Political Natural Law

Abstract

The précis of Jonathan Crowe’s latest book, Natural Law and the Nature of Law, claims that ‘this book provides the first systematic, book-length defence of natural law ideas in ethics, politics and jurisprudence since John Finnis’s influential Natural Law and Natural Rights’.1 That is a very high bar to set oneself, given that Finnis almost singlehandedly revived the natural law tradition in analytic jurisprudence post-Hart and restored it to a position of plausibility, if not respectability, within jurisprudential circles. I am happy to report that Crowe’s book has made good on the claim. Like Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights, Crowe’s Natural Law and the Nature of Law is ambitious in its scope, systematic in its argument and methodical in its treatment of the various implications of the argument. The book is, as the précis also rightly states, ‘timely, wide-ranging and clearly written’. Crowe’s primary interlocutors in the book are mainly fellow natural lawyers, who are engaging in a family dispute. Much of the book is directed towards disagreements within the natural law family. The intellectual attacks in the book against other natural lawyers are minor skirmishes, for in the grand scheme of things, the major battle is not with other natural law theorists, but with the legal positivists. This book leaves the major battle with legal positivists aside for the moment to engage in some intellectual sparring with other natural lawyers. Those who come to the book looking for a knockdown argument against legal positivism will not find it, but those who come to the book to look for clarification and refinement of the natural law thesis will be delighted with what they find. As a sign of its richness, there are many aspects of the book that I could focus on in this essay, but I will just focus on one question, which is a fundamental one for the natural law position: where do basic goods come from? Part I will begin with Finnis’s answer to this question, and Crowe’s critique of Finnis on this point. Part II will analyse Crowe’s alternative answer to the question. Part III will endorse Crowe’s alternative answer, albeit with a friendly addendum. Show more