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  • 19 - Civic Friendship, Natural Law, and Natural Rights

  • from Part IV - The Human Person, Political Community, and Rule of Law
  • Edited by Tom Angier, University of Cape Town, Iain T. Benson, University of Notre Dame, Australia, Mark D. Retter, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Natural Law and Human Rights
    Published online:
    03 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022, pp 276-290

  • Summary

    This essay demonstrates the relationship between rights, natural law, and civic friendship by showing how the latter, the aim of law according to classic natural law theory, cultivates a culture of care for the other for one’s own sake, which is the basis of rights protections. It considers these connections in the teachings of key contributors to the classic natural law tradition, Aristotle and Aquinas, and engages their ideas with how rights are understood in modern liberal theory. The focus on the good regime of civic friendship responds to some contemporary concerns over the abstractness of human rights. While rights protections exist because the virtue of human beings cannot be depended upon, they still depend upon a standard of civic friendship that habituates citizens into regarding others as having absolute worth which finds its experiential origins in friendship.