Term Paper on The Idea of Natural Right

By "natural law" we mean principles of human conduct, not the laws of nature discovered by the physical sciences. Many philosophers who advocate natural law see it at work in both the human and nonhuman areas, but their chief concern is in its unique importance to man. According to these scholars, the natural law as applied to physical things or animals is unbreakable; stars and atoms never defy the laws of their nature. But man regularly disobeys the ethical rules, which represents the law of his exclusive human nature.

 
The idea of a natural right order to which, all things; including human beings, should conform is one of the most earliest and universal philosophies. It is the main belief in the religious and philosophic systems of ancient India and China, as well as in traditional Greek philosophy. Plato calls it "justice" and applies it to the human soul and human conduct.
In Western civilization, particularly from the Roman jurists and the theologians of the Middle Age on, we find the doctrine of the natural moral law for man. It is the basis of ethical principles, the foundation of moral judgments, and the gauge of justice in the man-made laws of the state. If the law of the state runs counter to the principle of the natural law, it is held to be unjust.

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The first rule of natural law is to seek the good and avoid sin. It is often put as follows: "Do well unto others, injure no one, and render to every man his own." Now, certainly, such a universal rule is ineffective for organized society unless we can use it to stipulate different kind of rights and wrongs. That is exactly what man-made, or helpful, law tries to do. Hence, the natural law tells us only that robbery is wrong because it causes harm, but the positive law of stealing describes the different types and degrees of theft and imposes the penalty.

Disregarding or rejecting the difference between real and apparent goods, together with that between normal wants and acquired wants, the positivists can find no basis for the difference between what "ought" to be desired or done and what is desired or done. Hence it shows, that there is no natural moral law, no natural rights, no natural justice, ending up with the conclusion that man-made law alone determines what is just and unjust, right and wrong. This optimistic analysis is as old as the despotisms that existed in ancient times.

The denial of natural rights, the natural moral law, and natural justice leads not only to the constructive conclusion that man-made law alone decides what is just and unjust. It also leads to an outcome which inevitably connects itself to that conclusion -- "that might makes right" -- this is the very spirit of a tyrannical or autocratic government.

Heidegger, was a German Philosopher, he was an idealist, who spent his life searching for spiritual authority. Heidegger was right when he said that in humans, the more shallow representative-calculative thinking is "dominant," because that is the thinking of the accountants, and it is the accountants, not the engineers or the scientists or the ethicists, who write the bottom lines. Ethics has always been the fundamental duty of philosophy, thus what philosophy wants to become is in line with a lawful way of considering what it always have been.

Techno-industry-calculating need not be the only criterion for human thinking, is not as strange a possibility as Heidegger makes out. He followed a steady path his whole life, i.e. a search for spiritual authority. His ultimate passion was to fight relativism; the cause or basis of this relativism, is something called "multiplicity". It is what really throws us into danger and threat. Therefore, many, as opposed to only one, are the source of the threat we should be experiencing from the ensuing "relativism." Hence many more threatening than the One. Multiplicity, in and of itself, is not what he really fears so much as he does the "relativism" that is produced by it.