Day: September 2, 2025

While routinely invoked by Protestant Reformers during the Reformation, natural law ethics did not have a good twentieth century among Protestant theologians, particularly those in the Reformed (or “Calvinistic”) tradition. Karl Barth famously blasted natural law ethics. Cornelius Van Til blasted both Karl Barth and natural law ethics. More recently, albeit more irenically, Calvin College philosophy Professor James K. A. Smith detailed “What’s Wrong with Natural Law?”

Despite the criticism, or perhaps because of it, the pendulum started swinging back earlier this century. Interest in natural law ethics revived not only among distinctly Reformed and Lutheran scholars, but among Evangelical scholars more generally. This May, Zondervan Academic published Natural Law: Five Views. The book seeks to introduce today’s Protestants to the renewed attention to natural law. To do so, it includes contributions by Catholic as well as Reformed and Lutheran commentators on natural law. It also includes a chapter by one “anti-natural law” theologian.

For the most part, the book’s editors and the four “pro” natural law authors each provide a helpful précis for their particular tradition’s view of natural law. These views are the classical view, the Lutheran view, the Reformed view, and the “new natural law” (a la Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and others).

Each chapter, and the back-and-forth discussion between the contributors that follows each chapter, accomplishes the editors’ and authors’ goal: each contributor provides a brief, chapter-length summary of their tradition’s distinctive emphases and provides sources and citations for the interested reader to follow up.

All that is useful enough. Yet a thought kept nagging me while reading the short volume: The editors and the contributors (except for the “anti-natural law” contributor, of course) seem distinctly interested in promoting “natural law” as a distinctive label or brand name. Pressing the brand name, however, risks muddying waters that the editors and authors aspire to clarify, and losing at least two distinct groups that natural lawyers presumably would count as allies or cobelligerents.

On the one hand, there is a set of scholars and commentators who, like natural lawyers, are moral realists yet who reject or find inadequate some elements of natural law systems. Moral realists hold that moral requirements are objectively true, as opposed to moral requirements being subjective or relative. In the main, all natural lawyers are moral realists, but not all moral realists are natural lawyers.

On the other hand, there are scholars and commentators who actually, if implicitly, apply or draw on forms of natural law methodologies in their arguments, but who want to reject the natural law brand name for one reason or another.

We’ll start with this second set first.

Natural Law in Name vs. Natural Law in Substance

C. S. Lewis, whom the editors and several of the contributors cite with approval, exemplifies brand-name ecumenism in his book, The Abolition of Man.

The thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. … The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.

What is critical in Lewis’s view is not whether one applies the “natural law” label to one’s view, but the substantive commitment to moral realism, whatever one terms it.

Lewis, for example, would welcome Ronald Dworkin’s echo of the “reductio” Lewis asserts in The Abolition of Man regarding the self-refuting nature of moral skepticism. In his book Law’s Empire, Dworkin writes that if a person “really believes, in an internally skeptical way, that no moral judgment is really better than any other, he cannot then add that in his opinion slavery is unjust.” This is a form of the “reductio” that Lewis employs, even if the affirmative content of the objective morality each asserts ultimately differs at signal points.

Yet while Dworkin devoted much of his career to arguing that morality cannot be separated from law, he nonetheless resisted the claim that his theory reflected some version of natural law theory. He did so not because it wasn’t true, but rather because he didn’t deem it “a very important objection.” He observed that labeling his theory a natural law theory merely “suggests a different way of reporting” what his theory is about.

Or consider Michigan Law Professor Scott Hershovitz, who argues a different version of Dworkin’s thesis in his recent book, Law Is a Moral Practice. Hershovitz, too, does not deny that he engages in natural-law reasoning. Rather, he rejects the label as just not “helpful” in identifying the nature of his argument, given the wide variation in theories that go under the label.

To be sure, natural law jurisprudence should not be identified with natural law ethics, but the two sets of literature do intersect. Both Dworkin and Hershovitz advance a form of moral realism in their arguments, although neither thought it necessary to anchor their moral realism in a deeper metaphysical system. (Dworkin, for instance, did not believe in God.)

On the other hand, the “anti-natural law” contributor to the “Five Views” volume, Peter Leithart (with whom I co-edited a book), argues that “natural law” does not apply to his thought because he believes it necessary to posit a deeper metaphysical system of thought to account for knowledge of law, and this requires divine rather than natural revelation. (More on this point below.) Despite rejecting the natural law label in application to his view, the volume’s editors wonder whether Leithart is “truly ‘Anti-Natural Law.’”

It seems to me that many who reject the natural law label nonetheless either apply a natural law methodology or assert a form of moral realism that rejects moral relativism, an outcome the editors of the Five Views book suggest is realized uniquely by natural law theories.

Natural Law Methodologies vs. the Natural Law Brand Name

The irony is that many scholars and commentators who ignore or reject the natural law label nonetheless employ one or another form of natural law methodology. The question then is whether it is worth the effort to persuade these scholars to apply the brand name to their product. This, as opposed to the possibility that self-identified natural law aficionados can, like C. S. Lewis, simply declare victory and focus on the substantive debate over the content of natural law principles.

To make this argument, we first need to identify what are “natural law” methodologies. Here, the heterogeneity of natural law theories can be a problem. I suspect that some scholars reject the natural law label because they think it requires a commitment to a methodology they do not employ or to which they object. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, and with the proviso that methodologies can overlap, I would generally follow Russell Kirk, with some differences by way of emphasis, and count at least four basic types of natural law methodologies:

• Connaturalism and/or an intuitive commitment to some form of moral realism as self-evident (cf., Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 91, a3).
• Principles and actions that promote achieving the human teleology, that is, achieving the human end or “nature” in the Aristotelian sense (see, for example, Aristotle’s Politics I.2, 1252b30-34 or Nichomachean Ethics I.7, 1097b24-29).
• Rejection of self-refuting propositions. (See, for example, John Finnis; Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 94, a2).
• Empirically observed universal, or near-universal human beliefs and/or behavior. (See, for example, Edward O. Wilson’s empirical/biological argument, or Aquinas, ST I-II. q. 94, a3, ad.2, or Lewis’s argument in The Abolition of Man.)

As I mentioned, these types can overlap. For example, Finnis’s argument in Natural Law and Natural Rights asserts both that the “basic goods” he identifies are “self-evident” and asserts the claim that to reject any of the basic goods he identifies is self-refuting.

The larger point of the exercise, however, is that any number of commentators who reject the label “natural law” nonetheless implicitly employ natural law methodologies. Dworkin and Hershovitz, for example, seem to employ a form of moral intuitionism.

The question is how much energy natural law advocates want or need to invest in persuading these folk expressly to apply a natural law nomenclature to their work versus the alternative that C. S. Lewis modeled, of simply recognizing that those who are not against us are for us, and focus attention and resources on substantive questions.

Consider the difference between Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s teleologies. Both Aristotle and Aquinas conceive of a human nature through what it means for a human to be wholly mature or fully flourishing. But Aristotle identifies flourishing with “an activity of the soul in accord with virtue,” while Aquinas identifies it with realizing the beatific vision. To be sure, there can be overlap between these two views, perhaps substantial overlap. But they are not necessarily the same thing.

The point of observing this is to note that anyone who reasons from a human telos, an image of human flourishing, implicitly engages in this sort of natural law methodology, even though the content or conclusions of their natural law theory will diverge depending on the distinctive telos they reason from.

Whether the image of human flourishing is that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the freedom of the Jeffersonian yeoman, or overcoming Karl Marx’s alienation, all posit a telos that can be understood to identify a human “nature” to which the Aristotelian methodology can apply.

I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that it doesn’t matter what we posit as the human telos or our view of human flourishing. It matters critically; analysts will argue over which image of human flourishing is correct or appropriate.

The point is that deriving moral or political implications from a concept of human flourishing—any concept of human flourishing—is a natural law methodology, whether one calls it that or not. That Aristotle and Aquinas (or others) disagree about the ultimate nature of the human telos does not mean that one or the other is therefore not engaging in natural law reasoning. Nonetheless, the promiscuity of natural law theory here is one reason scholars such as Hershovitz don’t think it’s helpful to be identified with natural law.

So, too, for example, Dworkin and other secular scholars. Despite not believing in God, Dworkin nonetheless embraced a form of moral intuitionism that required him to posit a form of moral realism. Pertinent to the Five Views book, this moral realism—the belief that moral principles were objective and could be known and applied—would seem to be consistent with the minimal threshold that the Apostle Paul identifies for non-believers reflecting the requirements of the law “by nature” in his letter to the Romans, a canonical text for natural law (Romans 2:14-15).

Even the likes of nineteenth-century legal positivist scholar John Austin, who expressly warred against the notion of “natural law” in jurisprudence (calling it “stark nonsense”), was nonetheless a moral realist. Austin assented “without hesitation” to the view that “all human laws ought to conform to the Divine laws.” He agreed that “if human commands conflict with the Divine law,” then the human law should be “disobey[ed]” in favor of the Divine law. While insisting that “law” can be identified by positive attributes alone—he insisted that “the existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another”—Austin was nonetheless a moral realist.

Sin and the Problem of Gaps in Apprehension of Natural Law

The Protestant theologians who criticize natural law are moral realists as well. In the main, they object to the notion that natural law is accessible to reason on account that sin impacts humans so dramatically that it can limit natural knowledge of morality in significant ways. This creates a very practical problem for an argument commonly deployed to argue for natural law. The argument is that “natural law” is moral knowledge shared generically by humanity across culture and across time. In response, some Protestant theologians have argued that if sin so dramatically affects moral knowledge that there are gaps in the human conscience at particular times and cultures, then natural law cannot or does not provide a universally accessible moral system.

The issue revolves around whether sin affects the moral conscience so significantly that natural law fails to meet the threshold for robust versions of moral responsibility.

While Aquinas is often forwarded as a paradigmatic natural lawyer, it seems to me that he goes further down this anti-natural law road than is often conceded. Divine law, which is biblically revealed law for Aquinas, is needed not only for matters beyond what is accessible to reason (Aquinas includes the Gospel in this category), but also for matters that are accessible to reason but to which access has been “impeded” by sin. Aquinas writes:

It was fitting that the Divine law should come to man’s assistance not only in those things for which reason is insufficient, but also in those things in which human reason may happen to be impeded. … Through being habituated to sin, [human reason] became obscured in the point of things to be done in detail. … The reason of many men went astray to the extent to judging to be lawful things that are evil in themselves. Hence there was need for the authority of the Divine law to rescue man from both of these defects (ST I-II. Q. 99, A.2).

The issue here pertains to the robustness of natural law, that is, the problem of gaps in apprehension of natural law.

Note first that, for Aquinas, this is not a minor problem for humanity. Aquinas observes that being “habituated to sin” is the “reason … many men went astray” in approving evil things.

Secondly, in referring to moral sense being “obscured … in detail,” Aquinas means that the natural law becomes obscured on specific moral points, but these can be significant moral points. One example of impeded human reason that Aquinas discusses is German barbarians for whom “theft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong” (ST I-II. Q.94, A.4). So, too,

the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Rom. 1), were not esteemed sinful. (ST I-II. Q.94, A.6).

Let’s take Aquinas’s example of theft and consider how this would create a very practical problem for the deployment of natural law in concrete situations. Let’s say that the moral conscience is working just fine for nine of the Ten Commandments. But the consciences of “many men” in our society have gone astray on the natural law behind one commandment, the commandment against theft. The practical problem is that it is specifically when there’s a failure to follow the law that we would want to appeal to conscience to persuade people to stop stealing. But it’s precisely on the point of theft (in my hypothetical) that the appeal to conscience wouldn’t work because reasoning has been impeded regarding this principle.

The natural lawyers’ habitually appeal to Romans 2:14, when Paul discusses that “Gentiles who do not have doing by nature the things of Law,” doesn’t help at this point. This canonical text for Christian natural lawyers contains an opening conditional (a condition that is often elided over). Paul writes, “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do by nature the things of the Law.” Paul’s argument here does not require that Gentiles by nature recognize all the things stipulated in the Law. His argument is only that “when” they do, their conscience bears witness to the Law.

Paul’s argument is consistent with the possibility of gaps in apprehension of natural law. Take the Ten Commandments again, and Aquinas’s example of ancient German barbarians thinking that theft is morally permissible. As long as their conscience “accuses” them regarding one of the other nine commandments, then Paul’s argument is satisfied. Their consciences “accuse them” on one or more of these other grounds, and, therefore, they know they have sinned (which is the bigger point that Paul is making in the passage).

The problem that “gaps” create for natural law systems is that natural law cannot be offered as a theory that accounts for a universal morality accessible to all people … except when it doesn’t.

Whether they are moral realists who reject the natural law label or moral realists who accept the natural law label, it seems that in this day and age, the wedge issue is moral realism versus the rejection of moral realism. As C. S. Lewis suggests, it doesn’t matter all that much what label we apply to the view as long as it’s some form of moral realism. I’m not suggesting that advocates of one view or the other shouldn’t burn any of their free time arguing over whether Coke is better than Pepsi or vice versa. At the same time, we don’t want to get caught up in a form of natural-law sectarianism akin to what Emo Philps lampooned with his telling “die heretic” joke.

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Congressman James Madison, Republicans of Virginia, took a lengthy trip through northern climes together in the spring of 1791. Contemporaries surmised that the two of them had in mind to invigorate the Republican proto-party of which they were understood to be the leaders. Louis P. Masur’s exquisite little book A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship shows that they did far more than that.

Masur refers to the Virginians’ northern sojourn as “a gambol through upstate New York and parts of New England” and what we would nowadays call an opportunity for them to recharge their batteries. Their ongoing conflict with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party had somewhat dampened their spirits, and a bit of sightseeing would perhaps reinvigorate these prominent political contestants—even if it is somewhat difficult to imagine James Madison in so light-hearted a mood as to be gamboling. Masur’s other description of the journey as an “excursion, maybe an adventure” is more apt. They did do some work along the way, the author avers, as their sightseeing at Revolutionary battlefields and meetings with local eminences perforce had political implications.

In his prologue, Masur shows that Jefferson, at least, had in mind traveling with a companion from an early age. For example, he asked John Page—a young friend and future Virginia governor—whether he had in mind to travel: “If you have,” Jefferson told him years before the Revolution, “I shall be glad of your company.” As Page would not join him, Jefferson had to wait until he was posted several years later to represent the Confederation Congress in Europe to take in the sights in much of England and France. Of rural France, he wrote, “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven?” He counseled a younger kinsman that traveling “makes men wiser, but less happy.” As he was likely to learn to value his homeland less if he traveled abroad, Jefferson opined that the younger man should just take in American sights: “There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects as in your own country, nor any wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened.”

James Madison was loath to undertake significant travel. He first rejected an invitation from Jefferson to spend much of 1784 in France and then the following year turned down James Monroe’s invitation to accompany him to the Ohio territory. Monroe’s suggestions of Montreal and Quebec sojourns drew no more positive a response. In 1784, however, Madison did accompany the Marquis de Lafayette to New York and up the Hudson River (which he had visited before). He told Jefferson in the wake of this journey that he would like to see “the eastern states,” i.e., New England, on the first convenient occasion.

Masur provides a kind of précis of Jefferson’s life prior to the trip with Madison, capturing all of the main points in a slight space and giving a good impression of the older man’s personality along the way. A substantial deepening of the two men’s friendship followed the death of Jefferson’s wife, particularly as the two shared time together in Philadelphia between that lamentable event and Jefferson’s departure for diplomatic duty in France. In 1784, not for the last time, Jefferson tried to persuade Madison to establish an abode close to Monticello.

Their political relationship is also succinctly presented. Like most Federalists of the 1780s, Madison was aghast at Shays’ Rebellion; Jefferson, away in France, found something very un-French to admire in Berkshires Massachusetts men’s tax resistance. A similar impulse left Jefferson quite skeptical of the proposed United States Constitution, which his friend had played the lead role in writing. To placate Orange County Baptists, Jefferson, Governor Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and George Nicholas, Madison took up Jefferson’s dear cause of constitutional amendments. Masur’s account of these matters, familiar to students of the men and the period, is brief and clear. So too that of the Jefferson/Madison-led Republican Party’s opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program.

Some of the material Masur includes is of interest to students of Jefferson, Madison, and the United States in this period, though not likely to people solely interested in the Northern Sojourn of 1791. For example, the story of the slave James Hemings’ service to Jefferson in Virginia and France, besides his eventual emancipation in America and ultimate suicide, has little to do with the events of 1791. So too the imbroglio over publication of Jefferson’s comment on a copy of Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man” that it would counteract certain “political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The “heresies” he had in mind had been endorsed by Vice President John Adams, whom Jefferson certainly did not intend to contradict in so direct a manner before the public—yet here it was. Masur seems to include these marginally relevant tales just because he finds them interesting. (The Paine tale ends with an observation that Timothy Pickering was due to have a distinguished career, which is one way to describe it.)

We are told after this that Madison and Jefferson fell into “the very party system that they dreaded,” and by the end of the same paragraph, Madison says that party disputation “could not be prevented,”—which anyone familiar with his famous Federalist #10 would find totally unsurprising. Jefferson stooped to secret partisan machinations and lied to President Washington about being involved, as the President surely must have known. That the two Republican chieftains dined with prominent administration critics before their departure to the north cannot have allayed anyone’s suspicions.

“No question,” Masur says, “politics was on everyone’s mind” as our heroes began their journey. “Jefferson and Madison’s tour through Federalist New England undoubtedly reinforced for them the necessity of taking a firm public stand against what they saw as the heresies of the day. Yet, in the end, politics was not their main purpose.” “Health, recreation, and curiosity,” said Madison, prompted their trip. What else might we expect him to have said?

From then on, each chapter of the book about the journey itself is titled to refer to one of the main matters of interest to Jefferson and Madison as they made their way. Jefferson famously was a man of encyclopedic interests, and Madison, too, could be prompted to take up matters of fascination. While we are prone to think of them now as among the premier politicians in the country’s history, both of them were first substantial farmers, of course, and one of the purposes of their journey was to investigate the problems posed to American agriculture by the Hessian fly.

Masur provides information about the new pest’s appearance in Europe, about Jefferson’s role in spurring the American Philosophical Society to investigate the Hessian fly, about the questions regarding the fly—when it first appeared, whether it grew from egg or worm, the type(s) of wheat it attacked, how it had been successfully fought—to ask people along their route. “Jefferson’s most extensive writing” on the trip, we learn, “was his notes on the Hessian fly.” “They are never in the grain or chaff,” he jotted, likely irked by the British government’s measures to exclude American wheat imports. Though an amateur scientist, Jefferson was a notable one. In his leisure time, he did significant mental work, and Madison was right along with him. Much of their recreation on the trip had practical application.

Masur also describes Jefferson’s relationships with one of his daughters and a slave, as shown on this trip. Rather than a single narrative account, the book presents a timeline with several points of interest along it, at which the author delves into related, sometimes distantly related, matters. The “forging of a friendship” in the book’s title does not exactly capture the book’s content. For example, there are sections on Jefferson’s relationship with his younger daughter and on the slave man he took with him to France, neither of which is related to the older man’s relationship with James Madison.

A substantial section on Madison and slavery, though interesting, is not much about the men’s friendship either. Like Jefferson, he thought seriously about slavery, and Masur considers his record in this regard. Like many other Upper South liberals of his day, Madison believed that the sole practicable solution to the slavery problem was to find someplace to which American slaves could be sent. While Masur’s account of this matter will hold the interested reader’s attention, it is not obviously related to the book’s supposed theme.

In sum, A Journey North ably tells the story, with substantial digressions, of the northern trip James Madison and Thomas Jefferson took in 1791. Perhaps the most memorable aspect of this well-written little book is the story of Jefferson’s leaving his walking stick to Madison “as a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an [sic] half century, has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.” Masur illustrates it with a photo of the stick, which Madison returned to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s favorite grandchild, thus accounting for its presence at Monticello today. One suspects that spending time together was what the two rising statesmen enjoyed most about their voyage.