquestionably culturally related and that cultural boundaries cannot be crossed. At the same time, the concepts of ‘human nature’ and ‘natural law’ are often misunderstood to be related to human biology only. To overcome these issues, this paper aims to reinterpret the Thomistic doctrine of natural law as a form of the golden rule (‘Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you’; ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’).

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.

Natural law in early modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Heydt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Warring States ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Summum Bonum ◽  
Modern Natural

Are there moral norms for action applicable in all times and places? It was common in the early modern period to answer ‘Yes’ to this question and to appeal to natural law as expressing those norms. Natural law developed in the early modern period through the work of Suarez, Grotius, Hobbes, Cumberland and Pufendorf, among others. Natural law is a universal, obligatory set of rules for action, known without revelation and legislated by God. The phrase ‘natural law’ carries with it a set of claims about moral norms – where they originate, what justifies them, how we know them. Early modern natural law has roots in the ancients (particularly in Stoicism) and Christianity. It is a standard part of medieval and early modern Aristotelian moral philosophy, where it informs discussions of law, moral action, and the Ten Commandments. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, one sees something novel: philosophers claiming that moral philosophy is fundamentally legal or jural or, even more pronounced, nothing other than natural law. On a jural view of morality, moral principles are imposed – in some sense or other – through legislation. It has often been claimed that this marks a break between modern and pre-modern moral philosophies – from views oriented by happiness, good and virtue to views focused on obligation, law, right, duty and authority. The most important differences between a scholastic or eudaimonistic conception and a natural law or jural conception of moral philosophy arise in claims about the summum bonum (highest good), the emphasis on law, action and justice, and the nature of moral reasons. Perhaps, most generally, natural law can be thought of as reorganizing morality towards the goal of adjudicating conflict, particularly among religious confessions, warring states, traders and alien cultures. Natural law informed much academic moral philosophy in the eighteenth century and exerted strong influence on moral and political thought (for example, the American Declaration of Independence). By the nineteenth century, however, utilitarian and historicist critics attacked the ideas of morality as law and of timeless, universal norms as constituting morality. In the present day, natural law ideas are manifest in the human rights tradition.

A Common Sense Response to Hume’s Moral Atheism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Engels Kroeker
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Moral Principles

This chapter presents Reid’s answers to three non-theistic implications of Hume’s moral philosophy. One non-theistic implication of Hume’s view is the claim that morality is tied to human nature, and is hence secular because it is autonomous from religious doctrines, beliefs, or motivations. Another implication is that the standard of morality is determined by human mental states and psychological processes, and hence renders all reference to an objective, mind-independent standard, unnecessary. A final implication, according to Hume, is that our human passions are not directed toward God, and hence that God is not the object of any human moral discourse. In response, Reid argues that the truth of moral principles is not relative to human nature and to natural human passions. It follows, Reid holds, that talk of a benevolent God is intelligible. Reid’s explicit objective is to criticize not only Hume’s moral philosophy, but also his moral atheism.

Naturalizing Sharīʿa: Foundationalist Ambiguities in Modern Islamic Apologetics

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F. March
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Ethical Systems

This essay discusses an important feature of much modern Islamic writing on law, politics and morality. The feature in question is the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fiṭra) are in perfect harmony, that Islam is the “natural religion” (dīn al-fiṭra), and thus that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. My discussion proceeds through a close reading of the Moroccan independence leader and religious scholar ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (d. 1974). I discuss the ambiguities within Fāsī’s theory and suggest that the natural religion doctrine might be better understood less as a reduction of Islamic law to “natural law” and more as an apologetic effort to defend the realism and feasibility of Islamic law. In the hands of reformers like Fāsī, this project is beset with unresolved ambiguities around the constraining quality of revealed law in practice and the moral validity of non-Islamic political and ethical systems.


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.

Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 414-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Herdt
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Fair Dealing ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Moral Quality ◽  
Careful Distinction

AbstractRecent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

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