Natural Law and Ethics
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In order to gauge the degree to which natural law ethics answers or challenges ethics as perceived by cultural relativism, it is useful to set forth the way in which ethics may be understood in the context of each system. Natural law can be considered a term meant to encompass moral philosophy and its corollary, moral behavior, in human society, which evolves into a certain shape owing to how the human beings involved in it comport themselves toward one another. Ethical behavior in the context of natural law is that which does no deliberate harm to individuals and that which does not disrupt the welfare and stability of society. Cultural relativism can be said to take the shape of human society, or culture, as the starting point, with ethical behavior a result of the subjective responses that individuals make to the culture.Theories of both natural law and cultural relativism presume the human rational capacity as well as the human tendency toward forming social connections. But each theory interprets how that capacity functions in a different way. From the point of view of natural law, morality can be enacted because the limits of human prerogatives can be sighted and because human rationalist can recognize and adjust to the demands of eternal moral truth, which comes from God. In this regard, Aquinas cites eternal law and "divine reason," which governs the orderly cosmos, which contains another eternal construction in the form of "a dictate of practical reason" (Aquinas 7
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st principles of ethical human conduct and indeed the moral structures informing human experience. Locke is showing how the man-made concepts of right and entitlement derived from the application of reason and labor to a cosmos, or state of nature, that would have otherwise lain fallow, i.e., would not have been understood. The application of human reason to the project of life experience is meant to include access to benefits of such application as well as basic survival. That application entails ethics and morality because it seeks to explain how human reason applies itself to the ask of making human society and social interaction as orderly as the divinely created cosmos that was "given" by God to mankind. Human reason can be interpreted as a gift from the cosmos and as the mechanism of participation in the cosmic order. The application of practical human reason can be interpreted as mankind's conscious attempt to capture that order in terms of shared principles governing human society and sanctioning the creation of specific laws and commandments. This is not inconsistent with Aquinas's statement that the rational creature "partakes of a share of [divine] providence, by being provident both for itself and for others. Therefore
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Approximate Word count = 2247
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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