Natural Law 5

Natural Law since Aquinas has followed several rivulets aside from the main stream. In the fourteenth century the nominalism of William of Ockham stressed the absolute power and freedom of God. Along with Duns Scotus, he deviated from the Thomistic doctrine by eliminating reason from the basis of Natural Law. In the sixteenth century, both Luther and Calvin held to versions of Natural Law, as did Hooker. Hugo Grotius, whose major work is On the Law of War and Peace (1625), provided for a secular version of Natural Law by observing that since this law was the law of our rational human nature, God was not an essential part of the doctrine, an autonomy affirmed by the Spanish Jesuit Suarez. Natural Law thinking has thus developed into a theory of universal human rights. The doctrine underwent a revival in Catholic teaching in the nineteenth century during the pontificate of Leo XIII as a counter to socialism and the rising tide of mistrust in divine revelation. The world, if it ignored the Word of God, might at least listen to reason. “Right reason” and Natural Law continue to be the basis of official Roman Catholic ethical teaching, from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae down to John Paul II.

Aside from the institutional endorsement of Natural Law, there are several advocates of Natural Law theory on the contemporary scene which are best described as adjustments to the Thomist position. Two powerful Protestant proponents of Natural Law, to whose arguments we will return, are Oliver O’Donovan and Emil Brunner. Among the Roman Caholics, Finnis and Grisez offer a theories founded on “pre-moral pratical principles” identifying the various kinds of human good that are self-evidently worth pursuing. For Finnis these are life, knowledge, play, aesthtic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and ‘religion’. At a second level are “modes of responsibility”, which correspond to virtues. Moral rules (unsuprisingly for Finnis those of a peculiarly Roman Catholic sort) result from deductions at a tertiary level.