Natural Law
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DEONTOLOGICAL AND ABSOLUTE
• Natural Law is deontological – concerned with the means to the end
• Natural Law is absolute – it does not allow any exceptions to its rule and can be applied universally
ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY
Natural Law is routed in the philosophy of Aristotle. He believed that everything in life serves a purpose and has an efficient and final cause. Efficient causes are the things/processes (the tools used to create a wooden figure) by which things are achieved, and the final cause is the end product (the wooden figure). For Aristotle, everything has a telos or end purpose, and this determines it’s ‘good.’ If we can understand the final cause of an organism we can understand the necessary processes to reach this.
FAITH AND REASON
Thomas Aquinas took Aristotelian Philosophy and applied it to Christian Theology. He argued that the telos of the world can be found in God. The world is the creation of God and thus can reveal his purpose through reason and intellect. For Aquinas, faith and reason together provide the best tools for living.
ABSOLUTE LAWS
There are absolute laws, which govern the way the world works for example the law of gravity. In the same way, Aquinas postulated that right and wrong, good and evil follow a natural law, which we can discover through our reason and observation.
POTENUALITY AND ACTUALITY
Aristotle said everything has a state of potentiality and an actuality; turning potentiality into actuality is fulfilling a purpose and thus the essence of goodness.
EUDAIMONIA
Our potential is to reach the ultimate good, Aristotle’s idea of Eudaimonia – our ultimate aim.
LEVELS OF LAW
The whole idea of law works on four levels:
1. Eternal Law – The order in the mind of God
2. Divine Law – The law given to people from God through the bible and the teaching of the church
3. Natural Law – Intuitive sense of right and wrong discovered through conscience
4. Human Law – Rules made by Human societies in order for them to work successfully
Each level of law depends on the levels above it, whilst eternal law does not depend on anything because God exists necessarily
The Roman Catholic Church adopted the whole of Aquinas’s thinking and today still takes the same approach to religious questions.
ADVANTAGES
• It is a justifiable way of asserting that morality is absolute. It is therefore possible for one group of people to be able to judge another.
• It allows faith to be combined with reason and appreciates the human ability to reason, whilst it can still be adopted from a Christian perspective.
• Appeals to our instinctive convictions of right and wrong that depend on more than opinion and society. Our instincts from a child tell us there is an absolute right and wrong – children are quick to recognise when something is not just or an absence of equality.
CRITICISMS
• When strictly applied, some rules are counter-intuitive e.g. the purpose of sexual intercourse is procreation which implies a couple should not have sex if they are infertile perhaps because they have passed the menopause or because of some other condition.
• It suggests every human adult should marry and have children – does this mean Mother Teresa was wrong to devote her life to helping the poor instead? Or that Thomas Aquinas was wrong to have been a priest? Aquinas tackled this challenge by maintaining it is acceptable for some people to choose other ways of life. However, this seemingly allows some people to consider themselves exempt from the rules whilst imposing the same rules on others.
• There are some cases in which we are not sure what the natural thing to do is. For example: is it wrong to attempt to prolong the life of a dying man?
• What happens when there is conflict between divine law and the reason? For example, Jesus said turn the other cheek but natural law commands that you should attempt to preserve your life.
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