Natural Law,

In philosophy, system of right or justice held to be common to all humankind and

derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. Throughout the
history of the concept, from Greek antiquity, there have been disagreements over the
meaning of natural law and over its relation to positive law.

Aristotle held that what was "just by nature" was not always the same as what was
"just by law"; that there was a natural justice valid everywhere with the same force and
"not existing by people's thinking this or that"; and that appeal could be made to it from
the positive law. He drew his instances of the natural law, however, chiefly from his
observation of the Greeks in their city-states, with their subordination of women to men,
of slaves to citizens, and of barbarians to Hellenes. The Stoics, on the other hand,
conceived an entirely egalitarian law of nature in conformity with the "right reason," or
Logos, inherent in the human mind; and Cicero wrote of a "true law, right reason,
diffused in all men, constant and everlasting." The Roman jurists paid lip service to this
notion, and St. Paul seems to reflect it when he writes of a law "written in the hearts" of
the Gentiles (Romans 2:14-15).

St. Augustine of Hippo took up the Pauline mention and developed the idea of
man having lived freely under the natural law before his fall and his subsequent bondage
under sin and the positive law. Gratian in the 11th century simply equated the natural
law with the divine law, that is, with the revealed law of the Old and the New Testament,
in particular the Christian version of the Golden Rule.

St. Thomas Aquinas propounded an influential systematization. The eternal law of

the divine reason, he maintained, though it is unknowable to us in its perfection as it is in
God's mind, is yet known to us in part not only by revelation but also by the operations of
our reason. The law of nature, which is "nothing else than the participation of the eternal
law in the rational creature," thus comprises those precepts that humankind is able to
formulate, namely, the preservation of one's own good, the fulfillment of "those
inclinations which nature has taught to all animals," and the pursuit of the knowledge of
God. Human law must be the particular application of the natural law. Other scholastic
philosophers, for instance John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and, especially,
Francisco Suárez, emphasized the divine will instead of the divine reason as the source of
law. This "voluntarism" influenced the Roman Catholic jurisprudence of the Counter-
Reformation, but the Thomistic doctrine was later revived and reinforced to become the
main philosophical ground for the papal exposition of natural right in the social teaching
of Leo XIII and his successors.

The epoch-making appeal of Hugo Grotius to the natural law belongs to the
history of jurisprudence; but whereas his fellow Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557-
1638) had proceeded from theological doctrines of predestination to elaborate his theory
of law binding on all peoples, Grotius insisted on the validity of the natural law "even if
we were to suppose . . . that God does not exist or is not concerned with human affairs."
A few years later Thomas Hobbes was arguing not from the "state of innocence" in which
man had lived in the biblical Eden but from a savage "state of nature" in which men, free
and equal in rights, were each one at solitary war with every other. After discerning the
right of nature (jus naturale) to be "the liberty each man hath to use his own power for the
preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of life," Hobbes defines a law of nature (lex
naturalis) as "a precept of general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden
to do that which is destructive of his life" and then enumerates the elementary rules on
which peace and society can be established. Grotius and Hobbes thus stand together at
the head of that "school of natural law" which, in accordance with the tendencies of the
Enlightenment, tried to construct a whole edifice of law by rational deduction from a
fictitious "state of nature" followed by a social contract. In England, John Locke departed
from Hobbesian pessimism to the extent of describing the state of nature as a state of
society, with free and equal men already observing the natural law. In France, where
Montesquieu had argued that natural laws were pre-social and were superior
to those of religion and of the state, Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated a savage who was
virtuous in isolation and actuated by two principles "prior to reason," self-preservation
and compassion (innate repugnance against the sufferings of others).

The Declaration of Independence of the United States refers only briefly to "the
Laws of Nature" before citing equality and other "unalienable" rights as "self-evident."
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen asserts liberty, property,
security, and resistance to oppression as "imprescriptible natural rights." The philosophy
of Immanuel Kant renounced the attempt to know nature as it really is, yet allowed the
practical or moral reason to deduce a valid system of right with its own purely formal
framework; and Kantian formalism contributed to the 20th-century revival of naturalistic
jurisprudence.

On the level of international politics in the 20th century, the assertion of human
rights was the product rather of an empirical search for common values than of any
explicit doctrine about a natural law.

Norm,
Also called SOCIAL NORM, rule or standard of behaviour shared by members of
a social group. Norms may be internalized--i.e., incorporated within the individual so that
there is conformity without external rewards or punishments, or they may be enforced by
positive or negative sanctions from without. The social unit sharing particular norms may
be small (e.g., a clique of friends) or may include all adult members of a society. Norms
are more specific than values or ideals: honesty is a general value, but the rules defining
what is honest behaviour in a particular situation are norms.

There are two schools of thought regarding why people conform to norms. The
functionalist school of sociology maintains that norms reflect a consensus, a common value
system developed through socialization, the process by which an individual learns the culture
of his group. Norms contribute to the functioning of the social system and are said to develop
to meet certain assumed "needs" of the system. The conflict school holds that norms are a
mechanism for dealing with recurring social problems. The Marxian variety of conflict
theory states that norms reflect the power of one section of a society over the other sections
and that coercion and sanctions maintain these rules. Norms are thought to originate as a
means by which one class or caste dominates or exploits others. Neither school adequately
explains differences between and within societies.

Norm is also used to mean a statistically determined standard or the average

behaviour, attitude, or opinion of a social group. In this sense it means actual, rather than
expected, behaviour.

Law, morality, and natural law.

A consideration of fundamental importance in the philosophy of law is that of the
distinction between law and morality. The importance of the distinction is illustrated by
the main questions to which it gives rise: (1) How far and in what sense should the law of
a community seek to give effect to its morality? (2) Is there a moral duty to obey the law
even when it does not embody morality, and, if so, are there any limits to this duty? (3)
When a legal rule directs conduct that morality forbids, which should the citizen obey?
(4) Is there ever (and, if so, when is there) a duty to overthrow an entire legal system
because of its conflict with morality?

In all these questions the word "law" refers to the specialized form of social
control familiar in modern, secular, politically organized societies. The word "morality"
in the four questions may, however, refer to any of the following: (1) the community's
relevant factual behaviour patterns (its mores); (2) its socially approved behaviour
patterns, as sanctified by some widely held rational or religious ideal, whether observed
in practice or not (social morality); or (3) the moral ideals accepted by each individual as
binding on himself and on others, whether or not those others agree (individual morality).
All these, like law, are means of controlling human conduct by setting normative
standards; and all three have a constantly changing interaction with each other, as well as
with law.

The fact that legal and moral norms vary from place to place and from one
historical period to another lies in part behind a persistent theme in the philosophy of law:
the search for unchanging norms that are universally valid. Clearly, the most certain way
of establishing such norms would be to base them on widely observed facts, such as
man's social propensities or the ubiquitous importance of kinship in social organization,
which supposedly reveal something fundamental about the nature of man and his
adjustment to the world. The attempt to base norms on some such category of facts has
for two millennia been associated with the concept of natural law. This concept has many
versions, the principal of which are outlined in the historical survey below, but the
significance of the topic merits some separate preliminary discussions.

It has always been possible to trace a mainstream of natural-law thought, flowing

from Aristotle’s premise that the "nature" of any creature, from which obligations must
be derived, is what it will be in its fullest and most perfect development. For man, this
means what he is when the powers and qualities distinguishing him from other creatures,
namely, his reason and his impulse to social living are fully developed. Natural law
embodies those obligations that will appear if mankind's reason and sociality are fully
unfolded.

A major difficulty presented by this attempt to develop normative standards

appears to be that it is very difficult to demonstrate, let alone create a sense of obligation
toward, values that are only immanent. All theories of natural law, moreover, have found
it necessary to rely on what are essentially intuitions or preconceptions as to what man's
true nature is. All such theories acknowledge, for instance, that the full development or
fulfillment of an entity is not the same as its mere continued existence, that there may be
a "warping" or "impeding" of the natural tendencies, so that what exists may then "be
said to be unsound or incorrect." Thus, mere factuality is not a sufficient source of
obligation.
Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas himself, in identifying the "inclinations" from which men
may learn natural law, found it necessary to order these in grades of inclination, so that
those inclinations most closely related to reason and sociality take priority over those
concerned (for example) with procreation and self-preservation. The criteria by which
such a hierarchy is ordered must be drawn from sources other than the factual inclinations
themselves. The "lower" grades (such as self-preservation) may well be based on
something like instinct; but the question arises at the higher grades whether there is any
comparable instinct by which men seek to find moral precepts binding all of them in
common. Aquinas here appealed to synderesis, a kind of sympathetic understanding
found in men, a disposition (habit) of the practical intellect inclining them to the good
and murmuring against evil.

To derive from this synderesis a universal natural law, however, it would be

necessary to demonstrate some "universal conscience" of all mankind. But natural
lawyers faced with the fact that men's consciences do not coincide explain that
conscience may err and reason be corrupt. Invocation of synderesis is in fact helpful not
as an account of how one may arrive at factually based normative standards but as an
illustration of the psychological tendency of men to assert values.