NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATURAL LAW

Abstract

Notoriously, natural law means many things to many people. Natural law is discussed quite differently in the fields of ethics, law, and theology; it is employed quite differently in the spheres of political rhetoric, churches, and academia; it has been used quite differently in the eras of ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern West; and something akin to natural law appears, with quite different associations, in the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In some contexts natural law refers to God's moral law. In other contexts natural law consists of norms that can be discerned solely through human reason. In still other contexts natural law describes rules that are naturally embedded in the physical world.