School
Natural law
Natural law theory holds that there are moral standards grounded in human nature and knowable by reason, which human laws should follow.
Its roots lie in Aristotle, the Stoics and Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas gave it its classic Christian form in the thirteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius applied it to the rights of peoples and the law of war, helping to found international law, and in the twentieth century Lon Fuller argued for an inner morality of law. It is distinct from the laws of nature studied in science. On this site it answers questions on war and political violence (3.3.5), divine command, duty, law and moral language.
Thinkers of this school
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies