Understanding Natural Law
Christopher Wolfe
Marquette University
[Paper delivered at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, for a
“Roundtable on Natural Law in a Secular Society,” sponsored by the Committee on the Political
Economy of the Good Society and co-sponsored by the American Public Philosophy Institute,
August 30, 2003.]
Natural law is a term that has been used with a multitude of incompatible meanings, and
this certainly has not helped its cause. In this paper I would like to sort through some of the
meanings of natural law in an effort to bring some more clarity to contemporary discussions of
the subject. In particular, I want to try to identify four different forms or levels of “natural law”
thought. They range from the very broad–highly abstract and formal–to the relatively concrete
and specific, and can be differentiated partly by the range of thinkers that are comprehended
within each level.
Natural Law as Objective Value
The first and most abstract notion that can be called “natural law” is that human beings
are a certain kind of being, and the features of that being should direct our understanding of how
human beings should live. This approach implies the existence of some sort of objective moral
law knowable through reason. It is implicit in what are perhaps the most basic intuitions giving
rise to natural law, namely, the sense that there must be some general standard in light of which
it is possible to judge human laws or conventions. The classic instance of this idea is found in
Sophocles’ Antigone, in which a sister disobeys a law by burying her brother, and claims a
warrant in higher law for so doing.
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Convention