Natural Law
Introduction
Ancient and Modern Natural Law
People make a distinction between philosophers who believe in natural law and modernists who do not. That is entirely false. The idea of natural law in politics is that there are definite, timeless, rules of cause and effect, just as in the natural law of science. If you do not penalize murder, people will commit more murders. If a society allows homosexuality, it will decay. If the king listens to flatterers, he will be deceived. If taxes are higher, people will work less hard. If you build a big army, your neighbor is less likely to attack you. This is all natural law. There are parts which are more subtle, such as that if you live virtuously, you will be happier, or that moral education will make a country more prosperous, but these all are essentially the idea that you there exist The Gods of the Copybook Headings and they cannot be defied. You cannot make of the world what you want. It is the Constrained Vision of Thomas Sowell. This is Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Montesquieu. It is perhaps not Rousseau. It is Marx, but not Nietzsche.
It is also not Confucius, though it is Han Fei and Lao Tzu.
It is not the Bible either.
