The Principles of Liberal Natural Law Sample Clauses

The Principles of Liberal Natural Law. The principles of natural law aim to identify the basic forms of human flourishing as goods worth pursuing. This requires a methodology of practical reasonableness to distinguish between acts that are reasonable (moral) and unreasonable (immoral).8 This methodology allows for one to arrive at a set of general moral standards with which one is able to evaluate the legitimacy of positive law. Natural law theory rests on the presumption that basic reasons for action are self-evident, known in “non-inferential acts of understanding in which we grasp possible ends or purposes as worthwhile for their own sakes.”9 Basic reasons for action are those whose comprehension does not require an appeal to more fundamental reasons. They are by definition underived, “for there is nothing more fundamental that could serve as a premise for a logical derivation.”10 Intrinsic goods – things that are desirable for their own sakes – are the basic reasons for action. Those goods that need appeal to more basic reasons for justification are instrumental, derived, and not self-evident. The idea that basic reasons for action and intrinsic goods are underived challenges a common misconception of natural law: that we come to know what constitutes right action by a descriptive analysis of human nature. This is a popular 8 Ibid, 23. 9 Xxxxxx Xxxxxx, In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 84. 10 Ibid, 85. straw man construction of natural law theory, making it vulnerable to criticism of committing the naturalistic fallacy, an illicit reference from facts to norms.11 Introduced by Xxxxx Xxxx as the is-ought problem, the fallacy consists of deriving an ought (a moral imperative) from an is (an ontological fact). Some natural lawyers have attempted to skirt around the issue with arguments such as “the very is of human nature has been shown to have an ought built into it.”12 Such a rhetorical leap is unnecessary. If natural law were to derive principles of right action from an assessment of human nature it would indeed be fallacious. But this is not the case. The epistemological source of our knowledge of human nature is through its potentialities, which we come to know by its actuations, and these we know by its objects- intrinsic goods.13 In other words, our knowledge of human nature is induced from our empirical, practical, underived knowledge of human