Natural Law and Justice  

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""everyone would be born free by the natural law" and that slavery exists by the ius gentium [...] The same description of natural law , evidently taken from Ulpian, appears prominently near the beginning of the Institutes . 1.2 , Thomas , p . 4 . 12. Digest 1.1.4 .."--Natural Law and Justice (1987) by Lloyd L. Weinreb


"Developing the essential idea of normative natural order far beyond what had gone before, [Thomas Aquinas] drew from it explicitly its ethical implications and gave it human as well as cosmic significance . So doing, he provided a philosophic foundation for all the subsequent efforts to derive moral principles from the nature of reality itself."--Natural Law and Justice (1987) Lloyd L. Weinreb


"The communitarian position has been stated most plainly by Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel. MacIntyre engages the whole liberal, Kantian moral tradition, in which the account of justice has a prominent place.There is no categorical imperative, at least unless there is a categorical end to be achieved — the heteronomy that Kant rejected."--Natural Law and Justice (1987) Lloyd L. Weinreb, p. 251-52


"But this is to reduce the universe to a madhouse. It means that there is no purpose, no reason, in anything that happens. The universe, in this case, is irrational. No explanation of it is possible. Philosophy is futile, and not only philosophy, but morality and everything else. If there is really no higher and lower, there is no better and no worse. It is just as good to be a murderer as to be a saint. Evil is the same as good. Instead of striving to be saints, statesmen, philosophers, we may as well go and play marbles, because all these values of higher and lower are mere delusions, "the human way of looking at things.”"--A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace, epigraph


"I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization." --Don Marquis, epigraph


“[Weinreb's] mode of inquiry reminds one of Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being or Leo Strauss's Natural Rights and History."--Cass R. Sunstein , University of Chicago

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Natural Law and Justice (1987) is a book by Lloyd L. Weinreb.

"Human beings are a part of nature and apart from it" The argument of Natural Law and Justice is that the philosophy of natural law and contemporary theories about the nature of justice are both efforts to make sense of the fundamental paradox of human experience: individual freedom and responsibility in a causally determined universe. Professor Weinreb restores the original understanding of natural law as a philosophy about the place of humankind in nature. He traces the natural law tradition from its origins in Greek speculation through its classic Christian statement by Thomas Aquinas. He goes on to show how the social contract theorists adapted the idea of natural law to provide for political obligation in civil society and how the idea was transformed in Kant's account of human freedom. He brings the historical narrative down to the present with a discussion of the contemporary debate between natural law and legal positivism, including particularly the natural law theories of Finnis, Richards, and Dworkin. Professor Weinreb then adopts the approach of modern political philosophy to develop the idea of justice as a union of the distinct ideas of desert and entitlement. He shows liberty and equality to be the political analogues of desert and entitlement and both pairs to be the normative equivalents of freedom and cause. In this part of the book, Weinreb considers the theories of justice of Rawls and Nozick as well as the communitarian theory of Macintyre and Sandel. The conclusion brings the debates about natural law and justice together, as parallel efforts to understand the human condition. This original contribution to legal philosophy will be especially appreciated by scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of political philosophy, legal philosophy, and the law generally.




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