natural law

Examples of natural law in the following topics:

• Natural Rights

  • Natural rights are closely related to the concept of natural law (or laws).
  • Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty" from natural "laws."
  • He objected to the attempt to derive rights from "natural law," arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations.
  • Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless.
  • Such rights were thought to be natural rights, independent of positive law.

• Spencer and Social Darwinism

  • Like Comte, Spencer saw in sociology the potential to unify the sciences, or to develop what he called a "synthetic philosophy. " He believed that the natural laws discovered by natural scientists were not limited to natural phenomena; these laws revealed an underlying order to the universe that could explain natural and social phenomena alike.
  • Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover laws of morality that had the same authority as laws of nature.
  • He believed that all natural laws could be reduced to one fundamental law, the law of evolution.
  • Thus, Spencer's synthetic philosophy aimed to show that natural laws led inexorably to progress.
  • Critics of Spencer's positivist synthetic philosophy argued that the social sciences were essentially different from the natural sciences and that the methods of the natural sciences—the search for universal laws was inappropriate for the study of human society.

• Thomas Hobbes

  • Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty" from natural "laws."
  • In his natural state, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws, which leads to the world of chaos created by unlimited rights.
  • Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from "natural law," arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations.
  • Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless.
  • This marked an important departure from medieval natural law theories which gave precedence to obligations over rights.

• Sociology and the Social Sciences

  • But even this law has proved to have exceptions.
  • Newton made a sharp distinction between the natural world, which he asserted was an independent reality that operated by its own laws, and the human or spiritual world.
  • In the attempt to study human behavior using scientific and empirical principles, sociologists always encounter dilemmas, as humans do not always operate predictably according to natural laws.
  • Kepler's law, which describes planet orbit, is an example of the sort of laws Newton believed science should seek.
  • Isaac Newton was a key figure in the process which split the natural sciences from the humanities.

• The Second Law

  • The second law of thermodynamics deals with the direction taken by spontaneous processes.
  • The law that forbids these processes is called the second law of thermodynamics .
  • Like all natural laws, the second law of thermodynamics gives insights into nature, and its several statements imply that it is broadly applicable, fundamentally affecting many apparently disparate processes.
  • We will express the law in other terms later on, most importantly in terms of entropy.
  • Examples of one-way processes in nature.

• Models, Theories, and Laws

  • The laws of nature are concise descriptions of the universe around us.
  • They are not explanations, but human statements of the underlying rules that all natural processes follow.
  • The cornerstone of discovering natural laws is observation; science must describe the universe as it is, not as we may imagine it to be.
  • A law uses concise language to describe a generalized pattern in nature that is supported by scientific evidence and repeated experiments.
  • However, the designation law is reserved for a concise and very general statement that describes phenomena in nature, such as the law that energy is conserved during any process, or Newton's second law of motion, which relates force, mass, and acceleration by the simple equation F=ma.

• Common Law

  • Law of the United States was mainly derived from the common law system of English law.
  • At both the federal and state levels, the law of the United States was mainly derived from the common law system of English law , which was in force at the time of the Revolutionary War.
  • American judges, like common law judges elsewhere, not only apply the law, they also make the law.
  • Instead, it must be regarded as 50 separate systems of tort law, family law, property law, contract law, criminal law, and so on.
  • Naturally, the laws of different states frequently come into conflict with each other.

• Nature vs. Nurture: A False Debate

  • Recently, the nature versus nurture debate has entered the realm of law and criminal defense.
  • The "nature" in the nature versus nurture debate generally refers to innate qualities.
  • In historical terms, nature might refer to human nature or the soul.
  • The "nature" side may be criticized for implying that we behave in ways in which we are naturally inclined, rather than in ways we choose.
  • A molecular biologist and psychoanalyst explain the nature versus nurture debate.

• Momentum, Force, and Newton's Second Law

  • This fact, known as the law of conservation of momentum, is implied by Newton's laws of motion.
  • If the particles are numbered 1 and 2, the second law states that
  • This law holds regardless of the nature of the interparticle (or internal) force, no matter how complicated the force is between particles.
  • Using symbols, this law is
  • So for constant mass, Newton's second law of motion becomes

• Introduction: Physics and Matter

  • Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force .
  • More broadly, it is the study of nature in an attempt to understand how the universe behaves.
  • The law of conservation of mass, for example, states that mass cannot be created or destroyed.
  • Further experiments and calculations in physics, therefore, take this law into account when formulating hypotheses to try to explain natural phenomena.
  • In fact, almost everything around you can be described quite accurately by the laws of physics.