Natural Law The term "natural law" is ambiguous. It refers to a type of moral theory, as well as to a type of legal theory, but the core claims of the two kinds of theory are logically independent. It does not refer to thelaws of nature, the laws that science aims to describe. According to natural law moral theory, the moral standards that govern human behavior are, in some sense, objectively derived from the nature of human beings and the nature of the world. While being logically independent of natural law legal theory, the two theories intersect. However, the majority of the article will focus on natural law legal theory. According to natural law legal theory, the authority of legal standards necessarily derives, at least in part, from considerations having to do with the moral merit of those standards. There are a number of different kinds of natural law legal theories, differing from each other with respect to the role that morality plays in determining the authority of legal norms. The conceptual jurisprudence of John Austin provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of law that distinguishes law from non-law in every possible world. Classical natural law theory such as the theory ofThomas Aquinasfocuses on the overlap between natural law moral and legal theories. Similarly, the neo-naturalism of John Finnis is a development of classical natural law theory. In contrast, the procedural naturalism of Lon L. Fuller is a rejection of the conceptual naturalist idea that there are necessary substantivemoral constraints on the content of law. Lastly, Ronald Dworkin’s theory is a response and critique oflegal positivism. All of these theories subscribe to one or more basic tenets of natural law legal theory and are important to its development and influence. Table of Contents 1Two Kinds of Natural Law Theory 2Conceptual Naturalism 1The Project of Conceptual Jurisprudence 2Classical Natural Law Theory 3The Substantive Neo-Naturalism of John Finnis
4The Procedural Naturalism of Lon L. Fuller 5Ronald Dworkin's "Third Theory" 6References and Further Reading 1.Two Kinds of Natural Law Theory At the outset, it is important to distinguish two kinds of theory that go by the name of natural law. The first is a theory of morality that is roughly characterized by the following theses. First, moral propositions have what is sometimes called objective standing in the sense that such propositions are the bearers of objective truth-value; that is, moral propositions can be objectively true or false. Though moral objectivism is sometimes equated with moral realism (see, e.g., Moore 1992, 190: "the truth of any moral proposition lies in its correspondence with a mind- and convention- independent moral reality"), the relationship between the two theories is controversial.
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