Natural Law

Melissa Moschella and Robert George

The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition

Abstract

The natural law tradition of thought about morality and jurisprudence has its roots in Ancient
Greek and Roman philosophy, was developed and systematized by scholastic thinkers,
particularly Thomas Aquinas, and continues to be influential to the present day. This article
focuses on the central tradition of natural law thinking, outlining its basic features with particular
attention to its political and legal implications as well as its relation to the social and behavioral
sciences.

Key Words

Thomas Aquinas, Authority, civil disobedience, ethics, John Finnis, H.L.A. Hart, human nature,
law, legal positivism, morality, natural law, obligation, rights

Body Text

The natural law tradition of thought about morality and jurisprudence has its roots in
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, was developed and systematized by scholastic thinkers,
particularly Thomas Aquinas, and continues to be influential to the present day. While the
concept of natural law played an important role in early modern moral and political theory,
particularly in the work of Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes and Locke, these thinkers’ understanding
of natural law represented a radical departure from the central tradition of moral and political
thought that reached a highpoint in the work of Aquinas. This article, therefore, will focus on
natural law theory within the central tradition, outlining its basic features with particular
attention to its political and legal implications as well as its relation to the social and behavioral
sciences.

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 The core of natural law theory is the view that, through rational reflection, human beings
can discern principles of right action that direct us to order our wills toward integral human
fulfillment, the overall well-being of all human beings as persons and communities. These
principles hold universally in all times and cultures because the basic requirements of human
well-being are rooted in an essentially unchanging human nature, although many concrete
applications of these principles may vary with circumstances. Natural law thus includes a theory
of value – a substantive account of human well-being in its various dimensions – as well as a
theory of right action – moral rules and principles that guide and structure ethical decision-
making in concrete cases. It also involves an account of virtues understood as the habits of
mind and character that reliably dispose one to choose and act in accordance with moral norms
and that in themselves constitute an important aspect of human flourishing, but the focus here
will be primarily on the first two aspects.

Natural Law as a Theory of Value

Natural law theories seek to provide objective and universal accounts of the basic and
constitutive elements of human well-being, while at the same time recognizing that the human
good, though determinate, is multifaceted, thus leaving room for a diversity of good lives. What
are these basic human goods or values that constitute a flourishing life? How are they identified?
What is their relation to human nature? While there is dispute among natural law theorists about
the precise answer to these questions, a common starting point is Question 94, Article 2 of
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. There, Aquinas argues that the natural law has various
precepts because it orders human beings toward a variety of goods that reason apprehends as
intrinsically valuable, as choiceworthy in themselves and not merely as means toward further
ends. These goods correspond to and are perfective of the various dimensions of human nature.
As bodily beings, life and health are inherent aspects of our well-being. As social beings,
friendship, the formation of communities, marriage and family life all have intrinsic value for us.
As rational beings, our fulfillment involves the acquisition of knowledge, both practical and
theoretical, including knowledge of the truth about God.
Contemporary natural law thinkers, such as Germain Grisez, John Finnis and Joseph
Boyle, have attempted to offer a fuller explanation of the nature of these basic goods, as well as a

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more complete list of them, since Aquinas mentions them only in passing as if by way of
example, without any pretensions to an exhaustive treatment of the topic. Thus, in addition to
the goods listed above which are all more or less explicitly mentioned by Aquinas, Finnis speaks
of the good of performative excellence, the goods of integrity (inner harmony among the
reasoning and desiring aspects of the self) and authenticity (harmony between one’s judgments
and one’s actions), as well as the good of harmony with God understood as the transcendent
source of existence and meaning (Finnis 2011).
There is some controversy among contemporary natural law theorists regarding how
these goods are known and how they relate to human nature. Aquinas speaks of these basic
goods as “those things to which man has a natural inclination” (q.94, a.2), leading some to claim
that natural law bases moral norms on sub-rational desires inherent in human nature, thus
denying the Humean fact-value distinction by implying that an ought can be derived from a mere
is. This is one of the criticisms levied against natural law theories by H.L.A. Hart in The
Concept of Law. Some contemporary natural law thinkers, such as Ralph McInerny and Alasdair
MacIntyre, argue that the fact-value distinction is false, and that moral norms are indeed derived
from facts about human nature (McInerny 1982, MacIntyre 1999 and 2007). Even these
accounts, however, are far from the crass naturalism of which critics like Hart accuse them, for
they have a sophisticated metaphysical understanding of nature that distinguishes only certain
essential aspects as normatively relevant. On this view, nature, and human nature in particular,
is normative not “as it happens to be,” but “as it could be if it realized its goal or telos.” And the
telos or perfection of human nature is, ultimately, discovered by reason.
Other contemporary natural law thinkers, including Grisez, Finnis and Boyle, accept the
fact-value distinction and deny that natural law, including Aquinas’s own formulation of it, runs
afoul of that distinction when properly understood. For Aquinas human nature is defined by
rationality; what is most natural to human beings, in Aquinas’s sense of the term natural, is to act
in accordance with reason. The natural inclinations to which Aquinas refers, as corresponding to
the human goods to which the first principles of practical reason direct our choices, are not the
inclinations of sub-rational desire, but rather the inclinations of the will, a rational appetite which
tends toward intelligible goods as apprehended by reason (Brock 2005). Thus while goods like
life, knowledge and friendship are intrinsic to the flourishing of all human beings because of the
nature that we have and because they are perfective of that nature, Grisez, Finnis and others who

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follow their account argue that practical reason directly grasps the choiceworthiness of these
goods, rather than claiming that our knowledge of what is inherently valuable for human beings
is derivative of our prior understanding of anthropological facts. In other words, the
choiceworthiness of these goods is grasped immediately by one who properly understands them
and is not impeded in understanding by prejudice, partisanship, or some other factor.
On this view, the social and behavioral sciences can offer detailed descriptions of human
attitudes, inclinations and behaviors, their typical consequences, and the biological or cultural
factors that typically engender them, but these descriptions in themselves cannot be the basis for
value judgments. Nonetheless, the social sciences are not irrelevant to discerning the basic and
constitutive aspects of human well-being. Rather, as Finnis puts it, they are helpful insofar as
they offer “reminders of the range of possibly worthwhile activities and orientations” (Finnis
2011, p. 81). And, while the mere fact of universal or near-universal agreement about a value is
insufficient to establish it as such, comparative anthropology does provide evidence of broad
cross-cultural and trans-historical appreciation of the values that Aquinas and contemporary
natural law theorists point to as basic and constitutive forms of human well-being – as one would
expect if, indeed, basic human goods are as these theorists describe them.

Natural Law as a Theory of Right Action

Recognition that goods like life, knowledge or friendship are choiceworthy in themselves
as distinctive aspects of human flourishing corresponds to what natural law thinkers call the first
principles of practical reason, principles of the form, “X is to be done and pursued, and its
contrary to be avoided,” where X is any one of the basic goods. They are first principles because
they are the starting point for all practical reasoning, reasoning about how to choose and act. In
this sense, they are analogous to the first principles of theoretical reasoning, such as the principle
of non-contradiction (a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same
respect), which all reasoning necessarily presupposes. These first practical principles in
themselves, however, distinguish only intelligible from non-intelligible (irrational) choices and
actions, not morally right from morally wrong actions. Any action in pursuit of a basic good is
intelligible (and, to that extent, rational), but not necessarily moral. A surgeon, for instance,
might perform unnecessary operations on his patients for the sake of practicing and improving

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his skills. Though obviously immoral, such conduct is hardly irrational or unintelligible, as
would be the conduct of someone who for no reason at all devoted his life to hopping on one foot
all day in the corner of his room.
How, then, does the theory of value discussed in the previous section form the basis for
concrete norms that guide morally-significant choice and action? As a preliminary matter, it is
worth mentioning here that one of the core differences between natural law thinking in the
central tradition and the natural law theories typical of the early modern and modern periods is
that, in the central tradition, law’s force – its binding power or obligatoriness – lies essentially in
its reasonableness, rather than in the will or command of a superior – of any authority, human or
divine, understood as external to reason itself. As Aquinas puts it, law is essentially an
“ordinance of reason;” its reasonableness is the source of its binding power as law (as opposed to
brute force) (q. 90, a.1, 4).
Thus, according to Finnis, the first and most general moral principle is, “be fully
reasonable,” where reasonableness is understood not merely instrumentally as a matter of
choosing efficient means towards pre-given ends, but rather as including within itself a
substantive account of the ends worth choosing, of the various distinct and irreducible goods that
are constitutive of human flourishing. To choose and act reasonably, then, is to choose and act in
ways that respect the intrinsic value (choiceworthiness) of all of the basic goods for all human
beings – that is, to choose and act in ways that are compatible with the ideal of integral human
fulfillment (Finnis 2011, p. 451).
A number of concrete moral norms flow from this master moral principle. Since, for
instance, practical reason directs us toward each of the basic goods and away from their
contraries, a direct choice to damage human well-being in any of its basic forms is always
unreasonable, and therefore immoral – i.e. against the natural law. This norm accounts for the
existence of absolute moral prohibitions that are binding always and everywhere, such as the
prohibition on direct killing of innocent human beings. (Some, including Finnis, hold that this
prohibition includes all direct killing, but all natural law thinkers agree that the natural law
strictly prohibits at least direct killing of the innocent.) It is important to note here that these
absolute moral prohibitions apply only to choices and actions directly against the basic goods,
not choices that give less priority to one good rather than other, or that accept damage to one
good as a foreseeable side effect of pursuing another good. Indeed, since human beings have

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limited time and energy, and the basic goods are irreducibly distinct, acting for any one good
necessarily means forgoing the opportunity to act for another. Choosing to spend an afternoon
visiting a sick friend entails choosing not to spend that afternoon studying or going to the gym.
Such a choice, however, is not directly against the good of knowledge or health, even if one
knowingly risks catching the friend’s illness by visiting.
Being fully reasonably, of course, involves constraints not only on what one may directly
will or choose to do, but also on the acceptance of the foreseeable side effects of one’s actions.
Since each good is a distinct and, in the abstract, equally choiceworthy form of human well-
being, and since each good is grasped as inherently valuable not only for oneself but for all
human beings, arbitrariness in prioritizing one good over another and in favoring the well-being
of one person over another is always unreasonable. Hence the moral requirement, for instance,
to develop and follow a rational plan of life that takes into account one’s talents, dispositions,
realistic possibilities, obligations to other people, and so forth, and to establish one’s priorities
accordingly; hence also the moral requirement of fairness, traditionally expressed by the Golden
Rule.
In part because friendship and sociability are themselves intrinsically valuable as well as
instrumentally indispensable for human well-being, and in part because the basic forms of human
well-being are grasped as valuable not only for oneself but for all human beings, full practical
reasonableness also implies a moral requirement to favor and foster the common good of one’s
communities. It is important to point out here that a natural law understanding of the common
good is completely different from the utilitarian notion of the greatest good (or “happiness”) for
the greatest number. Indeed, on the natural law view this utilitarian ideal is not only wrong but
incoherent, because the distinctive forms of human well-being are irreducible to one another or
to any more basic value. Thus, they are in a certain sense incommensurable as they figure as
options in morally significant choosing. Even if the choice to visit a sick friend rather than go to
the gym is morally right, that does not mean that the good(s) one participates in (the good of
friendship, among others) by doing so includes all of the “goodness,” and more, that one would
have gained by going to the gym. There simply is no common currency in which the basic goods
can be added to or subtracted and weighed against one another, as utilitarianism would require.
Nor, on the natural law view, are individual human beings fungible repositories of “goodness” or
“utility” such that one person’s good can be weighed against the good of others in a way that

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could justify, say, killing (i.e. intending the death of) one person in order to save 1,000. Rather,
according to natural law theory, the good of each individual is a constitutive element of the
common good, and the common good is just the set of conditions within which all members of
the community, as individuals and in association with one another, can pursue their well-being.
Further, contributing to the common good is itself a constitutive element of the well-being of any
individual, and in the concrete this generally means fulfilling one’s particular obligations to
others (as individuals and groups) to and for whom one has a particular responsibility by virtue
of one’s professional, social, familial, religious and/or civic ties.

Natural Law and Human Rights

By providing (1) a substantive account of the basic and fundamental forms of human
well-being, (2) moral norms that require respect for each of these basic values in both oneself
and in others, and (3) a conception of the common good in which the good of each individual is a
constitutive aspect, natural law theory offers a firm basis for human rights, including rights that
are absolute – i.e. universal, inalienable and inviolable, avoiding an undue proliferation of
ungrounded rights claims as well as the putative antagonism between individual rights and the
common good. According to natural law, the language of rights is simply a way of expressing
what is right or just – i.e. of expressing the requirements of justice – from the perspective of the
person or group to whom something is owed. Thus absolute rights are, on this view, simply the
flip side of absolute moral prohibitions. The claim that human beings have an absolute right to
life and bodily integrity (i.e. a right against being killed, maimed or tortured as an end-in-itself or
as a means to some end), for instance, is simply a translation into rights-language of the claim
that there is an absolute duty to refrain from direct killing (or maiming) of innocent human
persons. Similarly absolute negative rights (rights that require only non-interference on the part
of others) correspond to all of the basic aspects of human well-being – hence the right of
association, the right to pursue one’s profession, the right to marry and raise one’s children, the
right to practice one’s religion as well as rights of conscience more broadly. These rights are
absolute insofar as they involve an absolute immunity from actions on the part of others
(individuals or communities) whose object is precisely to impede one’s participation in the
relevant good. Further, acting in ways that indirectly harm others with respect to their

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participation in basic values – i.e. not directly intending such harm but only accepting it as a
side-effect – is a violation of rights insofar as there is a lack of fairness – i.e., insofar as one
would not be willing to accept the harm in question if it were to fall on oneself or one’s own.
For example, one implication of the right to life is the norm of noncombatant immunity in
war. Governments can run afoul of this norm – and thus violate human rights – not only by
directly targeting noncombatants, but also by a lack of fairness in their willingness to accept
noncombatant deaths as a side-effect of attacks on legitimate military targets. Such a lack of
fairness would be involved if, for instance, the government were to order a day-time attack on a
munitions factory located next door to an elementary school, when it would refrain from such an
attack if, instead of being located near an elementary school, the factory were located near a
prisoner of war camp. In other words, the government would be acting unfairly by treating the
lives of “enemy” children as much less important than those of its own soldiers being held
prisoner.
Natural law also provides the basis for so-called “positive” rights, rights that are not
simply immunities but that involve a claim of entitlement to receive certain benefits or services
from others. Given the understanding of human well-being that is essential to natural law theory,
as well as natural law theory’s view of human beings as naturally social due in part to human
interdependence and vulnerability, it makes sense to speak of human rights to goods like health
care, adequate food and shelter, education, and so on. Yet such positive rights are much more
indeterminate than negative rights. While negative rights involve a clear claim on everyone to
refrain from violating the right in question, to make positive rights meaningful it is necessary to
specify precisely who has the obligation to provide the benefits or services in question, and
precisely how to do so, and these questions cannot be answered in the abstract, for they will vary
depending on social, cultural, political and legal factors, as well as individual circumstances.
The principles of natural law thus leave much room here for prudential judgment on the part of
both individuals and political authorities.

Natural Law and Authority

Natural law theories also offer an account of legitimate authority and of the obligation to
obey the law that avoids some of the well-known and seemingly intractable difficulties of basing

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legitimate authority on actual or hypothetical consent. Beginning with early modern social
contract theorists such as Pufendorf, Hobbes and Locke and continuing into the contemporary
period most famously with the hypothetical contract theory proposed by John Rawls in a Theory
of Justice, there is an assumption that to be a part of an authoritative community – a community
with some degree of decision-making power over its members – is, though ultimately necessary
for survival and well-being, fundamentally unnatural to human beings. For authoritative
communities to exist legitimately (rather than merely on the basis of brute force), they must be
based upon the consent of their members, understood as free and equal individuals subject to no
pre-consensual authority structures.
By contrast, natural law theories within the central tradition view human beings as
naturally enmeshed within a web of authoritative communities at different levels – the family,
religious communities, fraternal and civic associations, the political community – whose
legitimacy is not based primarily on consent but on their inherent connection to the common
good which natural law requires each individual to protect and promote. On the natural law
view, justifying political authority is not fundamentally a matter of consent, but rather of
recognizing that solving coordination problems among individuals, families and particular
associations is necessary for the common good, and that the only practicable way to solve such
problems is through authority. This would be true, on the natural law view, even in a society of
saints, because the practical problems involved in coordinating to pursue common aims admit of
many reasonable solutions. What practical reasonableness requires is only that one of the many
possible solutions be adopted and followed by all, and this can only be done if authority is
established (be it a person, a group, or a particular decision-making procedure such as majority
vote). Thus reason requires obedience to authority insofar as that authority is on balance actually
helping to solve coordination problems in view of the common good and has not degenerated
into tyranny. Consent, on this account, need not be a part of the justification of authority at all.
All that is necessary to generate an obligation to obey political authority (or any authority) is the
recognition that such authority is in fact conducive to the common good.

Natural Law and Positive Law

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 It is a famous natural law dictum, articulated by Augustine and reiterated by Aquinas,
that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Legal positivists including H.L.A. Hart have harshly
criticized this view, arguing that law is simply a matter of social fact and that laws have no
necessary connection to morality, because patently unjust laws clearly can and do function as
laws insofar as they are accepted as law and treated as binding by both officials and community
members. Yet the natural law claim that an unjust law is no law at all does not conflict with the
claim that, as a matter of social fact, unjust rules do function as laws. Nor does the natural law
view deny that there is value in providing a purely descriptive sociological account (as Hart
himself proposes to do) of what it means for a particular social rule to function as a law. The
natural law theorists’ claim, rather, is that the unjust social rule which recognizably functions as
a law is not a law in the fullest – i.e. moral – sense of the term, and thus that it is possible to
criticize that law as failing precisely to fulfill the justifying purpose of law as such – i.e. as
failing to advance the common good in part by establishing a fair balance of benefits and burdens
among the community’s members.
On the natural law view, a positive law is just to the extent that it is in accordance with
the natural law. This does not mean, however, that positive laws are simply straightforward
deductions from the natural law, that the positivity of a law adds nothing to its moral force, or
that the positing of a law cannot sometimes itself create moral obligation where it would not
otherwise exist. With regard to the mode of their derivation from natural law, positive laws can
be divided into two categories. The first category consists of positive laws that flow directly
from the requirements of natural law, such as laws against murder. The second category consists
in positive laws that relate more indirectly to natural law by way of what Aquinas calls the
“determinations” of the legislator. As Aquinas explains, such laws are derived from natural law
not, as opposed to those in the first category, like “conclusions deduced from general principles,”
but like “‘implementations [determinationes] of general directives’” (q.95, a.2). Thus, for
instance, natural law requires that there be some pooling of resources for the sake of public
goods such as bridges and roads, but natural law does not indicate any specific way of doing so.
Indeed, the prudent legislator will take into account the particular social and cultural conditions
of the community in an attempt to devise the most just and expedient means of pooling
resources. What results – a set of tax laws, for instance – is a determination or specification of
the natural law requirement to favor and foster the common good (in this case, through the

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contribution of material resources) that is binding only for the members of a particular
community. In this sense, such laws are binding entirely because they are posited, even though
ultimately their normative force comes from the permanent principles of practical reason. The
choice (determinatio) of rulers will thus determine what is uniquely just for those under their
rule.
Precisely because the normative force of all laws ultimately flows from their relationship
to the requirements of natural law, laws fail as laws to the extent that they are in conflict with the
requirements of natural law. Hence the claim that an unjust law is not law in the full moral sense
of the term, even though it may indisputably function as such as a matter of social fact.
According to Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (q.96, a.4), there are several ways in
which laws can be unjust. The first is procedural: laws can be unjust if they are not enacted in
accordance with the established decision-making procedures or go beyond the limits of the
lawmaker’s rightful authority. Laws can also be unjust on substantive grounds in two ways.
First, they can directly contradict the natural law, as did genocidal laws in Nazi Germany or laws
maintaining the institution of slavery in the pre-Civil War United States. Second, they can fail to
fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of common life. Note that established decision-making
procedures themselves can also be substantively unjust on grounds of fairness.
A famous application of this understanding of the proper relationship between natural law
and positive law is found in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he
defends his acts of civil disobedience against those who criticize him for failing to show
sufficient respect for the law. Citing Thomas Aquinas, King states that “an unjust law is a
human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Glossing this in a way that
highlights the inherent connection between natural law and human flourishing, paralleling the
connection that should exist between positive law and the common good, King writes: “Any law
that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” He
then goes on to point out the obvious truth that segregation laws are a clear instance of the latter,
and thus are unjust and do not merit respect as laws. Aside from his criticism of segregation
laws as directly contradicting the natural law, King also points to lack of fairness as an
independent ground for the injustice of segregation laws: “An unjust law is a code that a
numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding
on itself.” He argues further that the laws in question are procedurally unfair because “devious

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methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters.”  In other words, King
makes a comprehensive case that the laws against which he is protesting are truly not laws at all
in the morally relevant sense because they violate all of the criteria, both substantive and
procedural, for just laws.
Yet King also follows Aquinas and the natural law tradition more broadly in recognizing
that, even when faced with patently unjust laws that cannot be obeyed in good conscience,
respect for the system of law as a whole (provided the system is not completely corrupt) – and
thus for legitimate authority as conducive on the whole to the common good – must nonetheless
be maintained. That is why King stipulates that “one who breaks an unjust law must do so
openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” He thus distinguishes himself
from the anarchist by arguing that his acts of civil disobedience – in which he openly defies a
patently unjust law and accepts imprisonment for doing so, with the aim of “[arousing] the
conscience of the community over its injustice” – are “in reality expressing the highest respect
for the law.” Only because he holds this view of positive law as deriving its binding character
as law (as opposed to brute force) from its essential relationship to the natural law can King
make such a claim.
Indeed, at the heart of the natural law tradition’s criticism of legal positivism is the
argument that, by denying any essential connection between law and morality (between positive
law and natural law), legal positivists make it ultimately impossible to distinguish law from brute
force, or to distinguish the civil disobedience of someone like King from mere anarchism.
Further, as Hart points out, any sophisticated sociological understanding of law must be able to
account for the fact that those who administer and are subject to laws view them as essentially
different from mere commands backed by threats of force. By conceiving of law as inherently
aimed at the common good and as having normative force precisely insofar as it achieves this
purpose, natural law theorists claim to offer a more accurate description of law as social fact, as
well as to provide broader moral standards according to which the justice of any particular law or
legal system can be critically assessed.
Natural law reasoning has been applied to contemporary controversies ranging from
bioethical issues like abortion (Kaczor 2011), euthanasia (Keown 2002) and embryonic stem cell
research (George and Tollefsen 2008), to marriage policy (Girgis, Anderson and George 2012),
capital punishment (Grisez 1970), torture (Tollefsen 2008), nuclear deterrence (Finnis, Boyle,

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Grisez 1987) and property and welfare rights (Boyle 2001).

Suggested Cross-References:
1. Civil Liberties and Human Rights
2. Injustice: Legal Aspects
3. Justice and Law
4. Legal Positivism
5. Rights: Legal Aspects

References

Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.90-97

Boyle, Joseph 2001, “Fairness in Holdings:  A Natural Law Account of Property and Welfare
Rights” Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (1), 206-226.
Brock, Stephen L. 2005, “Natural Inclination and the Intelligibility of the Good in Thomistic
Natural Law,” Vera Lex 6.
Finnis, John 2011, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Second Edition, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Finnis, John, Boyle, Joseph, and Grisez, Germain 1987, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and
Realism, Oxford University Press, New York.
George, Robert 1999, In Defense of Natural Law, Oxford University Press, New York.
-------2007, “Natural Law,” American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 52, p. 55-75.
-------and Tollefsen, Christopher 2008, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, Doubleday, New
York.
Girgis, Sherif, Anderson, Ryan and George, Robert 2012, What is Marriage? Man and Woman:
A Defense, Encounter Books, New York.
Grisez, Germain 1970, “Toward a Consistent Natural Law Ethics of Killing,” American Journal
of Jurisprudence 15, 64-96.
Hart, H.L.A. 2012, The Concept of Law, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, New York.

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Kaczor, Christopher 2011, The Ethics of Abortion, Routledge, New York.
Keown, John 2002, Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.
Lee, Patrick and George, Robert 2009, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics,
Cambridge University Press, New York.
MacIntyre, Alasdair 1999, Dependent Rational Animals, Open Court, Chicago.
-------2007, After Virtue, Third Edition, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame.
McInerny, Ralph 1982, Ethica Thomistica, The Catholic University of America Press,
Washington, D.C.
Simon, Yves 1965, The Tradition of Natural Law, Fordham University Press, New York.
Tollefsen, Christopher 2008, Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry,
Routledge, New York.

Recommended Website: Natural Law, Natural Rights and American Constitutionalism,

http://www.nlnrac.org/

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