The natural law outlook

Abstract

The term ‘natural law’ has historically led to a great deal of confusion. This is partly due to the ambiguity of the term ‘law’, which can be understood in at least two different senses, each of which plays a significant role in natural law thought. First, the use of the term ‘law’ in this context is sometimes taken to refer to the rule-like character of natural law standards.1 The idea that natural law represents a set of rules or commands analogous to positive law, but emanating from God rather than humans, is certainly an influential aspect of the natural law tradition. There is, however, a second and equally important sense of ‘law’ at play throughout the history of natural law thought. This is the sense of ‘law’ as a teleological notion. Natural law, on this conception, is best analogised not with positive legal enactments, but with the regularities captured in the ‘natural laws’ of physics or biology. Humans are governed by natural law in the sense that their actions are guided by certain normative ends; these ends are what are good for humans with the nature they have. The dialectic between these two conceptions of natural law can be seen historically in the long-running dispute between voluntarism and naturalism in meta-ethics.2 Roughly, voluntarists hold that whatever God wills is good, whereas naturalists hold that some things are inherently good by nature, and even God may not override those values. However, defenders of one or the other of these positions frequently recognise an interplay between them, rather than preferring one to the complete exclusion of the other.3 A voluntarist, then, may hold that God, although in principle capable of willing anything to be good, would in practice will those things to be good that are in accordance with nature. A naturalist, meanwhile, may hold that those things that are good by nature are so because of God’s wise and beneficent design; the constraints imposed on God’s will by these natural values, then, are ultimately self-enacted. The two conceptions of ‘natural law’ outlined above – law as command and law as teleology – are therefore far from mutually exclusive. They may converge to yield a coherent picture of the natural law outlook. There is a tendency in contemporary discussions of natural law – particularly by those not working within the tradition – to focus on the idea of natural law as divine command to the exclusion of its naturalistic aspect. This simplification has a number of unfortunate consequences. One is that it leads people to reject natural law because they are sceptical about God, whereas even leading theistic defenders of natural law such as Thomas Aquinas have emphasised that it primarily depends on natural human dispositions and intellect, rather than divine