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’).

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.

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.

Legalism and Humankind

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-208
Author(s):  
Frank I. Michelman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Good For ◽  
Normative Argument

Prescriptive political and moral theories contain ideas about what human beings are like and about what, correspondingly, is good for them. Conceptions of human “nature” and corresponding human good enter into normative argument by way of support and justification. Of course, it is logically open for the ratiocinative traffic to run the other way. Strongly held convictions about the rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, of certain social institutions or practices may help condition and shape one's responses to one or another set of propositions about what people are like and what, in consequence, they have reason to value.

scholarly journals La estructura intencional de la Ley natural, según Vázquez (s. xvi) / The Intentional Structure of the Natural Law According to Vázquez (16th century)

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Juan CRUZ CRUZ
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Moral Rule ◽  
Practical Judgment ◽  
Structural Requirements ◽  
Rational Nature ◽  
Intentional Structure ◽  
Self Consistency

Gabriel Vázquez (1549-1604) explained that natural law is properly «the whole of radical or structural requirements of human nature as such, which is biological and rational at the same time». Natural law has also «self-consistency» by its own nature, and not by the consent or will of anyone, not even God. There is a double natural law: the primary one is the rational nature, and the secondary one is the judgment of our reason. This secondary natural law, based on the rational nature —which is our first moral rule—, gives a guideline, a practical judgment about the morality and immorality of human acts. The first is properly rule (mensura), the second is properly law (lex). The present study examines this dual intentional structure of natural law.

Human Biology and Human Nature

2017 ◽  
pp. 61-91
Author(s):  
James F. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Biology

Epilogue and Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Church

This chapter draws together the themes of the book and looks forward to the later-seventeenth century. It argues that for much of the sixteenth century politics was subordinate to religion; temporal authorities needed the additional sanctions provided by religious belief if they were to exert any power over the consciences of individuals. The effect was to entangle temporal power in the deepening conflicts over religious truth, and thus to reveal the brittleness of any conception of political authority which relied on the support of the Church. At the same time, older traditions of political thought did not go away and often became stronger. The circulation of classical ideas, the discovery of new peoples, the growing interest in historical change and development all suggested alternative ways of legitimizing political power, often using natural law and avoiding any reliance on specifically Christian commitments. What happened in the early-seventeenth century, and most obviously in the writing of Hugo Grotius, was a move not only to ground political society in a particular conception of human nature (conceived of juridically, as a source of rights and obligations) but also to detach Christianity from that view of human nature. It was this understanding of human beings which enabled the development of a social contract tradition through the seventeenth century and beyond, and became an important source for modern liberalism. The questions it raised would help to shape the thought of the next century.

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