Natural Law Theory

PRESENTED BY:
Adora, Joshua
Ballesta, Ma. Angela
Carullo, Ma. Cristina
Jarito, Andrea Alexa
Marquita, Marian
Rojo, Ezra Joseph
Sabong, Dhea
Turla, Merlinda
Examples of Natural Law
1. It is universally accepted and understood that killing a human being is
wrong. It is also universally accepted that punishing someone for killing
that person is right. The idea illustrates that such beliefs are something
that human beings understand as inherently wrong, even without the
requirement of law.
2. When two people create a child, they then become parents and natural
caregivers for that child. No human-made law would require them to feel
as though they need to act as the caregiver of their child. And by not
doing so, is accepted as inherently wrong.
Natural Law Theory defined
• A legal theory that recognizes law and morality as deeply connected,
if not one and the same.
• Natural law theorists believe that human laws are defined by morality,
and not by an authority figure.
• Humans are morally obliged to use their reasoning to discern what
the laws are and to act in conformity with them.
• Actions are right because they are natural, and wrong because they are
unnatural. People are good or bad to the extent that they fulfill their
true nature – the more they fulfill their true nature, the better they
are.
Natural Law
Theorists
Aristotle
The father of biology, is also regarded as the father of natural law,
having articulated the existence of natural justice or natural right. He
was the student of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great, whose
Hellenic empire spread the Greek civilization and tested Aristotle’s
teaching that because men have a common nature, common laws should
work.
Aristotle’s Theory
• Aristotle observed that human beings have a rational nature that must be followed as a matter of law.
• Natural law cannot be confused with animalistic biologism because a man as a moral creature has advanced
from primitivity. The best political system is supposed to cultivate human nature. Human natural law is
different from animal natural law. 
• In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle said that happiness is the final goal or end of a man’s pursuits. As much as
people seek different goods, so do they different views of what can make them happy. But while people have
different functions and interests in life, they have a common function and reasoning that separates them from
other species.
• To live well—to excel or flourish –is to function well. Reason makes us perceive what is excessive, pursue a
balanced life, and to seek what is balance and fair, just and right; in other words, the “golden mean” of living.
• The law bids us to do the acts of a balanced and temperate man, of someone we admire would do in the
circumstances.
• Tolentino also followed the Aristotelian view that the purpose of law is “happiness, which cannot exist for man,
except through a permanent and stable equilibrium between human personalities.”
Aristotle in his Politics
• Aristotle said that a man, being a social animal, needs to live in a community.
Man’s first association is the family, then neighborhood, village, then the polis or
city state. All these institutions are natural since no man is self- efficient. Man is
given the faculty of language because he needs to socialize effectively.
• Aristotle distinguished six types of constitutions. The first three are, Monarchy
(one-man rule), aristocracy (rule of few good men), and polity (rule of men of
equal merits). The worst forms are the last three: tyranny, oligarchy, and radical
democracy.
• Polity or democracy is the most stable since monarchy risks the intemperance of its
leader, while rivalries and his infighting hound an aristocracy.
• The aim of a good state is “the good life” with the middle class as the basis for the
progress.
Aristotle
For Aristotle, a good government establishes a political law that
conforms with rational principles of right and equity. There must be
constitution that provides general rules and guidelines on the
administration of the state. But for the particulars of the organization of
offices, the contingencies of life, and for settlement of future disputes,
laws must be promulgated.
Cicero
Cicero is a rarity in history: a philosophically inclined man who held political
power. He was born in Arpinum in 106 BC. His political career took place during
the twilight of the ailing Roman Republic. He was a self-​described constitutionalist,
but also a dedicated moderate who wished for peace and harmony above all else.
Cicero’s natural law views persist as influential to this day. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, Cicero did not forge a career by means of war but instead through
oratory in the law courts of his day. He opposed the tyranny of Caesar and,
subsequently, Mark Antony. Eventually, Cicero was assassinated after delivering an
intensely scathing condemnation of the tyranny of Mark Antony as part of a series
of speeches entitled the Philippics.
Cicero
• Law - All things are implanted with a function and end towards which
they are directed by the dictates of their own nature. Law in the proper
sense is right reason in harmony with nature. 
• Cicero believed that humanity’s ultimate goal was justice.
• Cicero was one of the first thinkers to posit the view that the
preservation of property rights was one of the core reasons people
formed states.
Cicero
• Cicero’s philosophy is characterized by a strong sense of
individualism. This is most evident in his approach to private property.
• Cicero did not claim that ownership of property is a natural right, but
rather believed that it was established through a mixture of convention
and consent.
• On the duties of public officials Cicero wrote that “the men who
administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds on to
what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by
public acts.” 
Cicero’s Principle of Justice
1. Do not initiate violence without good reason;
2. Keep one’s promises;
3. Respect people’s private property and common property; and
4. Be charitable to others within one’s means.
Thomas Aquinas
• Thomas Aquinas is generally regarded as the West’s pre-eminent theorist of the natural law,
critically inheriting the main traditions of natural law or quasi–natural law thinking in the
ancient world (including the Platonic, and particularly Aristotelian and Stoic traditions) and
bringing elements from these traditions into systematic relation in the framework of a
metaphysics of creation and divine providence. His theory sets the terms of debate for
subsequent natural law theorizing.
• The fundamentals of Aquinas’s natural law doctrine are contained in the so-called Treatise on
Law in Thomas’s masterwork, the Summa Theologiae, comprising Questions 90 to 108 in the
first part of the second part of the three-part Summa.
• Thomists have rightly expressed reservations about the procedure of surgically extracting the
teaching in those Questions and representing it as Thomas’s natural law thinking tout court.
There is less possibility of distorting Thomas’s theory if one is careful to read the Treatise on
Law in the context of the conceptual architecture of the Summa Theologiae as a whole.
Thomas Aquinas
• The Summa is a systematic, overall account of the divine nature, as
knowable by faith-enlightened reason, and the divine plan and work of
creating and redeeming the cosmos and ordaining it to a final transfiguration
in glory at the end of history. Thomas's method in composing the work is to
treat of the whole of revealed theology (sacra doctrina) as briefly and clearly
as possible, but according to a strict order. The first Question of the Summa
so treats the nature and scope of theology itself, and once this is established,
the work considers the very existence and nature of God. The very first
principles or premises that serve as inferential starting points in the
systematic inquiry of theology are those items that God has revealed to us
concerning His nature and His plan and purpose in creating the cosmos.
Thomas Aquinas
• AQUINAS ARGUED THAT GOD CREATED THE WORLD ACCORDING TO
NATURAL LAWS — PREDICTABLE, GOAL-DRIVEN SYSTEMS WHEREBY
LIFE IS SUSTAINED, AND EVERYTHING FUNCTIONS SMOOTHLY.

• According to Thomas, human nature is perfected or fully realized by harmonious

and habitual excellence. He sees God as the artisan-creator and ruler of the cosmos.
Law, of its various sorts, has a role to play in humans' full realization of their
nature. The law, Thomas will have it, is an extrinsic source of human perfection or
full human development. In the order of the Summa, the first part of the work treats
the divine nature in itself and then the free creative production of creatures by God
(angels, humans, and all other animate and inanimate beings). The things that
we’re designed to seek are known as the basic goods, and there are seven of them.
Thomas Aquinas
• Life, The first thing that all living things just naturally want, Aquinas said, is self preservation - the
drive to sustain life.

• Reproduction, After preserving our own lives, our next most pressing basic good is to make more
life - in other words, to reproduce.

• Educate one’s offspring,once we manage to achieve our second basic good - reproduction - we need
to educate those kids we just made.

• Seek God, Aquinas also thought we are built with an instinctual desire to know God.

• Living in society, taking a page out of Aristotle's book, Aquinas also said that humans are naturally
social animals, so it's part of our basic good to live in community with others.
Thomas Aquinas
• Avoid offense, Aquinas said we feel shame and guilt when we do things
that cause our group to turn against us, and that was another basic good.
• And Finally, Aquinas said we’re built to Shun ignorance.
• The highest end or purpose we have as humans is our ultimate
fulfillment, the full realization of our nature, or "happiness" as is
commonly said in English. Thomas argues that law (lex) essentially can
be seen as an ordinance of reason directing activity toward some end,
goal, or purpose. So the true purpose of law is to sub-serve the happiness
of all in the community. But law does not merely recommend or suggest,
it binds and commands.
Thomas Aquinas
• Thomas Aquinas argues that God has a law of God's making that is co-
eternal with His own nature. This is the Eternal Law (lex aeterna)
through which the divine intellect creatively designs and directs all
creatures to a common end. As universal creator He has authority to
the highest degree with respect to His intelligent creatures. When
humans correctly understand, desire, and act for the goods of human
nature (food, drink, clothing, creative activity, knowledge, friendship,
etc.) they are freely enacting this eternal law. This for Thomas is the
natural law (lex naturalis) - a sharing from within (or participation of
the eternal law).
Thomas Aquinas
• The natural law, according to Aquinas, has certain basic and self-
evident precepts or dictates. Paraphrasing Thomas, first and
fundamental, is the precept that, "anything good [i.e. that which
perfects human nature] is to be pursued". The basic precepts of the
natural law command human nature to seek obvious human goods.
Thomas Aquinas
• God's design-plan for the whole of humanity is perfectly complete and
specified in all detail in the divine mind. The portion of the Eternal
Law which concerns humankind in its nature and in its divinely
foreknown history is not fully graspable by the human intellect.
Because of this inherent limitation of the human mind, humans must
make their own laws that they do spontaneously and readily grasp
(which portion includes the rudimentary parts of the natural law) to
direct themselves in community to their fulfillment.
Hugo Grotius
The ‘Father of Modern Natural Law’ paved the way for the atheistic philosophy
of the Enlightenment and today’s effective altruism that has reduced the human
person to a mere statistic. It was his belief that the law of nature would still exist
etiamsi daremus Deum non esse (even if we were to say there is no God).

Grotius, an Arminian Calvinist, wanted to dispel the belief that God only
renders justice by an ‘absolute decree’, which in turn left no room for free will.
Grotious’ religious writings emphasized that the truths of Christianity, which
were held in common by Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Armenians, were
fundamentally more important that the peripheral points on which they felt they
differed.
Grotius’Vision
• Grotius's Prolegomena of his De Iure Belli ac Pacis' (Right to War and Peace) was
written in the 16th century. He was set apart from his contemporaries for his 'transition
from the metaphysical to the rationalist natural law'. Unlike Aristotle, who sought to
provide political solutions to the city-states, Grotius sought to furnish a peaceful
resolution to the wars that the Christian absolute monarch-states were carrying out
among themselves.

• Grotius believed that since man had the right to travel and trade freely, States also had
the right to free trade. As exposed in his Mare liberum, 1609 (The Freedom of the
Seas), he refuted the commonly held opinion of monarchies that
 seas could become state property. In fact, no government had the right to exclude
other nations‘ merchant ships from any seas. He was adament about the ‘principle of
“responsibility to protect”
Grotius’Concept of
Natural Law
• Grotius rejected the concept of sola gratia of the Protestant
Reformation, and that of medieval Voluntarism. The latter presented
morality as subject to individual will or judgment, such as the arbitrary
command of a tyrant. Grotius placed emphasis on man having
complete freedom to discern for himself the law of nature.
Grotius’Concept of
Natural Law
Natural law, Grotius sustained, is the basis of natural rights: 

‘Civilians call a faculty that Right, which every man has to his own…
This right comprehends the power, that we have over ourselves, which is
called liberty…It likewise comprehends property…Now any thing is
unjust, which is repugnant to the nature of society, established among
rational creatures. Thus for instance, to deprive another of what
belongs to him, merely for one’s own advantage, is repugnant to the law
of nature.’
John Finnis’ Seven Basic Goods
1. Life
2. Knowledge
3. Play
4. Aesthetic Experience
5. Sociability
6. Practical Reasonableness
7. Religion
Nine Basic Requirements of
Practical Reasonableness
1. The good of “practical reasonableness” structures the pursuit of goods
generally;
2. A coherent plan of life;
3. No arbitrary preference amongst values;
4. No arbitrary preference amongst persons;
5. One should be both open-minded and committed to one’s projects;
6. The relevance of consequences;
7. Respect for every basic value in every act;
8. The requirements of the common good; and
9. Following one’s conscience
Brian Bix
TRADITIONAL LAW THEORY
Argues about the existence of higher law which is a standard by
which other laws are adjudged. This law can be derived from
divine revelation, religious text, a careful study of human nature.

CLASSICAL WRITERS
The source of higher standard is inherent in the nature of things
(a passive God)
Brian Bix’s Natural Law
A. Unchanging over time and does not differ in different
societies
B. Every person has access to the standard of this higher law
by use of reason
C. Only just laws ‘really deserve the name’ “law”
D. In definition of the term law, there infers the idea and
principle of choosing what is just and true
Thank you for listening.!