Making Use of the Testimonies: Suárez and Grotius on Natural Law

Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-136
Author(s):  
Sydney Penner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

Thanks to Barbeyrac, Pufendorf and others, there is a long-familiar picture of Grotius as offering a groundbreaking account of natural law. By now there is also a familiar observation that there is no agreement what makes Grotius’s account innovative. Sometimes this leads to skepticism about how innovative Grotius’s account of natural law really is. Some scholars suggest that Grotius’s account of natural law resembles Suárez’s account. But others continue to argue that Barbeyrac is right to see Grotius as breaking the ice of previous philosophy and laying the groundwork for a distinctively modern moral philosophy. I plan to contribute to the debate by arguing that, properly understood, Grotius’s position is similar to Suárez’s on a range of fundamental questions, and, furthermore, that seeing Grotius as making a radical break with the past violates his own self-conception. 1

Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Democratization of Moral Virtue

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Getty L. Lustila
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

AbstractThis paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn’s account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn’s encounter with Shaftesbury’s writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn’s work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from seventeenth-century natural law theory to the naturalism of the eighteenth century— that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.

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.

“Ambiguist” Statesmanship

Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Fixed Points ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
The One

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

Rethinking Kant as a public intellectual

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Sofie Møller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon.

Natural law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter explores the concept of natural law, turning first to the Protestant milieu. Alterity—what would in the seventeenth century come to be theorized, and problematized, as “sociability”—is the dominant mood of the humanist and Protestant handling of natural law. It is there even in Thomas Hobbes, whose natural law coincides with moral philosophy and concerns the sphere of one's actions in respect of others. However, the Catholic scholastic tradition presents a very different framing of natural law, one that centers on individual agency and regulates the behavior of individual agents in their aspect as beings of a particular kind. While authors in this tradition grapple equally with the question of animal behavior in relation to law, they do not do so from the social perspective that characterizes Protestant humanist Aristotelians and jurists.

Elizabeth Anscombe versus the World

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-170
Author(s):  
Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Honorary Degree ◽  
The World ◽  
Harry Truman ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

This chapter chronicles the philosophical development of the abrasive, brilliant Elizabeth Anscombe and her contribution to her friends’ implicit project of reshaping mid-century ethics: her all-out attack against “Oxford Moral Philosophy” epitomized by R.M. Hare, and her publication of the influential “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Anscombe was Wittgenstein’s apprentice and translator for much of her early career, rarely publishing original work. She was, nonetheless, a fearsome adversary of anyone she saw as glib or insufficiently serious, including C.S. Lewis and J.L. Austin. Anscombe’s real engagement with ethics began with her attempt to stop Oxford from bestowing an honorary degree on Harry Truman; she abhorred his decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was invited to give a radio broadcast, “Oxford Moral Philosophy: Does It Corrupt the Youth?”—the opening salvo in a fight with R.M. Hare, which resulted in her influential essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.”

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