6 - Natural Justice and Natural Law

Summary

The question of Aristotle’s natural law credentials has often divided interpreters. In the current chapter, I argue that much of this disagreement stems from insufficient attentiveness to both the details of Aristotle’s account of the just by nature in Nicomachean Ethics V.7 and the ambiguity of the term ‘natural law.’ The chapter thus proceeds from the assumption that a precondition for any adequate assessment of Aristotle’s status as a natural law theorist is a close analysis of the V.7 discussion of natural justice. Such an investigation, the main concern of section 1, reveals that Aristotle’s characterization of the politically just as partly natural and partly conventional does indeed entail that nature serves as a normative ground for law. With this conclusion in place, section 2 then turns more directly to Aristotle’s relation to the natural law tradition. Despite important differences between Aristotle’s account of the normative foundations of law and those found in the paradigmatic natural law teachings of the Stoics and Aquinas, I argue, there are nonetheless features of later natural law thought on the purpose and evaluation of law which are genuinely Aristotelian in orientation.