Natural Law, Rights and Justice in Legal Theory

Natural Law, Rights and Justice in Legal Theory

Key Concepts and Definitions

Natural right

A kind of action belonging to a broader moral order (natural law); it can be discovered in the nature of human realities. It is a whole bundle of institutions that allow basic justice in societies and among people.

Iusnaturalism

What is natural for humans is common to all (universal), and those elements that are not essential change according to the different conditions in which they develop (positive right).

Positive right

Law arranged by the human will.

Positivism

A philosophical current that denies the validity of speculative metaphysics. It precedes the juridical trend of legal positivism and exclusively admits as real what is empirical, countable, and measurable.

Ius gentium

"Law of nations" — principles that gave rise to what is now international law, both public and private.

Law

Law is a rational order aimed at the common good and given by the authority responsible for a particular community.

Custom (lex non scripta)

The unwritten law — the common law or customary law.

Natural law

The human conscience's judgment on the morality of human actions.

Conscience; natural reason

Implies accepting a common understanding and reason that allow us to pronounce what is just and unjust. It assumes people's capacity to know truth and the goodness of things with a minimum of objectivity, through human reason and perception.

Natural tendencies

The behavior of a thing in its natural state; a natural inclination.

Types of Justice and Related Concepts

• Justice: A virtue that tends to give each one what is rightfully theirs; it corresponds to what is due to persons.
• Injustice: The correlative vice opposed to justice; it consists of denying someone what is their right.
• General justice: Everything that is contained in laws is in some way just.
• Commutative justice: Implies an arranged exchange of things that have similar value (a proportionate equivalence between them).
• Distributive justice: That which serves to distribute, allot, or disperse charges and benefits in society.
• Contributive justice: The responsibility each individual has to contribute to civil society and to collective wellbeing.

Other Related Virtues and Obligations

Piety: The virtue that develops an attitude of respect toward our roots, arising from the impossibility of fully repaying everything we have received.

• Right: A right is a claim that involves both the capacity to demand and the duty to fulfill; it establishes an objective relation between individuals and things.
• Moral obligation: These originate from an individual's knowledge and free will, from traditions (what has been believed to be good or bad for the community), and from natural law as an inner sense of what is good or bad.
• Legal obligation: Obligations imposed by public authorities to be enforced for the common good.
• Penalty: The imposition of punishment or a fine, or the deprivation of a good, on a person who has broken the rules.
• Coaction (Coactions): The use of intimidation to force someone to behave in a certain way.
• Coactive: Acting in concurrence or by means of coercion.