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Some of the major criticisms of natural law have been suggested earlier but can be recapitulated in light of contemporary debates. First, at the start of the twentieth century anti-naturalist philosophical criticism repudiated any attempt to derive moral ‘values’ from ‘facts’ about human nature.

G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) argued that naturalistic theories commit the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ by attempting to move invalidly from descriptive ‘is’ statements to normative ‘ought’ statements. Moore directed his criticism at the evolutionary social thought of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), but others applied it to natural-law theory as well. Philosophers found precedent for this criticism in passing observation made by David Hume (1711–76) in A Treatise of Human Nature concerning the introduction of ‘ought’ statements within the course of argument that had been descriptive.43 Over the course of the century, natural-law theorists have incorporated this stricture as a warning to avoid hasty, naive and simplistic derivations of ‘values’ from ‘facts’ rather than as requiring a complete abandonment of any descriptive bases for ethical reflection.

Second, some Christian theologians attack natural law theorists for overestimating the powers of ‘fallen’ human reason and for calling into question the sufficiency of the Word of God. Early in the century this line of attack was expressed poignantly by Swiss theologian Karl Barth, especially in his attack of Emil Brunner’s (1889–1966) theological ethics based on an ‘orders of creation’. Though categorised as a debate between Protestants and Roman Catholics, this debate runs within as well as between the Christian churches. More recently, ‘narrative theologians’ have criticised natural-law theory for minimalising or even ignoring Jesus, the Kingdom of God and the community of disciples embracing a distinctive way of life in favour of an accommodating universal ethic based on abstract and rationalistic metaphysics, anthropology and law.46 Yet narrative need not in principle be opposed to natural law.

Third, the anti-realist critics, informed by radical historicism, attack the ‘essentialism’ implied in Thomistic natural law. If there is no such thing as ‘human nature’ at all, then the notion of natural-law ethics is nonsense. They also charge modern natural law (or its philosophical descendants) with promoting a ‘foundationalism’ that ignores the radical limitations of its own suppressed historical particularity. If there is no properly rational practical reason, but only a raw human capacity for enculturation and socialisation, then it makes no sense to talk about a natural-law ethic. Anti-realists also point to its destructive consequences, particularly through the ways in which natural law has been invoked to give moral legitimation to dominant power structures and to repress prophetic demands for greater freedom.

Natural-law theorists have responded to anti-realism in a variety of ways, from denouncing it as nihilist to cautiously appreciating its insightfulness and taking up the challenge of presenting a more self-critical, historically conscious methodology. It needs to be said that in an age of moral pluralism we have become acutely conscious of the serious and widespread mistake of projecting the moral beliefs or social customs of a particular culture onto what is ‘natural’ to all human beings everywhere. Knowledge of history enables us to see as cultural what was once assumed to be ‘natural’ – the inferiority of women, the double standard for males and females in sexual morality, the disgracefuness of long hair on men (1 Cor. 11:14–15), the enslavement of captives of war etc. The same is true of practices that were once dismissed as ‘unnatural’. Invocation of natural law has indeed been a tactic used by people in power to maintain their privileged position, and of course the same is true of appeals to scripture, tradition, philosophy and other sources of legitimation. While much of its analysis in the universities is fairly abstract, one can observe the practical appeal of natural law.

The horrors of the century – from the Holocaust to Rwanda – point to a level of moral perversity that is unimaginable. There is widespread recognition by all but the most indifferent and cynical that these evils amount to something more than a violation of mere social customs, aesthetic taste or sentiment. These horrors have led governments, religious institutions and humanitarian organisations to call for a level of philosophical backing for human rights that carries stronger moral authority than conventional treaties. The practical force of natural law can thus be seen in legal documents from the 1946 Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals and in the formulation of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Its soaring idealism is evidenced in Martin Luther King, Jr’s ‘A Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, which denounced laws enforcing racial segregation with the Augustinian maxim that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’. It offers a basis for moral analysis of the content of human rights, the requirements of the international common good and the demands of ecological responsibility.

It has recently been invoked to criticise slavery in the Sudan, to support the rights of prisoners in China, to attack the practice of genital mutilation in Africa, to provide backing for the justice due to immigrants in Europe, to counter the death penalty in the United States and to authorise the priority of human rights over the claims of national sovereignty in the former Yugoslavia. The natural-law tradition has been strongly associated with Roman Catholicism. Yet the reformers acknowledged the natural law, and all of the major theorists of the modern version, from Grotius through Locke, came from Protestant nations. In the twentieth century its major defenders were often Roman Catholic, but its advocates have also come from the Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant traditions (though sometimes employing the language of ‘general revelation’, ‘created order’ and the like).

While  the language of natural law has an undeniably Christian character, many of its themes find resonance with themes found in Confucius, Mencius and thinkers from different religious traditions. Whatever their differences, natural lawyers believe that it offers a superior alternative to the relativism that discourages serious public moral discourse and to the subjectivism that undermines personal moral deliberation. More sophisticated proponents of natural-law ethics wish to employ it as a way of searching for a shared understanding of the human good, or at least of the major components that constitute the human good, both within their own religious communities and also in broader public contexts. They recognise that the common good can only be discerned through active participation in conversation by all the members of a community. For all their differences, natural-law ethicists share a belief that there is such a thing as the human good, commensurate with human nature, however complex its manifestations and various its possible modes of fulfilment.

Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006