St Augustine An Unjust Law

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail." In information technology, the protestant chaplain would cite 2 of the about influential saints of the Roman Catholic Church building, Augustine and Aquinas, to justify civil disobedience in the face of unjust segregation laws:

I would hold with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no constabulary at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one decide whether a law is just or unjust? A merely law is a man-made code that squares with the moral police or the police force of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human constabulary that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

As much as people today speak of moral relativism and legal positivism, the truth of the matter is that we tin can't escape the natural law. Anytime we're debating what the law should be, we're appealing—at to the lowest degree implicitly—to some formulation of justice, some conception of the mutual good, in order to justify why we think the law ought to be whatever our proposal entails. And the same is true whenever we're deliberating almost what we should practice: The natural police governs our personal actions just equally much as information technology does our common life equally political communities. As Samuel Gregg, inquiry managing director of the Acton Institute, explains in his new book, The Essential Natural Law, "natural police force is primarily ethics insofar every bit information technology is concerned with practical reasoning almost how individuals and communities practice good and avoid evil when making choices and interim."

Reason tells us that there are things 1 cannot not know, amongst them: to do good and avert evil. Information technology is from this starting signal that one can begin speaking of natural and ceremonious rights.

The Essential Natural Law
By Samuel Gregg
(Fraser Institute, 2021)

Theories of the natural law are one thing—and theorists will debate them until the second coming. Just the natural law is first and foremost a reality before it is theorized. There is a truth most human nature and the goods that perfect information technology, but every bit there is a truth most the moral norms that should govern our actions in pursuit of those appurtenances. And the natural constabulary tradition, as Gregg clearly lays out, holds that reason tin know these truths, and that at some level we all make appeal to these basic truths even if we fail to follow reason all the way through: "Natural law maintains that for us to exist rational in the fullest sense is to choose and act in accord with what our reason tells united states of america is the truth well-nigh the right class of activity."

Gregg opens this short volume by tracing the tradition of natural law theorizing back to its classical roots in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Far from being just a translation of Christian theology into secular language, Gregg argues that critical reflection on human nature and its perfection gets started in a systematic way in the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers who sought a standard of justice beyond mere convention, grounding justice in nature. From there Gregg turns to the Christian thinkers who develop this tradition of philosophy and incorporate it into Christian theology, particularly the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, whose foundational theory of natural police force Gregg presents in some detail. Continuing his historical sweep, Gregg explores later medieval Cosmic thinkers, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez, particularly concerned with what the natural police force entailed for the exploration and settlement of the so-called New World, international relations, and merchandise, along with Protestant natural police force thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Emmerich de Vattel.

Of detail importance in Gregg's presentation of natural law theory is that the appurtenances that perfect homo nature are the foundational starting points. Our grasps of certain ends that are proficient in themselves, non mere means to other ends, is what allows thinking about action to get off the ground. From at that place nosotros can discern diverse moral norms that should guide our activeness, and and so various conclusions about particulars such as the virtues that shape our character, the deportment that should never be done because they always involve committing immorality (then-called moral absolutes), and rights understood as the entailments of justice. This last point is critically important: Natural rights for the natural law tradition are conclusionsof a chain of moral reasoning, not starting points (as they are for certain social contract thinkers). Gregg explains: "Natural rights derived their moral, legal, and political force from giving effect to requirements of natural law. Absent that foundation, natural rights would be understood simply every bit assertions of will and thus having little to do with reason." That is, it is only from a sound conception of human nature and human being flourishing, of the demands of justice and the common practiced, that nosotros can then reason to conclusions about natural rights—and, I would add, whatsoever justified political and civil rights.

From here, Gregg moves on to discuss what the natural police force tradition means for political authorisation and the distinctively political mutual expert. In a affiliate titled "Limited Authorities and the Rule of Law," Gregg explains that it is precisely a concern for human flourishing that both justifies and limits regime, and that demands that people be governed by law. Here Gregg attends both to those things that government must do in order for people to flourish and the ways in which government could overreach and subvert that flourishing, with the principle of subsidiarity proving crucial. In the next affiliate Gregg turns to the natural law foundations and limits to the ownership of private property, emphasizing the foundations of property rights in service to the common good, but non saying quite enough most property duties. And in the final substantive chapter, Gregg explores the celebrated roots of the jus gentium—the law of nations—and its implications for international trade. In both these chapters on economical relations, Gregg examines the role that various late medieval and early mod Catholic and Protestant natural law thinkers played in the development of theorizing nearly markets, prices, trade, and commerce in full general—showing how many of Adam Smith's particular conclusions were already arrived at and with greater clarity and rational justification by these earlier thinkers.

The book concludes with Gregg'southward discussion of the axis of natural law for societies that want to maintain and protect ordered liberty, arguing that "it may well be natural law's insistence that there are universal moral and philosophical truths knowable through right reason that represents one of its most important contributions to the maintenance of free societies." Confronting skepticism virtually our ability to know the man practiced, or relativism and "neutrality" about the land'southward promotion of the good, Gregg argues that it is precisely a audio—true—formulation of human nature and human goods that will be the best bulwark for authentic freedom. Indeed, he closes the book with this blaring call: "Understanding natural law and the principles that information technology embodies surely has enormous potential to serve every bit a powerful ballast for the free society and to remind the states of why liberty is important and why the protection of freedom claim eternal vigilance."

Gregg's book is an outstanding introduction—concise and attainable—to the broad natural law tradition. The selection to focus on economic and international relations leaves other topics less explored, and the Thomistic theory avant-garde is clearly influenced by Germain Grisez and John Finnis's re-presentation of Aquinas's works—which may rub some Thomists the wrong mode. For the lay reader looking for a reliable guide, all the same, The Essential Natural Law is a fine place to start.