While we will focus primarily on the status of natural law as principles of practical rationality, we should consider, at least for a moment, the significance of the claim that natural law is an aspect of divine providence. The basic thesis confirmed here by Thomas Aquinas is that the natural law is a participation in the eternal law (St. IaIIae 91:2). For Thomas Aquinas, the eternal law is the rational plan by which all creation is ordered (ST IaIIae 91:1); Natural law is man`s “partake” of the eternal law (ST IaIIae 91:2). While non-rational beings have a share in the eternal law only when they are ordained by it—their actions are freely derived from their definite nature, the existence of which flows from God`s will in accordance with God`s eternal plan—rational beings like us are able to grasp our part of the eternal law and act freely accordingly (ST IaIIae 91, 2) It is this characteristic of natural law that, according to Thomas Aquinas, justifies calling natural law “law”. For the law, as defined by Thomas Aquinas (ST IaIIae 90:4), is a rule of action established by one who cares for the community; and since God cares about the whole universe, God`s decision to give birth to beings who can act freely and in accordance with the principles of reason is sufficient to justify our thinking of these principles of reason as law. The fundamental principle of natural law, wrote Thomas Aquinas, was that “good is to be done and persecuted, and evil avoided.” Thomas Aquinas explained that reason reveals certain laws of nature that are good for man, such as self-preservation, marriage and family, and the desire to know God. Reason, he taught, also allows people to understand bad things like adultery, suicide and lies. Thomas Aquinas is an intellectual giant. He has written an incredible amount on a variety of topics.
His influence was immense. Its central idea is that man was created by God to reason – this is our function. People do what is morally right when we act in accordance with reason, and what is morally wrong when we don`t. Thomas Aquinas is an incredibly subtle and complex thinker. For example, his doctrine of double action makes us think about what we really mean by “actions,” “intentions,” and “consequences.” His work remains much discussed and researched and generally still plays a central role in a Christian ethic that rejects God`s theory of commandment. 4There is a powerful and influential challenge to such a narrative, called Euthyphro`s dilemma, after the challenge was first raised in Plato`s Euthyphro. The dilemma is this: either God commands something to be right because it is, or He is just because God commands it. If God commands something because it is right, then God`s commandments do not make it right, His commandments only tell us what is right. This means that God simply falls out of the picture when it comes to explaining why something is right. Dworkin believes that his theory of judicial obligation is a consequence of what he calls the rights thesis, according to which court decisions always uphold pre-existing rights: “Even if no fixed rules settle the case, one party may still have the right to win. It remains the duty of the judge, even in difficult cases, to discover what the rights of the parties are and not to invent new rights after the fact” (Dworkin 1977, 81).
Beings created without intellect and will follow the eternal law, the eternal instructions in the creative spirit of God, spontaneously or automatically and completely. In the case of man, this eternal law spontaneously directs him towards his full and complete good, directing his essential nature towards acts of understanding and desire for the goods constituting perfection or human fulfillment. But each person has his own intellect and will, so that his spontaneous inclination and subsequent movement towards this full and complete good are brought about by conscious ratification and cooperation, that is, knowingly and willingly (or not, since he can be resisted or rejected). Thus, in the human world, we have the Eternal Law as it is received and understood, so to speak, from within, and only conditionally observed: when people understand, desire and act correctly on the goods of human nature (food, drink, clothing, shelter, creative activity, knowledge, friendship, etc.), they are free to act to observe the Eternal Law. They do not make a law for themselves, but discover it and appropriate it. They can discover and ratify in action the divine plan for their nature, which non-rational creatures testify to in all that they do and go through, although they are not aware of this plan as a law, nor able to instantiate or knowingly resist it. Although this task is generally interpreted as an attempt to analyze concepts of law and the legal system, there is some confusion as to the value and character of conceptual analysis in legal philosophy. As Brian Leiter (1998) points out, philosophy of law is one of the few philosophical disciplines that considers conceptual analysis to be its primary concern; Most other areas of philosophy have taken a naturalistic turn, incorporating the tools and methods of science. To illustrate the role of conceptual analysis in law, Brian Bix (1995) identifies a number of different purposes that conceptual claims can serve: (1) to pursue the use of language; (2) establish service documents; (3) explain what is important or essential about a class of objects; and (4) establish an evaluation test for the word term. Bix assumes that conceptual analysis in law focuses on (3) and (4).
It is also easy to identify a number of writers, both historical and contemporary, whose views can easily be labeled as views of natural law, sharing all but one or two of Thomas Aquinas` paradigmatic position. Recently, there are non-theistic writers in the tradition of natural law who deny (1): see, for example, the works of Michael Moore (1982, 1996) and Philippa Foot (2001). There have been a number of post-Thomistic authors in the Middle Ages and in modern times who, in some way (2), denied the natural authority of natural law and asserted that if the content of natural law is wholly or partially determined by human nature, its receptivity can only come from an additional divine command: the views of John Duns Scotus, Francisco Suarez and John Locke fit into this form. The Stoics may have been thinkers of natural law, but they seem to deny (4) and have the right to stand before the good ones (see Striker 1986). Some contemporary theological ethicists, called “proportionalists” (e.g., Hallett 1995), have taken up and denied the point of view of natural law with a consequentialist twist (6). (For a discussion of the relationship between proportionalism and natural law theory, see Kaczor 2002.) And while some view Aristotle as the source of the natural law tradition, others have argued that his central appeal to person-insighted practical wisdom as the ultimate measure of right action excludes the possibility of the kind of general rules that (at least in a theistic context) would make Aristotle`s ethics a natural legal position. There is, of course, no clear answer to the question of when a viewpoint ceases to be a theory of natural law when it becomes a non-paradigmatic theory and not a theory of natural law at all. 60Finally, we ask ourselves whether it is easy to know what to do with the help of natural law. We hope that our moral theory will give us a direction for our lives. One might think that this is precisely the role of a moral theory. But how could it work in this case? 7So what role, if any, does God have when it comes to morality? For him, God`s commandments are there to help us see what is really right and wrong, rather than determining what is right and wrong.
That is, Thomas Aquinas opts for the first option of Euthyphro`s dilemma, as mentioned above. But it raises the obvious question: If it is not God`s commandments that do something right and wrong, what is? Doesn`t God simply fall out of the picture? This is where his theory of natural law comes into play. Indeed, Austin explicitly supported the view that it is not necessarily true that the legal validity of a norm depends on the conformity of its content to morality. But while Austin denied the overlap thesis, he accepted an objectivist moral theory; in fact, Austin inherited his utilitarianism almost entirely from J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Here, it should be noted that utilitarians sometimes seem to suggest that they derive their utilitarianism from certain facts about human nature; As Bentham once wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the dominion of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is up to them alone to tell us what we need to do and what we are going to do. On the one hand, the norms of good and evil are attached, on the other hand, the chain of cause and effect is attached to their throne” (Bentham 1948, 1).
Therefore, a commitment to the morality theory of natural law is consistent with the negation of natural law theory. According to his Five Ways of Proving the Existence of God (St. Ia, 2:3), St. Thomas Aquinas is probably best known for his concise but robust understanding of natural law. Just as he asserts and demonstrates in his proofs of God`s existence that natural human reason can come to some understanding of the author of nature, Thomas Aquinas, in his exposition of natural law, shows that human beings can discover objective moral standards by moving away from the objective order in nature, especially human nature. Get out.