In this book, S. A. Lloyd provides a radical interpretation of Hobbes' laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the ...common good. This account of Hobbes' moral philosophy stands in contrast to both divine command and rational choice interpretations. Drawing from the core notion of reciprocity, Lloyd explains Hobbes' system of 'cases in the law of nature' and situates Hobbes' moral philosophy in the broader context of his political philosophy and views on religion. Offering ingenious new arguments, Lloyd defends a reciprocity interpretation of the laws of nature through which humanity's common good is secured.
The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625-1800 offers innovative studies on the development of the law of nations after the Peace of Westphalia. This period was decisive for the origin and constitution ...of the discipline which eventually emancipated itself from natural law and became modern international law. A specialist on the law of nations in the Swiss context and on its major figure, Emer de Vattel, Simone Zurbuchen prompted scholars to explore the law of nations in various European contexts. The volume studies little known literature related to the law of nations as an academic discipline, offers novel interpretations of classics in the field, and deconstructs 'myths' associated with the law of nations in the Enlightenment.
A fresh look at the importance of natural and international law in the religious politics at the heartlands of the Reformation, from the Low Countries, the German principalities up to Transylvania; ...from Niels Hemmingsen to Gian Battista Vico; from religious reasons for the universalist claims of natural law to political arguments for the sacred polity, their tension and creative potential.
Changes of state Brett, Annabel S
2011., 20110314, 2011, 2011-03-14, 20110101
eBook
This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Annabel Brett takes a fresh approach by looking at this ...political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. She begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. She goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. Drawing on a wide range of authors, Brett reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, she shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends.
In response to the ecological crisis, Catholic social teaching draws upon an account of natural law that appeals to natural‐ecological order and its provision of principles for tilling and keeping ...creation. My main contention in this article is that social teaching has insufficiently concretized the empirical entanglements of this account, along with its ecological‐agricultural implications. One consequence, as scholars like Lisa Sideris and Celia Deane‐Drummond have shown, is that social teaching, like much theological reflection upon ecology, downplays the centrality of death.
While Catholic social teaching, as Óscar Romero rightly observes, must not “invade” other fields, a refusal to invade is not a refusal to engage, nor is it a refusal to learn from, or even to incorporate, wisdom from outside of itself. To this end, I argue that agroecology, a transdisciplinary science that applies ecological principles to agriculture, can help. By focusing upon an agroecological approach to the ecological management of insect herbivores (“pests”) known as biological control, I show how agroecology can assist social teaching in discerning the kinds of ecological principles it calls for but does not specify—principles, in this case, related to predator‐prey dynamics in natural systems and the importance of agricultural diversification. I further argue that if social teaching continues to appeal to natural‐ecological order, it must more directly confront death’s place in that order, and that the thought of Thomas Aquinas can be a helpful source. While my focus in this article is upon what social teaching can learn from agroecology, I conclude by suggesting how social teaching’s account of natural law and its integral ecology can surface and develop aspects of agroecology’s own, oftentimes implicit, moral vision.
This innovative book presents the creative adaptation of early-modern natural law theories in teaching and political discourse in Bohemia, Austria, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Transylvania, and Russia.
Abstract Natural law theories affirm that it belongs to the nature of law to be apt to promote the common good or do something similar. I defend a weak version of this thesis according to which part ...of what constitutes something as a nondefective central case of a posited law is that it is apt to promote the common good. Just as the rules of Pictionary require the drawing player to design her drawing to reveal the word in play, the rules of a central case of a legal system require lawmakers to design laws to promote the common good. Therefore, just as a Pictionary drawing that is inapt to reveal the word in play is defective, a central case of a posited law that is inapt to promote the common good is defective.
Natural Law Ethics in Theory and Practice brings together a selection of essays of the late Joseph Boyle. Boyle was, with Germain Grisez and John Finnis, a founder and developer of the New Classical ...Natural Law Theory, arguably the most important development in Catholic moral philosophy of the twentieth century. While this theory is indebted to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, it incorporates an understanding and assessment of that work that is different from that found in other statements of natural law. Boyle made crucial contributions to a wide variety of aspects of this theory, and the volume is divided into two parts. Part One: Articulating a Theory of Natural Law contains three sections in which Boyle defends the reality of free choice and the view that the basic reasons for action, or first principles of natural law, are incommensurable in goodness. Boyle identifies the basic moral standard for choice and action, and develops an account of human action that elucidates the important role played by intention and double effect in their moral evaluation. The essays in Part Two: Natural Law Theory and Contemporary Moral Problems demonstrate the strength and scope of Boyle's natural law account, as he brings it to bear upon just war theory, property and welfare rights, and issues in bioethics. The essays in bioethics address the difficult question of whether it is appropriate to tube-feed patients in persistent vegetative state, and include an unpublished essay, "Against Assisted Death," which he delivered as the Anscombe Lecture at The Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford about a year before he died. This volume also includes a Foreword by Princeton's Robert P. George; an Introduction by the editors that highlights Boyle's contribution to the development of the new classical natural law theory; and a bibliography of Boyle's publications.
This volume sheds new light on modern theories of natural law through the lens of the fragmented political contexts of Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the dramatic changes of ...the times. From the age of reforms, through revolution and the ‘Risorgimento’, the unification movement which ended with the creation of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861, we see a move from natural law and the law of nations to international law, whose teaching was introduced in Italian universities of the newly created Kingdom. The essays collected here show that natural law was not only the subject of a highly codified academic teaching, but also provided a broader conceptual and philosophical frame underlying the ‘science of man’. Natural law is also a language wherein reform programmes of education and of politics have taken form, affecting a variety of discourses and literary genres. Contributors are: Alberto Clerici, Vittor Ivo Comparato, Giuseppina De Giudici, Frédéric Ieva, Girolamo Imbruglia, Francesca Iurlaro, Serena Luzzi, Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, Emanuele Salerno, Gabriella Silvestrini, Antonio Trampus.
