At the time the Declaration of Independence was written, the “rights” people spoke of were considered natural or God-given. From the 20th century, however, the term “rights” evolved into “human rights.” Although natural rights and human rights are essentially universal, there are still significant differences between them. 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. To know what is right, one must use one`s reason and apply it to the commandments of Thomas Aquinas. It is believed that this reason is embodied in its most abstract form in the concept of a primary commandment: “Good must be sought, evil must be avoided.” [54] St. Thomas explains: The law of nature includes, first, some of the most general commandments known to all; and, secondly, certain secondary and more detailed rules, which are, so to speak, conclusions that flow closely from the first principles. As far as these general principles are concerned, the natural law can now be abstractly extinguished from the hearts of men.
However, it is extinguished in the case of a particular action, insofar as reason is prevented from applying the general principle to a particular point of practice, because of desire or another passion, as indicated above (77, 2). But what the others, that is, with regard to the secondary commandments, then the natural law can be erased from the human heart, either by bad persuasion, just as in speculative questions errors occur with regard to the necessary conclusions; or by evil customs and corrupt habits, as in some people, theft and even unnatural vices, as the apostle (Rm. i) says, were not considered sins. [55] You are a doctor in a busy hospital. Every day you have to turn away sick patients because you don`t have enough beds to accommodate them. They treat an elderly patient who dies of a painful illness. The disease is incurable and kills the patient within a few weeks. You know that large amounts of painkillers will give your patient some comfort in the last few weeks, but you also know that medications will cause the patient`s death within days.
When your patient dies, a new patient has a bed to be treated. What is the procedure in natural law? In the twelfth century, Gratian equated natural law with divine law. Albertus Magnus would address the subject a century later, and his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica I-II qq. 90-106 restored natural law to its independent state and affirmed natural law as the participation of the rational creature in eternal law. [45] However, since human reason could not fully comprehend the eternal law, it had to be supplemented by the revealed divine law. (See also Bible Law in Christianity.) Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas taught that all human or positive laws are to be judged by their conformity with natural law. An unjust law is not a law in the true sense of the word. It merely retains the “appearance” of the law, insofar as it is properly constituted and enforced, as it is a just law, but is itself a “perversion of the law.” [46] At this point, natural law was used not only to judge the moral value of various laws, but also to determine what those laws meant in the first place.
This principle sowed the seeds of possible social tensions on tyrants. [47] Cicero influenced the discussion of natural law for many centuries, until the era of the American Revolution. The jurisprudence of the Roman Empire was rooted in Cicero, who “had an extraordinary grip. on the imagination of posterity” as “a means of disseminating the ideas that shaped the law and institutions of the Reich.” [28] Cicero`s conception of natural law “found its way into the following centuries, especially through the writings of St. Isidore of Seville and Gratian`s Decretum.” [29] Thomas Aquinas, in his summary of medieval natural law, quoted Cicero`s statement that “nature” and “custom” were the sources of the laws of a society. [30] Students should research local, state, or federal laws to find a particularly controversial law. The law should be controversial because of an ethical dilemma For example, it could be argued that the death penalty violates natural law because it involves violence. Abortion is another well-known controversial law that would fall within the realm of an ethical dilemma that applies to natural law theory.