Natural Law Theory Approach

A Written Report


College of Law
University of Eastern Philippines
University Town, Northern Samar


In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirement for the Course
Human Rights Law




July 2014




Afundar, Ryan Clint
Caimol, Keena D.
Tobes, Adah Gwynne P.


ABSTRACT
In the context of our predecessors on ancient philosophy,
natural law is a universal rule based on reason alone. That is
higher than human positive law. Under natural law theory, reason
establishes a universal precept that identifies good or bad even
if there no same principles established in civil law.
The term is defined as a philosophical system of legal and
moral principles purportedly deriving from a universalized
conception of human nature or divine justice rather than from
legislative or judicial action. (Blacks Law Dictionary 9
th
ed.)














Introduction
"Natural law, as it is revived today, seeks to organize the
ideal element in law, to furnish a critique of old received
ideals and give a basis for formulating new ones, and to yield a
reasoned canon of values and a technique of applying it. I
should prefer to call it philosophical jurisprudence. But one
can well sympathize with those who would salvage the good will
of the old name as an asset of the science of law." (Roscoe
Pound, The Formative Era of American Law (1938).
To begin with, the cradle of natural law speaks of the
divine order of the progenitor. It is anchored on the instinct
of man and his profound virtue which is pity. Man is naturally
reasonable and his inclination to do well is the core of natural
law. People live in a world full of natural phenomena, thus
governed by natural law. This theory of law can either be from
theological, atheistic, or deistic foundation.
Natural law is grounded on an understanding of the nature of
the human person. In ethical philosophy, theology, law, and
social theory, a set of principles, based on what are assumed to
be the permanent characteristics of human nature that can serve
as a standard for evaluating conduct and civil laws. It is
considered fundamentally unchanging and universally applicable.
Because of the ambiguity of the word nature, the meaning of
natural varies. Thus, natural law may be considered an ideal to
which humanity aspires or a general fact, the way human beings
usually act. Natural law is contrasted with positive law, the
enactments of civil society.
1





















1
Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Social
Legislation (1748-1832)
Importance of natural law
The crucial part of natural law is natural inclination,
rational inclination to obey the divine. Without natural law,
faith cannot be cultivated into a general mandate of conscience.
Another is that it served as the foundation or the cradle
towards realization of human rights. As evidenced by the past,
men resolve their conflict by annihilation. Another crucial
significance of natural law is the idea of limitation on
governmental powers. Another concept as related to its
significance is the commission of a crime. A person without
basic foundation on natural and moral virtues disregards natural
law. With reference to ethics, natural law is crucial in the
behavior of people wherein the desire for peaceful association
and obedience to general principles had permeated the society.

Definition
Natural law is a system of law that is determined by nature,
and so is universal.
2
The classic definition of the term is that
natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature
both social and personal and deduce binding rules of moral
behavior from it.
3
On the other hand, in the context of legal

2
Strauss Leo, 1968 Natural Law International Encyclopedia of Social
Sciences, Macmillan.

3
Natural Law, Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6
th
ed. Columbia University
Press. 2007
theory, natural law is considered as basis of interpretation of
positive law. To understand the concept, philosophers had
theorized many definitions and explanations of natural law.
First one to attempt is Plato. According to him, we live in a
natural universe. He believed that there is even higher truth
than justice that only a very few will come to know. This higher
truth Plato calls the Good, which is the cosmic principle of
order that unites both physical and ethical principles in a
grand synthesis. It is that which gives the whole universe and
everything in it, a meaning and purpose.
4
However, to explain the
Good is near to quite impossible because it cannot be grasped
simply in logical terms. For Plato, knowing the Good is to have
a supernatural insight into the rational structure of the whole
universe. There is an element of mysticism in his theory, but
this in no way contradicts his emphasis upon rational knowledge.
The dialectical acquisition of knowledge is the necessary
condition of grasping the Good.
5






4
Brian R. Nelson, Western Political Thought: From Socrates to the Age of
Ideology, 2nd ed., (New Jersey: Prentice Hall.)p. 34

5
Ibid, p. 35

History of Natural Law from the beginning to Contemporary times

The Legacy of Greece and Rome
In the early periods of all peoples the mores and laws,
undifferentiated from the norms of religion, were looked upon as
being exclusively of divine origin. The order according to which
a people live is a divinely instituted order, a holy order. This
is true of the ancient Greeks, among whom all law was stamped
with the seal of the divine. It likewise holds good for the
early Germans: their law bore in the primitive period a
distinctly sacred character. Nor is it any less true of the
Roman people, whose legal genius enabled its law twice to become
a word law. For among the Romans, too, law in the earliest times
was divine law. Moreover, even the later period, when the Romans
had already hit upon the distinction between strictly sacred law
(fas) and profane law (ius), still afforded clear evidence of
the sacred origin of Roman law: the pontifices remained the
dispensers and custodians of the law until Roman legal reason
emancipated itself from this secret law of the priests.
6





6
Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and
Philosophy [1936]p. 1

The Natural Law in the Age of Scholasticism
A new philosophy and a new world order did not follow at
once upon the entrance of the Christian faith into the ancient
world, into a sociocultural complex that was in process of
dissolution and was addicted to somber mystical beliefs and
practices. Indeed, precisely because of the advancing
disintegration, or rather decomposition, of ancient society and
culture, a considerable number of early Christians were
eschatologically minded; that is, they were unduly concerned
with the supposed imminence of the last things, the end of the
world and the second coming of the Lord. At all events and for a
variety of reasons, the transforming power of Christian doctrine
could at first accomplish little.
7


The Turning Point: Hugo Groitus
Quite as untenable is the view, long held, that the doctrine
of natural law began with the Dutch scholar, Hugo Grotius (1583
1645), often hailed as the Father of Natural Law. For Grotius
was still closely connected with the teachers of the preceding
centuries. He stands out more through the first formal inclusion
of natural law and positive law in international law than
through any intellectual contribution of his own. He may be said
to have marked the transition from the metaphysical to the

7
Ibid, p. 30
rationalist natural law. The notion that the natural law would
still have some validity, etsiamsi daremus non esse Deum, aut
non curari ab eo negotia humana,

The Natural Law in the Age of Individualism and Rationalism
The so-called age of natural law did not, properly speaking,
commence with Hugo Grotius. It began rather with Pufendorf, who
undertook to expound the doctrine of Grotius. The net result of
the age was a disastrous setback, from the opening of the
nineteenth century, for the natural-law idea among the modern
philosophers and practitioners of law who were unacquainted with
the older Christian tradition. The new natural law differed in
many respects from the traditional one. It represented a
peculiar hypertrophy of the older conception. Numerous factors
were responsible for this development, and they arose from the
intellectual evolution and political circumstances of the
period. Humanism had declined, and with it had gone exaggerated
esteem for antiquity in general and, in particular, for Roman
law as ratio scripta. Roman law, in its degenerate form of usus
modernus and with its many archaic-sounding formulas, could not
satisfy this age of reason.
8



8
Ibid, p. 67

The Turning Away from Natural Law
The attack upon the idea of natural law came mainly from two
quarters. It came, in the first place, from skeptics and
agnostics like David Hume or from utilitarians like Jeremy
Bentham (17481832) and their disciples. In the next place, it
came from the leaders of the Romantic Movement, which was
antirationalist and antirevolutionary and was based upon the
philosophy of traditionalism as expounded by De Maistre and De
Bonald.
9

The Victory of Positivism
The attack of positivism proceeded from several quarters
along an ever-widening and enveloping front. It came first from
scientific empiricism, which was generally lacking in a sense of
the normative. The conflict of ethics with sociology opened, so
to speak, a second front. The third point of assault was the
spread of philosophical and historical materialism. For, in the
overthrow of the titans of German philosophy, even the power
of German idealism after Schelling and Hegel had been broken,
notwithstanding the efforts of the post-Kantians (Feuerbach,
Marx).
10




9
Ibid, p. 97
10
Ibid, p. 109

The Reappearance of Natural Law
The genius of the legal sciences could not be detained for
long in the arid waste of positivism. Bergbohm, who tracked down
the natural law into all the nooks and crannies in which it was
supposed to have hidden itself from positivism, found
everywhere, even among self-styled positivists, natural-law
thought patterns. His intention was to dislodge it definitively.
The year was 1885. Had Bergbohm repeated his hunt for the
natural law about 1925, forty years later, he would have been
shocked at the many new camouflages of his quarry. There is
manifestly something invincible and eternal about that body of
spiritual and moral ideas which for thousands of years has been
called natural law and is once more coming back into honor. This
is true even if those who admit these ideas in fact look back
with false shame at the deductive extravagances of the
rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
suppress the name of natural law. Not many concepts have had to
endure so much violence as the notion of natural law. Yet few
conceptions have had so proud and so great a tradition and a
past, and are destined to have so great a future.
11




11
Ibid, p. 119

Natural law and natural rights
What follow natural law are natural rights. Natural law may
be defined as the divine inspiration in man of the sense of
justice, fairness, and righteousness, not by divine revelation
or formal promulgation, but by internal dictates of reason
alone.
12
The binding force of natural law grasp all men at all
times, in every individual, there is always a fundamental
understanding of right and wrong, based on the basic standard of
the criterion that is good and evil. In other words, there is an
innate nature in every man known in his heart and conscience by
the dictates of his moral nature and is not a product of
theorizing which is the good or evil. Thus, we know that killing
for the sake of killing is bad or evil because it is contrary to
what we believe is just, fair or righteous. When we speak of
this inward instinct of justice, fairness, and righteousness in
man as divinely inspired by the dictates of his higher nature,
we are talking about natural law or the law of nature.
13
As
compared to divine law, there is difference. Divine law is the
law of religious faith made known to man by means of direct
revelation. On the other hand, natural law is impressed in man

12
Hector S. De Leon and Hector M. De Leon, Jr., The Law on Obligations and
Contracts, 2011 ed., (Philippines: Rex Printing Company Inc.,) p. 2

13
Ibid., p. 3

as the core of his higher self at the very moment of being or
even before that.
14

Natural rights are those rights possessed by every citizen
without being granted by the State for they are given to man by
God as a human being created to His image so that he may live a
happy life.
15
It is the right that we are presumably born with,
and that are inherent in individual existence, natural rights
are inalienable rights, meaning that they cannot be given away
even willingly or taken away legitimately by superior authority,
for Thomas Hobbes, the only natural right is the right to life
but for John Locke and classical liberalism, natural rights
includes the right to life, liberty, and property.
16
According to
Justice William Douglas (U.S. Supreme Court) explains natural
rights in these words: Man gets his rights from the creator.
They come to him because of the divine spark in every human
being. Thus deep within his conscience, man discovers a law he
has not laid upon himself but inscribed by God and which he must
obey. Even natural law, however, imposes limitations against the
misuse or abuses in the exercise of ones right. Every right

14
Ibid.,

15
Hector S. de Leon; Textbook on the Philippine Constitution; 2008 edition
(Quezon City: Rex Printing Company Inc.), p. 116

16
Carlton Clymer Rodee, et al., Introduction to Political Science. (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1989), p. 94

involves a corresponding responsibility to others and to
society.
17


Natural law and human rights
Natural law and human rights are closely connected to each
other as interdependent forces. A question is asked commonly,
what are human rights?
Human rights are commonly understood as being those rights
which are inherent to human being. The concept of human rights
acknowledges that every single human being is entitled to enjoy
his or her human rights without distinction as to race, color,
sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or
social origin, property, birth or other status. Human rights are
legally guaranteed by human rights law, protecting individuals
and groups against actions which interfere with fundamental
freedoms and human dignity.
18
They are expressed in treaties,
customary international law, bodies of principles and other
sources of law. Human rights law places an obligation on States
to act in a particular way and prohibits States from engaging in
specified activities. However, the law does not establish human
rights. Human rights are inherent entitlements which come to

17
Ibid. p. 117

18
Human Rights A Basic Handbook for UN Staff (Office of the High Commissioner
for Human rights, United Nations Staff College Project). P. 2

every person as a consequence of being human. Treaties and other
sources of law generally serve to protect formally the rights of
individuals and groups against actions or abandonment of actions
by Governments which interfere with the enjoyment of their human
rights.
19

Human Rights are the aggregate of privileges, claim,
benefits, entitlements and moral guarantees that pertain to man
because of his humanity.
20

The following are some of the most important characteristics
of human rights:
1. human rights are founded on respect for the dignity and
worth of each person;
2. human rights are universal, meaning that they are applied
equally and without discrimination to all people;
3. human rights are inalienable, in that no one can have his
or her human rights taken away other than in specific
situations for example, the right to liberty can be
restricted if a person is found guilty of a crime by a
court of law;
4. Human rights are indivisible, interrelated and
interdependent, for the reason that it is insufficient to
respect some human rights and not others. In practice, the

19
Ibid. p. 3

20
Rene V. Sarmiento; Human Rights Law, Human Rights Culture; Rex Book Store:
2014, p. 1
violation of one right will often affect the respect of
several other rights. All human rights should therefore be
seen as having equal importance and of being equally
essential to respect for the dignity and worth of every
person.
21



















21
Ibid.,

Aristotles Theory of Natural Law
Aristotle did affirm the existence of a law of nature, but
he was admired by and influenced the American Founders more for
his related views on republican government and the rule of law.
Aristotle was regularly included by the Founders in their lists
of reliable and authoritative political philosophers. When asked
once what was the philosophy underlying the Declaration of
Independence, Jefferson replied that: All its authority rests
on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in
conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary
books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke and Sidney.
John Adams similarly wrote that the principles of the American
Revolution are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy
and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of
nature and eternal reason; the principles on which the whole
government over us now stands.
22

The following are acknowledged doctrines which Aristotle
devised himself:
1. government should govern for the good of the people, not
for the good of those in power;
2. there is a natural aristocracy, and skilled statecraft
arranges things so that this element acquires authority,

22
Adams, Novanglus, No. 1.
or, failing that, blends democratic and oligarchic
influences in society to approximate to that outcome;
3. mixed regimes are better than pure regimes, because they
are more stable;
4. the best form of government in nearly all circumstances
involves the balancing of aspects of all three pure regimes
(kingship, aristocracy, and timocracy);
5. A pure democracy can easily turn into a tyranny of the
majority.

For Aristotle there is a very close connection between
justice and law, so much so that he is willing to say that the
general virtue of justice may be alternatively described as
lawfulness.
23
The opposition commonly drawn between natural
justice (and natural right) and natural law is therefore
unwarranted in the case of Aristotle.
24
The reason is not
difficult to see: particular judgments about what is equal or
just immediately imply corresponding generalizations, since
there would be no reason why similar cases should not be decided
in the same way. That this allotment should be 80/20 implies
that similar cases should have similar allotments. Thus, on
Aristotelian terms, a law is by nature if the equality which

23
Nicomachean Ethics, V.1

24
Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, Cambridge, CUP 1982.
it aims to ensure is such that it is justified by appeal to
something other than an agreement or decision. Similarly a law
would be contrary to nature if it forbade equalities which a
law which was by nature would aim to effect, or if it
commanded corresponding inequalities. By a law of nature,
then, Aristotle does not mean statutes, or a system of rules,
discernible by intellectual perception; rather, what he means
are recurring equalities or inequalities in the nature of
things, which, he considers, serve to justify general claims
involving the distribution of things and actions. Three
important things should be noted about a law of nature in this
sense:
First, Aristotle thinks that a law of nature may
appropriately be invoked as grounds for disobeying a human law
which contravenes it, since the law of nature has the higher
authority. This is clear from his favorable reference to the
Antigone of Sophocles and his willingness to contemplate jury
nullification in the Rhetoric.
25
It is unclear from the text on
what grounds Aristotle held that a law of nature has the higher
authority; but we may speculate that his view here is connected
with his views expressed elsewhere that the ultimate causes of

25
http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/aristotle

nature are divine, and that human artifice should assist or
complete nature rather than subvert it.
26

Second, it may reasonably be wondered why, if something is a
law of nature, it is not recognized and followed universally
by human beings. In fact no prescription seems to be
acknowledged by all cultures and times, not even Do not
murder. The puzzling language of the Nicomachean Ethics, which
defines nature as something that has the same force or
influence in all times and places, suggests how Aristotle
would deal with this problem.
27
His view seems to be that nature,
for its part, invariably suggests to us the appropriateness of
framing certain precepts (viz. concerning what is just by
nature), but we, for our part, need to have the appropriate
sensitivity to this influence. For example, on this view we
frame a precept of the form, Do not murder, and say that this
is just by nature, in view of our being sensitive to the
nearness and dearness of each human being to every other.
28

This nearness and dearness is an objective reality about our
similarity and potential reciprocal relationships with members
of the same kind; yet we may fail to be sensitive to this
reality. We do not, of course, merely intellectually perceive

26
Ibid. ,

27
Ibid.,

28
Ibid.,
that human beings are near and dear to one another; rather, we
sense or feel these ourselves, which is to say that we are
inclined to regard anothers good as our own good, and we are
prepared to act to protect and promote it. Yet it can happen, in
some cultures or circumstances, that our sensitivity is
suppressed or deformed, and in those unusual conditions the
precept Do not murder will either not be articulated by us or
will fail to have force. In such cases it is not nature that has
changed, or the law of nature; nature remains the same, but we
have failed to respond adequately to it, through a failure of
sensitivity.
Third, it seems to be Aristotles view that a law of nature
or what is just by nature never has an effect on our actions
without some admixture of the conventional and the arbitrary. No
precept is purely natural; all precepts are framed with a view
to an application to particular circumstances, and for this
something arbitrary will be required. Aristotles helpful
example is of the difference between wholesale and retail
measures: in all times and places, people use larger measures in
wholesale markets than in retail; they do this in view of the
nature of the casethe wholesale market involves a higher-level
distribution of goods for sale, and therefore it calls for
larger measuresand in this sense by nature wholesale measures
are larger than retail; nonetheless, which measures to use at
each level is purely a matter of convention like kilograms
rather than pounds, and grams rather than ounces.
The Law of Nature is so unalterable, that God himself cannot
change it. For the Power of God be infinite, yet we may say,
that there are some Things to which this infinite Power does not
extend, because they cannot be expressed by Propositions that
contain any Sense, but manifestly imply a Contradiction. For
Instance then, as God himself cannot effect, that twice two
should not be four; so neither can he, that what is
intrinsically Evil should not be Evil. And this what Aristotle
meant. Some Things are no sooner mentioned than we discover
Depravity in them. For as the Being and Essence of Things after
they exist, depend not upon any other, so neither do the
Properties which necessarily follow that being and Essence. Now
such is the Evil of some Actions, compared with a Nature guided
by right Reason. Therefore God suffers himself to be judged of
according to this Rule.
29


Stoic Natural law
The Stoics claim the order of the universe is fundamentally
rational. Human rationality, therefore, is a persons innate
moral compass. To reason and act rationally is to be in harmony

29
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Vol. 1, Chapter I: What War is,
and what Right is.

with the universe. Violence and vice are consequences of
irrationality and not being in harmony with universal laws.
30

They viewed Natural law, as a ruling principle based on
universal reason. They believed that this inherent rationality
in the universe was created by God, whose law applied
universally and equally.
31
According to Marcus Aurelius, emperor
of Rome and one of the greatest of the later Roman stoics, the
rational animal is consequently also a political and social
animal Human beings, therefore, can acquire virtue only as
citizens of the state and members of society, not in withdrawal
from their public duties and obligations to their fellow
citizens. These obligations, the stoics argued, are known by all
human beings on the basis of reason alone. They are therefore,
what the stoics called natural laws, that is, ethical
obligations we to one another that exist by nature, not by
convention, and are therefore universally valid. They are known
and apply in all societies the world over.
32

Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero (106-43 BCE) is an influential Roman jurist who was
heavily influenced by the Stoics in his understanding of natural

30
http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/morality-101/agency-theory/natural-law

31
http://orias.berkeley.edu/summer2004/summer2004antnatlaw.htm

32
Brian R. Nelson: Western Political Thought: From Socrates to the Age of
Ideology, 2nd Edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall), pp. 74-75

law, which he described by writing that "True law is right
reason in agreement with nature." It is universal ("There will
not be different laws at Rome and at Athens or different laws
now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will
be valid for all nations and all times"), divinely-inspired, and
divinely-enforced. Law is not necessarily just, but justice is
inherent in nature.
33

Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes had a different notion as regards natural law.
Since he is considered as the first great modern theorist, his
viewpoint differs from the classics. Hobbes was born during war
so his understanding of natural law is of negative approach. He
rejects the teleological view of human nature as a false and
dangerous illusion. Instead, he sees human nature as the
restless striving for power after power that has no end and
therefore no happiness or perfection. The rejection of end-
directed motion underlies Hobbess revolution in thinking from
classical natural law, and its perfectionist principle of
virtue, to modern natural rights, and its minimalist principle
of self-preservation.
34




33
http://orias.berkeley.edu/summer2004/summer2004antnatlaw.htm
34
http://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/hobbes

St. Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas bases his doctrine on the natural law, as one would
expect, on his understanding of God and His relation to His
creation. He grounds his theory of natural law in the notion of
an eternal law in God. In asking whether there is an eternal
law, he begins by stating a general definition of all law. Law
is a dictate of reason from the ruler for the community he
rules. This dictate of reason is first and foremost within the
reason or intellect of the ruler. It is the idea of what should
be done to insure the well-ordered functioning of whatever
community the ruler has care for. It is a fundamental tenet of
Aquinas political theory that rulers rule for the sake of the
governed, like for the good and well-being of those subject to
the ruler. Aquinas concludes that God has in His intellect an
idea by which He governs the world. This Idea, in God, for the
governance of things is the eternal law.
35

For Aquinas natural law consists of that portion of eternal
law that pertains particularly to people. His reasoning is that
all things share somewhat of the eternal law . . . from its
being imprinted on them and from this all things derive their
respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends. This is
particularly true of people, because our rational capacity has

35
http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/natlaw.html

a share of Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination
to its proper act and end. And, Aquinas says, This
participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is
called the natural law, and again, the natural law is nothing
else than the rational creatures participation in the eternal
law. We have already noted the basic precepts of the natural
law as being the preservation of life, propagation and education
of offspring, and pursuit of truth and peaceful society. Thus
the natural law consists of broad general principles that
reflect Gods intentions for people in creation.
36


John Locke
Lockes view of natural law is the opposite of Hobbes. While
Locke agrees that natural law is a condition of perfect freedom
as well as of perfect equality, he does not agree that people
use their natural freedom to destroy each other. Thus, Locke
stated in his work that the state if nature is a State of
Liberty, yet it is not a State if License . . . , because. . .
The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which
obliges every one: and Reason, which is that Law, teaches all
Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and

36
Samuel Enoch Stump and James Fieser, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A
history of Philosophy, 8
th
ed. (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, Inc.,) p. 163
independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health,
Liberty, or Possessions.
37

According to Locke, human nature under natural law is
innately social and cooperative. But to surmise this fact, it
can be questioned why if Locke maintains that human beings
possess a social and ethical capacity, it is necessary for us to
create a government at all? To answer this, Locke maintains that
Civil Government is the proper remedy for the Inconveniences of
the State of Nature, which must be certainly be Great, where Men
may be Judges in their own Case, since tis easily to be
imagined, that he who was so unjust as to do his Brother an
Injury, will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for it.
38


John Finnis
On Finniss view of the Overlap Thesis, the essential
function of law is to provide a justification for state
coercion. Accordingly, an unjust law can be legally valid, but
it cannot provide an adequate justification for use of the state
coercive power and is hence not obligatory in the fullest sense;
thus, an unjust law fails to realize the moral ideals implicit

37
Locke, The Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, p. 311

38
Locke, The Second Treatise, p. 321.

in the concept of law. An unjust law, on this view, is legally
binding, but is not fully law.
39


Like classical naturalism, Finniss naturalism is both an
ethical theory and a theory of law. Finnis distinguishes a
number of equally valuable basic goods: life, health, knowledge,
play, friendship, religion, and aesthetic experience. Each of
these goods, according to Finnis, has intrinsic value in the
sense that it should, given human nature, be valued for its own
sake and not merely for the sake of some other good it can
assist in bringing about. Moreover, each of these goods is
universal in the sense that it governs all human cultures at all
times. The point of moral principles, on this view, is to give
ethical structure to the pursuit of these basic goods; moral
principles enable us to select among competing goods and to
define what a human being can permissibly do in pursuit of a
basic good.
40


On Finniss view, the conceptual point of law is to
facilitate the common good by providing authoritative rules that
solve coordination problems that arise in connection with the

39
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
40
Ibid.,
common pursuit of these basic goods. Thus, Finnis sums up his
theory of law as follows:

The term law refers primarily to rules made, in accordance
with regulative legal rules, by a determinate and effective
authority itself identified and, standardly, constituted as an
institution by legal rules for a complete community, and
buttressed by sanctions in accordance with the rule-guided
stipulations of adjudicative institutions, this ensemble of
rules and institutions being directed to reasonably resolving
any of the communitys co-ordination problems and to ratifying,
tolerating, regulating, or overriding co-ordination solutions
from any other institutions or sources of norms for the common
good of that community (Finnis 1980, 276).

Again, it bears emphasizing that Finnis takes care to deny
that there is any necessary moral test for legal validity: one
would simply be misunderstanding my conception of the nature and
purpose of explanatory definitions of theoretical concepts if
one supposed that my definition ruled out as non-laws laws
which failed to meet, or meet fully, one or other of the
elements of the definition (Finnis 1980, 278).

Nevertheless, Finnis believes that to the extent that a norm
fails to satisfy these conditions, it likewise fails to fully
manifest the nature of law and thereby fails to fully obligate
the citizen-subject of the law. Unjust laws may obligate in a
technical legal sense, on Finniss view, but they may fail to
provide moral reasons for action of the sort that it is the
point of legal authority to provide. Thus, Finnis argues that a
rulers use of authority is radically defective if he exploits
his opportunities by making stipulations intended by him not for
the common good but for his own or his friends or partys or
factions advantage, or out of malice against some person or
group (Finnis 1980, 352). For the ultimate basis of a rulers
moral authority, on this view, is the fact that he has the
opportunity, and thus the responsibility, of furthering the
common good by stipulating solutions to a communitys co-
ordination problems (Finnis 1980, 351).

Finniss theory is certainly more plausible as a theory of
law than the traditional interpretation of classical naturalism,
but such plausibility comes, for better or worse, at the expense
of naturalisms identity as a distinct theory of law. Indeed, it
appears that Finniss natural law theory is compatible with
naturalisms historical adversary, legal positivism, inasmuch as
Finniss view is compatible with a source-based theory of legal
validity; laws that are technically valid in virtue of source
but unjust do not, according to Finnis, fully obligate the
citizen. Indeed, Finnis (1996) believes that Aquinass classical
naturalism fully affirms the notion that human laws are
posited.
41



















41
John Finnis, The Truth in Legal Positivism, in Robert P. George, The
Autonomy of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 195-214

Criticism on Natural Law
The concept of natural law is deistic or even atheistic in
sphere. The same is wrong to idealize because it deviate man
from spirituality. What makes man a human is the conscience that
governs him to act not just rationally but lovingly for
spirituality is not just reason or justice but beyond, this
quality is called love. According to the Holy Scriptures or the
Bible, God is Love.
42
Relative to this rule is for man to care
for one another, respect each other, improve their lives and
coexist harmoniously in the grace if the creator.
Defense on Natural Law
The idea of natural law is a pure secular rule that is
universal in scope as far as the earth is concerned. We are
human beings who live in this world and only things that concern
us matters. It is not our concern to deal with ecclesiastical
domains which can either be real or unreal. We are not concern
here of possibilities, we are dealing here with certainties for
we are rational and logical. Natural law is the ultimate control
of human behavior if we follow it. The same coincides to our
basic necessities and can do no harm to our existence since it
is our nature that dictates. Nothing in natural order will go
against our natural existence because we are part of the system.

42
1John 4:8

Therefore, natural law theory is good and this is what Plato has
argued as a form of the good. Recent researches in genetics,
evolutionary biology, and cultural anthropology had proven that
there is a complex interaction between genetically inherited
factors and developmental and social factors.
43
Thus, there is
interdependence of human behavior to the system of natural law.

















43
"Human Nature." Encyclopedia Britannica : Chicago: encyclopedia Britannica,
2012
Conclusion
The tenet of natural law are the philosophical foundation
of todays human rights. The concept of natural law has been an
instrument for people to discover and justify the rights of
every human. Which further inspired people to put these rights
in writing to ensure the recognition, promotion and protection
of these rights. From the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, all these documents base their
claims on natural law.
Human rights need not be based on law written by man for
these rights are in accordance with the natural law. Human
rights are inherent in every person since man is born with
reason. Our rationality, the capacity to know what is right from
what is wrong and the desire to be in harmony with our natural
environment, lead us to realize our rights as human beings.
Since every man shares the same characteristics of a rational
being it is also necessary that human rights be universal. These
rights must apply to all without discrimination with regard to
sex, age, religion, race and other classifications.
Natural law plays a fundamental part in the discovery and
development of our human rights. Because of natural law we can
enjoy these inherent rights, but of course not without
limitation. To be in harmony with the natural law every person
must exercise these rights and at the same time recognize,
promote and respect the same and equal rights of other people.