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Definition: natural law from The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide

The idea that basic fundamental laws exist in nature that are common to all humankind. Natural law is distinct from positive law, which is those laws imposed on people by people.


natural law

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is opposed to positive law, which is determined by humans, conditioned by history, and subject to continuous change. The concept of natural law originated with the Greeks and received its most important formulation in Stoicism . The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations were reducible to the dictates of natural law. This idea became particularly important in Roman legal theory, which eventually came to recognize a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples and existing alongside the individual codes of specific places and times (see natural rights ). Christian philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas perpetuated this idea, asserting that natural law was common to all peoples—Christian and non-Christian alike—while adding…
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Full text Article Natural Law

From Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology
The natural law is commonly said to be a set of moral norms, or evaluative principles, grounded in some way in nature or reason, and therefore accessible to all. However, there is no consensus on what the natural law is, even granting that such a thing exists. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace a…
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Full text Article NATURAL LAW

From The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment
Natural law is a major school of thought in legal theory, ethics, and political philosophy and dates back to ancient Greece. During the American Enlightenment, natural law theory emphasized early Enlightenment themes such as a confidence in and reliance upon reason, a focus on individuals as the…
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Full text Article natural law

From Encyclopedia of Ethics
In contemporary context ‘natural law’ suggests two things. It is most commonly identified with the Catholic Church's doctrine on the subject. To philosophers and jurists, it also means the more general theory of a ‘higher’ law, of which Catholic teaching is the most prominent example, and to which…
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Full text Article NATURAL LAW

From Encyclopedia of Religion and the Law in America
Natural law comprises an unwritten body of universal principles forming the ethical and legal basis by which human conduct is evaluated and governed. Purportedly of divine origin, this law is said to be accessible by reason to people of all races, classes, religions, and cultures. The content of…
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Full text Article natural law

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Greek and Roman…
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Full text Article NATURAL LAW

From Global Dictionary of Theology
The phrase natural law can refer to a range of theological and philosophical positions, including the conviction that the God who created all humans in his image and likeness endowed them with the capacity, through human conscience, to intuit not only God's existence but also something of God's…
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Full text Article THE NATURAL LAW IS THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN LAW:

From Big Ideas Simply Explained: The Politics Book
THE NATURAL LAW IS THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN LAW:
IN CONTEXT IDEOLOGY Philosophy of law FOCUS Natural and human law BEFORE 1274 Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between natural law and human law in his Summa Theologica . 1517 The Protestant Reformation questions the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and is used to justify the divine right of kings. …
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Full text Article natural law

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is opposed to positive law, which is determined by humans, conditioned by history, and subject to continuous…
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Full text Article Natural Law

From American Governance
The term natural law —better called the natural moral law to distinguish it from the “laws of nature” that govern the physical world—signifies a moral code that God implanted in human nature. Proponents see in it an objective basis for cross-cultural and unchanging moral principles. As God-given, …
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Full text Article natural law

From Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought
Natural law and natural rights are those recognized by natural justice , and the attempt to uphold them is the fundamental aim of any theory of justice that is not merely sceptical of the whole idea. Natural law, if it exists, is a system of law binding on people by virtue of their nature alone, and…
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