Reason, Will, Freedom: Natural Law and Natural Rights in Later Scholastic Thought
Tattay Szilárd doktori értekezés
Témavezető: Prof. Dr. Péteri Zoltán professor emeritus
Társ-témavezető: Prof. Dr. Philippe Gérard egyetemi tanár
Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem Jog- és Államtudományi Doktori Iskola
Budapest, 2012
Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter I: The Thomist Legacy 15 Part 1: Two Fundamental Notions: Ius and Dominium ...... 15 1.1 The Notion of Ius ...... 15 1.2 The Notion of Dominium ...... 20 1.3 Conceptual Relations I: Ius and Dominium as the Rule of Reason . . 21 1.4 Conceptual Relations II: Ius and Dominium as Property ...... 25 Part 2: Natural Rights? ...... 27
Chapter II: The Nominalist “Revolution”: William Ockham 37 Part 1: Philosophical-Theological Grounds ...... 38 1.1 The Philosopher and the Political Thinker ...... 38 1.2 Ockham’s Moral Theory ...... 49 Part 2: Natural Law and Natural Rights ...... 64 2.1 Natural Law: God’s Will or Human Rationality? ...... 64 2.2 Natural Rights ...... 75
Chapter III: The Harvest of Medieval Legal Philosophy: Francisco Suárez 83 Part 1: Natural Law ...... 83 1.1 The General Concept of Law ...... 84 1.2 The Eternal Law ...... 88 1.3 The Natural Law: Lex Indicativa or Lex Praeceptiva? ...... 94 1.4 The Suárezian Via Media ...... 102 1.5 Permissive Natural Law ...... 110 Part 2: Natural Rights ...... 115 2.1 The Meanings of Ius and Their Interrelations ...... 116 2.2 Property and the Natural Right of Using ...... 125 2.3. Liberty and the Origins of the State ...... 131 2.4. The Right of Self-Defence ...... 142
Conclusion 153
Bibliography 161 Primary Literature ...... 161 Original texts ...... 161 English translations ...... 165 Secondary Literature ...... 168 Introduction
Few would doubt the widespread commonplace in the history of ideas that natural rights were conceived from natural law. Nevertheless, the relationship between natural law and natural rights cannot be taken for granted. Although several competitive theories arose to de ne this relationship, the debates around it have not come to an end. It seems that the two most fundamental and most difficult correlating questions are whether (1) the mutual “encounter” between the concepts of natural law and natural rights in a determinate period of the history of Western political and legal thought was in a certain sense compelling or merely incidental, (2) there is an organic, accidental or logically contradictory relationship between these two concepts. e relationship between natural law and natural rights raises further issues besides these two essential questions depending on the answers given and the theory under exam- ination. Is the natural law or natural rights entitled to primacy and is it possible to derive natural rights from natural law or vice versa? If primarily obligations originate from natu- ral law, what and how could establish a relationship between the norms of natural law and the natural rights? Do natural rights only serve to ful ll obligations arising from natural law, or is their scope wider than this, and so and so forth? e starting point of my thesis is the assumption that among other reasons the prob- lem of the relationship between natural law and natural rights is dividing historians of ideas and provides them with false ambiguities because the thorough examination of the inter- mediate period between the thirteenth century, commonly regarded as the golden age of scholasticism, and the seventeenth century marking the beginning of modern natural law theory (the period between Saint omas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius) has been neglected up to recent times; although these three and a half centuries are essential concerning the evolution of the idea of natural rights. 6 Introduction
ere are two easily tangible, crystallized and characteristic opinions considering the intellectual historical relationship between natural law and natural rights. According to a widespread view initiated by Leo Strauss and Michel Villey, there is a mutually exclud- ing relationship or at least a fundamental tension and historical discontinuity between the ideas of natural law and natural rights. In Strauss’s view, the authentic, classical tradition of natural law declined when (and not to a negligible extent because of the fact that) nat- ural rights arose. Modernity took over temporarily the concept of natural law inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages, but transformed it according to the axioms of mod- ern philosophy, made it secondary and derivative compared to the concept of rights, and nally exceeded it. Michel Villey is even more categorical. e French legal philosopher, who sees an absolute logical incompatibility between the ideas of natural law and natural rights, claims that while the classical concept of ‘ius’ meant the constraint of all power, the modern ‘iura’ means the theoretically unrestricted power of the individual. e other general opinion, opposed to the previous one, regards the seventeenth-eigh- teenth-century modern variant of natural law rather than its classical version as a point of departure and ideal-typical. According to this approach, there is a close relationship and codependence between the ideas of natural law and natural rights. In this view, the most remarkable and imperishable merit of natural law theories is the elaboration of the idea of natural rights.⁴ If we pursue this reasoning further, we can even arrive at the conclusion that nowadays, when natural law is considered to be a minoritarian view in jurisprudence, besides its official advocates this approach endures latently – as a subterranean river – in the works of such human rights theoreticians as Ronald Dworkin, who cannot or are not willing to come to common grounds with natural law due to their dedication to analytic philosophy.⁵