If Alan Keyes is the Senate GOP candidate...just what IS "Natural Law"?

[terrya]

It appears that Keyes might be the GOP candidate to face Barack Obama in Illinois. And since Keyes is a disciple of "Natural Law", I guess I'd better ask just what this is.

Not that I'd vote for Keyes. Not in a million years.

Thanks,
Terry

[gristy]

1. Here's a link

http://www83.homepage.villanova.edu/richard.jacobs/MPA%208300/natural%20law.html

The Natural Law...

Although natural law is not "written" in the sense that human laws are codified, it is knowable by nature and binding by nature. That is, natural law manifests itself to human reason not by any external sign but by a rationally conducted examination of human nature with all its parts and relations. In this sense, natural law is "virtual" because it exists in every human being even before one"s power of reason is sufficiently developed to form actual ethical judgments.

One of the oldest recorded definitions of natural law comes from the orator, Cicero. He asserted that natural law is

"...right reason in agreement with nature, of universal application, unchanging and everlasting". There will not be a different law at Rome and at Athens, and different law now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law for all nations and for all times. (1928, 3.33)

Rather than utilizing the customs and laws of a particular society as a standard for determining ethical conduct, natural law theory asserts that all human beings by their nature seek happiness and this standard defines conduct as intrinsically ethical and other conduct as intrinsically unethical. Human beings are "hot wired" for happiness, goal-driven beings inclined toward the good. Plato and Aristotle understood happiness to be a good pursued solely for its own sake as an end, not a means to another end. The converse is also true, namely, that humans are "hot wired" to avoid unhappiness. Hence the similarity between natural law and the aphorism, "Do good and avoid evil," which some call the natural law.

A general paradigm explicating the content of the natural law exhibits the following seven elements:

1. the natural law is naturally knowable by all human beings
2. the natural law is knowable by the power of reason;
3. the natural law is naturally authoritative over all human beings;
4. the good is prior to the right;
5. right conduct is action that responds nondefectively to the good;
6. there are a variety of ways in which conduct can be defective with respect to the good (i.e., intention, circumstance, situation); and,
7. some of these ways can be captured and formulated as general rules.
MORE

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. Keyes and Reason...

LOL!!! That's funny. :crazy:

[Tansy_Gold]

3. I believe Cicero was hijacked

and used by the religious right.

"Natural law" is often used as a euphemism for christian biblical "law," the "law" of the creator, etc.

[Alpha Wolf]

4. St. Thomas Aquinas took the torch from the Greeks and continued...

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09076a.htm