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.
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.