Natural law

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The Review of Politics

This paper seeks to clarify the long-standing controversy over Aristotle's relationship to the natural law tradition. The paper argues that a precondition for any adequate assessment of Aristotle's natural law credentials is a close analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics V.7 discussion of the just by nature. Such an investigation, the primary concern of section 1, reveals that Aristotle's characterization of the politically just as partly natural and partly conventional does entail that nature serves as a normative ground for just law. With this conclusion in place, section 2 then turns more directly to Aristotle's relation to the natural law tradition. Despite important differences between Aristotle's account of the normative foundations of law and those found in the paradigmatic natural law teachings of the Stoics and Aquinas, I argue, there are nonetheless features of later natural law thought on the purpose and evaluation of law which are genuinely Aristotelian in orientation.

Aristotle and Natural Law