LAW 791 (12728)/HON 494 (26828) Natural Law Seminar Room: Armstrong Hall 111 T Th: 10:30-11:55 a.m.
Michael J. White Spring semester, 2013 Offices: Armstrong Hall 211 (law school) & LSC (Life Sciences C-Wing) 248 (SoLS) Tel. (480) 965-0105 (law); 965-0219 (SoLS) E-mail:
[email protected]
Office Hours (tentative): W 2-3 p.m. (LSC 248), T Th 3:30-5:00 p.m (Armstrong 211), and by appointment. Texts: Cicero. The Republic and the Laws, ed., ed. Jonathan Powell, trans. Niall Rudd. Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN-13 978-0192832368 Paperback Aquinas, St. Thomas. Treatise on Law. Hackett Publishing Co., 2000. ISBN 0872205487 Paperback Pufendorf, Samuel. On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0521359805 Paperback. Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson. Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. ISBN-13 9780915144860 Paperback. Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 9780199599141 Paperback. Other reading material, particularly that with which we shall begin the seminar, can be found in .PDF format on the course website the URL of which is given below. This seminar will examine the philosophical foundations and development of the so-called natural-law tradition and some of the implications of that tradition with respect to moral, political, and legal issues. Key ideas of this tradition are the following: (a) the postulation an objective human nature, ‘good’, ‘end’, or ‘function’ (‘ergon’, in the Greek); (b) the doctrine that human (practical) rationality is directed toward and properly regulated by this end/good/function; (c) the assumption that the combination of an objective human end/good/function and practical rationality (as directed toward that end) should be a/the primary basis of morality, as well as of human political and legal arrangements. We shall explore the following: the ancient Greek (particularly Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic) origins of the natural-law tradition; its adaptation to a Christian world-view and its development in medieval scholastic thought; its transformation (arguably into something quite different) within the ‘new natural law/’natural rights’ tradition of the seventeenth century. Finally, we shall consider a least one contemporary attempt to develop a moral theory within this tradition and to apply the natural-law perspective to political and legal issue (that of the ‘neo natural law tradition’). There is a website for this course (note that this is not a ‘Blackboard’ site): http://www.public.asu.edu/~mjwhite/law791.html
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The following is a rather tentative syllabus for the course, with some ‘initial suggestions’ concerning reading assignments. Topics, reading assignments, and times are all subject to change upon announcement in class and/or by postings on the course website. Topic I: The foundations of natural law and the Sophistic, Platonic and Aristotelian traditions; the central conceptual idea of a ‘normative anthropology’–the conception of a human ‘function’ (ergon), end (telos) or good–i.e., a normative ‘human nature’; physis (nature) versus nomos (law, custom, convention, ‘nurture’) and the idea of natural law; practical rationality and natural law. Plato: 15, 17, 22 January Reading: (pseud)Plato, Minos, Laws, Books I and IV (on course website); chapter on Plato from my book (on website). Aristotle: 24, 29, 31 Jan. Reading: selections from Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (on website); chapter on Aristotle from my book (on website) Topic II: Development of the idea of natural law in later antiquity, particular in Stoicism; natural law and ius gentium; natural law versus (?) legal positivism Stoicism, Cicero, and the Roman Jurists: 5, 7, 12, 14 February Reading: Cicero’s De legibus (Laws), Book I; selections from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum and malorum (On Moral Ends) and De officiis (On Duties) (on website); chapter on Cicero from my book (on website); possible reading (a ms. of mine on ius and lex) Topic III: St. Thomas Aquinas and natural law; theism and natural law & the nomos/physis distinction; natural law and the ius gentium; ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ conceptions of the common good (of which sort is St. Thomas’ conception?). 19, 21, 26, 28 Feb. Reading: Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law (Summa Theologica Ia IIae qq. 90-97); some additional relevant material from the Summa (on website); part of chapter on Aquinas from my book (on website). Topic IV: The ‘new natural law tradition’; natural rights and natural law; Locke’s Protestant theodicy (the human good/telos/ergon as a personal vocation or ‘calling’); natural rights and property; Pufendorf’s ‘(quasi)secularized’ theory of natural law and the Westphalian compromise. Locke: 5, 7 March Reading: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chs. I–V, Chs. VII–XI. Pufendorf: 19, 21, 26 March Reading: Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Editor’s introduction and, at least, Chs. 1-8. Topic V: The contemporary neo-natural law tradition; the emphasis on practical rationality; religious and metaphysical ‘decontextualization’ of natural law; neo-natural law and liberalism. Finnis: 28 March, 2, 4, 9, 11, 16 April John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (2nd ed.), selections to be announced
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