Editing Natural law (section)

=== Ancient Greece ===

==== Plato ====
[[Plato]] did not have an explicit theory of natural law (he rarely used the phrase "natural law" except in ''[[Gorgias (dialogue)|Gorgias]]'' 484 and ''[[Timaeus (dialogue)|Timaeus]]'' 83e), but his concept of nature, according to [[John Daniel Wild|John Wild]], contains some of the elements of many natural law theories.<ref>{{cite book|last=Wild|first=John|year=1953|title=Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law|url=https://archive.org/details/platosmodernenem0000wild|url-access=registration|location=Chicago|publisher=University of Chicago Press|page=[https://archive.org/details/platosmodernenem0000wild/page/136 136]}}</ref> According to Plato, we live in an orderly universe.<ref>Plato, ''[[Gorgias (dialogue)|Gorgias]]'' 508a.</ref> The basis of this orderly universe or nature are the [[Theory of forms|forms]], most fundamentally the [[Form of the Good]], which Plato calls "the brightest region of Being".<ref>Plato, ''[[The Republic (Plato)|The Republic]]'', 518b–d.</ref> The Form of the Good is the cause of all things, and a person who sees it is led to act wisely.<ref>Plato, ''The Republic'', 540a, 517b–d.</ref> In the ''[[Symposium (Plato)|Symposium]]'', the Good is closely identified with the Beautiful,<ref>Plato, ''[[Symposium (Plato)|Symposium]]'', 205e–206a.</ref> and Plato describes how [[Socrates]]'s experience of the Beautiful enabled him to resist the temptations of wealth and sex.<ref>Plato, ''Symposium'', 211d–e.</ref> In the ''[[Republic (Plato)|Republic]]'', the ideal community is "a city which would be established in accordance with nature".<ref>Plato, ''The Republic'', 428e9.</ref>

==== Aristotle ====
[[File:Sanzio 01 Plato Aristotle.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Plato]] (left) and [[Aristotle]] (right), a detail of ''[[The School of Athens]]'', a fresco by [[Raphael]]]]
[[Greek philosophy]] emphasized the distinction between "nature" ({{Lang|grc-Latn|physis}}, {{Lang|grc|φúσις}}) and "law", "custom", or "[[Convention (norm)|convention]]" ({{Lang|grc-Latn|nomos}}, {{Lang|grc|νóμος}}).{{citation needed|date=July 2019}} What the law commanded is expected to vary from place to place, but what is "by nature" should be the same everywhere. A "law of nature" therefore has the flavor more of a paradox than something that obviously existed.<ref name="IESS" /> 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 ({{langx|grc-Latn|dikaion physikon}}, {{lang|grc|δίκαιον φυσικόν}}, {{langx|la|ius naturale}}). Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law.<ref name="Shellens">{{cite journal|last=Shellens|first=Max Solomon|title=Aristotle on Natural Law|journal=Natural Law Forum|volume=4|issue=1|year=1959|pages=72–100|doi=10.1093/ajj/4.1.72|url=https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=nd_naturallaw_forum&source=post_page|access-date=2020-09-10|archive-date=2021-12-12|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211212175923/https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=nd_naturallaw_forum&source=post_page|url-status=live}}</ref>

Aristotle's association with natural law may be due to [[Thomas Aquinas]]'s interpretation of his work.<ref name="Jaffa">{{cite book|last=Jaffa|first=Harry|author-link=Harry V. Jaffa|title=Thomism and Aristotelianism|orig-date=1952|year=1979|location=Westport, CT|publisher=Greenwood Press}}</ref> But whether Aquinas correctly read Aristotle is in dispute.{{citation needed|date=October 2023}} 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 them more literally.<ref>{{cite conference|last=Corbett|first=Ross J.|title=The Philosophic Context of the Development of Natural Law| date=April 2012 |conference=Midwest Political Science Association|ssrn=2021235}}</ref> Aristotle notes that [[natural justice]] is a species of political justice, specifically the scheme of [[distributive justice|distributive]] and [[restorative justice|corrective justice]] that would be established under the best political community; if this took the form of law, it could be called a natural law, though Aristotle does not discuss this and suggests in the ''[[Politics (Aristotle)|Politics]]'' that the best regime may not rule by law at all.<ref name="Corbett">{{cite journal|first=Ross J.|last=Corbett|title=The Question of Natural Law in Aristotle|journal=History of Political Thought|volume=30|issue=2| date=Summer 2009 |pages=229–250}}</ref>

The best evidence of Aristotle's having thought there is a natural law is in the ''[[Rhetoric (Aristotle)|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.<ref>Aristotle, ''Rhetoric'' 1373b2–1378.</ref>{{edition needed|date=February 2025}} Specifically, he quotes [[Sophocles]] and Empedocles:

{{blockquote|
[[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 (Sophocles play)|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:

{{blockquote|style=font-size: initial|"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:

{{blockquote|style=font-size: initial|"Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky
Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth's immensity."<ref>Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book I – Chapter 13, {{cite web |url=http://rhetoric.eserver.org/aristotle/rhet1-13.html |title=Book I - Chapter 13: Aristotle's Rhetoric |access-date=2012-12-22 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150213075009/http://rhetoric.eserver.org/aristotle/rhet1-13.html |archive-date=2015-02-13 }}</ref>}}}}

Some critics believe that this remark's context suggests only that Aristotle advised that it can be rhetorically advantageous to appeal to such a law, especially when the "particular" law of one's own city is averse to the case being made, not that there actually is such a law.<ref name="Shellens" /> Moreover, they write that Aristotle considered two of the three candidates for a universally valid, natural law provided in this passage to be wrong.<ref name="IESS"/> Aristotle's paternity of natural law tradition is consequently disputed.

==== Stoic natural law<!--linked from 'Stoicism'--> ====
{{Further|Stoicism}}

The development of this tradition of [[natural justice]] into one of natural law is usually attributed to the [[Stoicism|Stoics]]. The rise of natural law as a universal system coincided with the rise of large empires and kingdoms in the Greek world.<ref>''Lloyd's Introduction to Jurisprudence'', Seventh Edition.</ref>{{Full citation needed|date=November 2012}} Whereas the "higher" law that Aristotle suggested one could appeal to was emphatically [[Appeal to nature|natural]], in contradistinction to being the result of [[Divinity|divine]] [[Positive law|positive]] [[legislation]], the Stoic natural law was indifferent to either the natural or divine source of the law: the Stoics asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe (a [[Divine law|divine]] or [[eternal law]]), and the means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this order was the natural law, which inspired actions that accorded with virtue.<ref name="IESS"/>

As the English historian [[Alexander James Carlyle|A. J. Carlyle]] notes:

{{blockquote|There is no change in political theory so startling in its completeness as the change from the theory of Aristotle to the later philosophical view represented by Cicero and Seneca&nbsp;... We think that this cannot be better exemplified than with regard to the theory of the equality of human nature.<ref>{{cite book|first=A. J.|last=Carlyle|title=A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West |volume= 1|location=Edinburgh|year=1903|pages=8–9 |publisher=William Blackwood and Sons |url=https://archive.org/details/ahistorymedival00carlgoog/page/n34/mode/2up}}</ref>}}

Charles H. McIlwain likewise observes that "the idea of the equality of men is the most profound contribution of the Stoics to political thought" and that "its greatest influence is in the changed conception of law that in part resulted from it.<ref>{{cite book|first=Charles H.|last=McIlwain|title=The Growth of Political Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.6570 |publisher=The Macmillan Company|location=New York|year=1932|pages=114–115}}</ref>

Natural law first appeared among the Stoics, who believed that God is everywhere and in everyone (see [[classical pantheism]]). According to this belief, there is a "divine spark" within us that helps us live in accordance with nature. The Stoics believed there is a way in which the universe has been designed, and that natural law helps us to harmonize with this.{{citation needed|date=August 2022}}