Natural Law

Open Access

Abstract

In early modern moral and political philosophy, the term "natural law" referred to a universal moral norm which human beings are able to recognize by using their natural faculties, without the supernatural information offered by the Bible, and which is, in one way or another, connected to human nature. Natural law had been a standard topic already in medieval philosophy, but the idea of such a universal norm received new significance as Europeans confronted and colonized non-Christian people, the Christian church itself was divided into rival confessional groups, and independent territorial states became the dominant form of political organization in Europe. As a result of these developments, the character, content and implications of natural law were widely debated in early modern scholarly literature. Even though all this was done by using concepts adopted from medieval scholasticism, early modern natural law should not be seen as a unified and evolving philosophical tradition, but rather as a series of attempts to redefine a collectively shared moral and legal vocabulary in order to justify what were often quite dissimilar political aims (see, e.g., Haakonssen and Seidler 2016; Westerman 1998; Hochstrasser 2000; Hunter 2011; Stolleis 2008). ; Peer reviewed