What is natural law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

“Although Plato did not have an explicit theory of natural law (he rarely used the phrase ‘natural law’ except in Gorgias 484 and Timaeus 83e), his concept of nature, according to John Wild, contains some of the elements found in many natural law theories.^[8] According to Plato, we live in an orderly universe.^[9] The basis of this orderly universe or nature are the forms, most fundamentally the Form of the Good, which Plato describes as “the brightest region of Being”.^[10] The Form of the Good is the cause of all things, and when it is seen it leads a person to act wisely.^[11] In the Symposium, the Good is closely identified with the Beautiful.^[12] In the Symposium, Plato describes how the experience of the Beautiful by Socrates enabled him to resist the temptations of wealth and sex.^[13] In the Republic, the ideal community is, “…a city which would be established in accordance with nature.”^[14]

Aristotle[edit]

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael.

Greek philosophy emphasized the distinction between “nature” (physis, φúσις) on the one hand and “law”, “custom”, or “convention” (nomos, νóμος) on the other. What the law commanded would be expected to vary from place to place, but what was “by nature” should be the same everywhere. A “law of nature” would therefore have the flavor more of a paradox than something that obviously existed.^[1] Against the conventionalism that the distinction between nature and custom could engender, Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right (dikaion physikon, δικαιον φυσικον, Latin ius naturale). Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law.^[3]

Aristotle’s association with natural law may be due to the interpretation given to his works by Thomas Aquinas.^[15] But whether Aquinas correctly read Aristotle is in dispute. According to some, Aquinas conflates natural law and natural right, the latter of which Aristotle posits in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics). According to this interpretation, Aquinas’s influence was such as to affect a number of early translations of these passages in an unfortunate manner, though more recent translations render those more literally.^[16]Aristotle notes that natural justice is a species of political justice, specifically the scheme of distributive and corrective justice that would be established under the best political community; were this to take the form of law, this could be called a natural law, though Aristotle does not discuss this and suggests in the Politics that the best regime may not rule by law at all.^[17]

The best evidence of Aristotle’s having thought there was a natural law comes from the Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common” law that is according to nature.^[18] Specifically, he quotes Sophocles and Empedocles:

Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other. It is this that Sophocles’ Antigone clearly means when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature:

“Not of to-day or yesterday it is,

But lives eternal: none can date its birth.”

And so Empedocles, when he bids us kill no living creature, he is saying that to do this is not just for some people, while unjust for others:

“Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky

Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth’s immensity.”^[19]”