Examples of natural law in the following topics:
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The spirit of secular natural law rests at the foundations of the Declaration.
- Unlike traditional natural law theory, secular natural law does not draw from religious
doctrine or authority.
- Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights,
these rights are held to be universal and valid in all times and
places.
- In
the second article, "the natural and imprescriptible rights of man"
are defined as "liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression."
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- Locke begins by describing the state of nature, a picture much more stable than Thomas Hobbes' state of "war of every man against every man," and argues that all men are created equal in the state of nature by God.
- Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that human nature is characterized by reason and tolerance.
- Locke's conception of natural rights is captured in his best known statement that individuals have a right to protect their "life, health, liberty, or possessions" and in his belief that the natural right to property is derived from labor.
- He defines the state of nature as a condition, in which humans are rational and follow natural law and in which all men are born equal with the right to life, liberty and property.
- However, when one citizen breaks the Law of Nature, both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, from which it is virtually impossible to break free.
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- The philosophic movement was led by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for a society based upon reason rather than faith and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation.
- Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
- Locke is particularly known for his statement that individuals have a right to "Life, Liberty and Property" and his belief that the natural right to property is derived from labor.
- For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he said must therefore remain protected from any government authority.
- She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education.
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- In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical state of nature as a normative guide.
- Contrary to Thomas Hobbes' views, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature."
- Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation.
- As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law.
- This division is necessary because the sovereign cannot deal with particular matters like applications of the law.
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- Galileo was one of the first modern thinkers to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical.
- Willebrord Snellius found the mathematical law of refraction, now known as Snell's law, in 1621.
- Subsequently, Descartes showed, by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as Descartes' law), that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42°.
- He also independently discovered the law of reflection.
- The many discoveries of this nature earned for Gilbert the title of founder of the electrical science.
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- While astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, its development during the Scientific Revolution entirely transformed the views of society about nature by moving from geocentrism to heliocentrism.
- While astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, its development during the period of the Scientific Revolution entirely
transformed the views of society about nature.
- It contains the first two of his eponymous three laws of planetary motion (in 1619, the third law was published).
- This was explainable by the Copernican system which said that all phases of Venus would be visible due to the nature of its orbit around the Sun, unlike the Ptolemaic system which stated only some of Venus’s phases would be visible.
- Isaac Newton developed further ties between physics and astronomy through his law of universal gravitation.
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- The scientific revolution, which emphasized systematic experimentation as the most valid research method,
resulted in developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry that transformed the views of society about nature.
- The Aristotelian tradition was still an important intellectual framework in the 17th century, although by that time natural philosophers had moved away from much of it.
- Isaac Newton's Principia, developed the first set of unified scientific laws.
- Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.
- His laws of motion were to be the solid foundation of mechanics.
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- Following the collapse of the Akkadians, the Babylonian Empire flourished under Hammurabi, who conquered many surrounding peoples and empires, in addition to developing an extensive code of law and establishing Babylon as a "holy city" of southern Mesopotamia.
- One of the most important works of this First Dynasty of Babylon was the compilation in about 1754 BCE of a code of laws, called the Code of Hammurabi, which echoed and improved upon the earlier written laws of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria.
- The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments depending on social status, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
- Despite Hammurabi's various military successes, southern Mesopotamia had no natural, defensible boundaries, which made it vulnerable to attack.