Natural Law and Modern Society
Natural Law and Modern Society
A New Treatise on the Classical Natural Law Tradition
Professor Sean Coyle of the University of Birmingham is one of the world’s leading Thomist jurists. This year he published his magnum opus “Natural Law and Modern Society” with Oxford University Press.
The thematic sweep of the intellectual inquiry in Natural Law and Modern Society is truly exceptional, and represents the consummation of over two decades of thinking and writing about foundational topics of natural law jurisprudence. Coyle writes authoritatively, just to give some examples, about what goods constitute human flourishing, the nature of practical reasoning and first principles of ethical action, the critical role of the virtues in the successful pursuit of human happiness, the nature of justice and its different facets, the nature and source of political authority and obligation, what the common good is and how it is upheld, the manifold ways in which law contributes to justice and the common good, and why a seriously unjust law or laws is certainly not a law or legal system in any real sense. Coyle’s arguments across all of these issues are meticulously made and articulated through a process of deep and thoughtful engagement with the thought of a wide array of scholars: classical, scholastic, and contemporary.
I encourage all our readers to get a copy. I personally find Coyle’s account of the classical natural law tradition convincing and think it will and should take its place alongside Heinrich Rommen’s The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy and John Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights as one of the most important restatements of the classical natural law tradition of our times.
The law journal Jurisprudence will be hosting a symposium on Sean’s book in early 2025. I was very happy to have been invited to contribute a review essay and have uploaded a draft to SSRN. In case it is of interest to our readers, I attach a link to it here.
In my essay, I zoom in on parts of Coyle’s treatise - chapters X and XI - that are relevant to questions about judicial power and legal interpretation. More specifically, I connect Coyle’s work to my own area of focus in constitutional theory, and to debates about how best to adapt classical natural law thought to questions of constitutional adjudication and interpretation. I anticipate that my comments will testify to the sheer richness of Coyle's work as, although his book does not directly engage with long-standing debates in constitutional theory, his arguments on the nature and point of law nonetheless holds important insights for them.
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Some reflections on your article “Natural Law, Practical Reasoning, and Legal Interpretation in 'Natural Law and Modern Society'.
The concept of natural law implies that the law (insofar as it is natural and not constructed) determines the limits and content of any legitimate authority to fulfil the law, as opposed to any person or institution of nominal authority ‘making’ the law. On this account, the Law that is ‘made’ has authority (normative validity) only insofar as it consistently adheres to and fulfils the natural law, or else it is not a valid law. We are evidently far from this ideal; concepts such as ‘common good’ and ‘justice’ are not consistently defined or applied.
Natural law presupposes moral realism: that there are objective moral rules or meta-moral facts that dictate how any rational agent ought to act, above all other considerations or personal preferences. If morality is an ontologically indispensable feature of social relations then morality must be rational, universal and therefore true independently of contingent social conventions, therefore not a function of democratic representation, consensus, implied consent or a result of any other ‘legitimisation process’ but aligned with what is objectively, rationally, right. The idea of having the authority to do what is objectively wrong is absurd, contradictory in its premises. On this view, logical consistency demands that every rational being has the moral authority to do what is morally right and no authority, under any circumstances, to do what is morally wrong.
The crucial question is of course how to determine what is ‘objectively right’, and the criterion of rationality can only enlighten us to a degree, since humans are not perfectly rational. We are bound to err and learn from our failures. Nevertheless, one point of reference is solid: absurd/nonsensical ‘laws’ cannot be the Law, since they have no normative content, cannot be integrated as a one, univocal intention, but remain composed of mutually inconsistent, reciprocally negating parts. Discovering violations of the laws of sense in any ’made’ laws and their interpretations, including the contradiction entailed by the lack of a priori normative grounding, could then be the primary function of judicial reasoning, aiming to discover the most consistent, logically integrated expression of the natural law.