The Essential Natural Law Quotes

“this sense, understanding natural law and the principles that it embodies surely has enormous potential to serve as a powerful ballast for the free society and to remind us of why liberty is important and why the protection of freedom merits eternal vigilance.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Writing in the late sixteenth century, the jurist and historian Bartolomé de Albornóz described commercial activity as the nerve of human life that sustains the universe. By means of buying and selling the world is united, joining distant lands and nations, people of different language, laws and ways of life. If it were not for these contracts, some would lack the goods that others have in abundance and they would not be able to share the goods that they have in excess with those countries where they are scarce. (Albornóz, 1573: VII, 29)”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“The effect was to generate an appropriation and rethinking of the principles of the ius gentium as part of the public international law designed to govern relations between sovereign states after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Mariana also argued that government-sponsored currency debasements, excessive expenditures, and subsequent tax increases effectively facilitated the slow but systematic violation of private property (1605/1950a: 548).”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“The global expansion of commerce and trade which began in the Middle Ages and accelerated from the late fifteenth century onwards raised many moral questions for merchants in Christian Europe. What, for instance, constituted a just price? Were money markets permissible? Was it legitimate for the state to give one merchant or a business a monopoly on a given product or type of industry? Many commercial traders, anxious about their salvation, turned to their confessors for guidance.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Aquinas provides a clearer indication of what constitutes “imminent danger.” In discussing almsgiving, he states that “it is not every sort of need that binds us as a matter of strict obligation, but only what is a matter of life and death” (ST II-II, q.32, a.5).”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“This is not an endorsement of theft. What it means is that if a particular manifestation of private property is actually obstructing common use, then the ownership of that property is no longer private. An example is someone who is starving to death and on the point of death and whose only opportunity to save her life is by eating an apple on a tree belonging to someone else.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Aquinas drew upon Aristotle to outline three reasons to favour the private ownership of material goods. First, he notes, people tend to take better care of what is theirs than of what is common to everyone, since individuals tend to shirk responsibilities that belong to nobody in particular. Second, if everyone were responsible for everything, the result would be confusion. Third, dividing up things generally produces a more peaceful state of affairs. By contrast, sharing things in common often results in tension. Individual ownership, then—understood as the power to manage and dispose of things—is legitimate and necessary (ST II-II, q.66, a.2).”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Rule of law was, for Aquinas, a matter of acting according to reason rather than our passions or in an arbitrary fashion.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“At the same time, there are particular responsibilities that natural law does regard as the state’s prerogative. Perhaps the most important of these is something that free societies see as fundamental to their very identity: rule of law.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“For if you believe that rights have no stronger foundation than the state’s exercise of its sovereign powers, they may be diminished or even abolished by the state. In such circumstances, rights would simply be identified—or abolished—according to whatever a particular majority in a particular country at a particular time preferred those rights to be.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“For machines do not possess another specifically human characteristic of human action: i.e., free choice.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Once your act involves a conscious choice of an evil (consciously targeting civilian populations and non-combatants while waging war), it follows that the act itself is evil, no matter how much good might be realized. In other words, there are some acts that cannot be rationally defended by reference to any end.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“By “classical liberalism,” I mean those thinkers who stress the importance of liberty from unjust coercion, a state limited to key functions like national security and rule of law, strong limits on government power, and minimal state intervention in the economy.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“natural law is concerned with what it is reasonable; and by reasonable, we are speaking of what it is right and good for individuals and communities to freely choose.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Nuremberg war crimes trials of the surviving leaders of the National Socialist regime. During the trial, one defense that many of the accused articulated was that everything done on their orders had been directly or indirectly sanctioned by the German state. The law was the law, and the moral rightness or wrongness of the law was consequently not relevant. The prosecution responded by maintaining that while this may have been the case, such actions were not only rendered illegal by international law, but were called into question by strong Western legal philosophical traditions which emphasized that there are indeed universal laws which no positive law (no matter how firmly sanctioned by the state) can annul. The chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson (a Justice of the United States Supreme Court and a firm believer in natural law), contended that the International Military Tribunal sought to “[rise] above the provincial and transient and [sought] guidance not only from international law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations” (Jackson, 1947: part 2, 29).”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Summa addresses critical questions such as the nature of human reason, the principles of morality, the character of justice, the origins and limits of government, the relationship of positive law (law decreed or promulgated by political or legal institutions with the authority to do so) to natural law, and the virtues. These are the sections to which natural law scholars—religious, secular, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Aristotelian, or Muslim—interested in exploring topics like the nature and limits of state power, or the character of property, continually turn.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“good desires work against a perverse reason”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law

“Natural law thus sees free choice as (1) the contemplation of possibilities that provide reasons for action, followed by (2) the active determination of the value of the object of a possible act, and then (3) the active willing of that act (Finnis, 1998: 71). This view of free choice and reason suggests that humans can make free choices to the extent that we understand and act upon reasons that are not reducible to the emotions, the influence of our environment, etc.”
― Samuel Gregg, The Essential Natural Law