why is natural law an inappropriate approach to ethics in the 21st century
Why is natural law an inappropriate approach to ethics in the 21st century?
Natural law, its critics claim, produces no certain knowledge. It is more often merely the rhetorical projection of whatever a person firmly believes but finds them self unable to prove. Appeals to natural law never solve moral conflict. People on the left and the right side of natural law come to conclusions that contradict each other on things such as marriage. Therefore it is better to find a clearer, more widely accepted basis for morality.
Let’s think what the term natural law really means; natural law - a term rarely used today, at least by scientists thinking about what they're saying. Nineteenth-century science presumed that it could arrive at immutable, absolutely true, universal statements about nature, and these were to be "natural laws. So newton’s ideas about gravity were called ‘the laws of gravity’, until the 20th century when Einstein came along. He proved that not all of newton’s laws were correct; this shows that not all ideas that have produced are true. This makes them more principles than laws.
Many philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle have conflicting ideas on what natural law is from. For Aquinas, the reason why nature had the order it did was because God had put it there but for Aristotle, did not believe that this order was divinely inspired but that it was brought about to create a society with a set of rules to live by. Back in the 13th century believing that natural law was a rule laid down by god would have been far easier to believe. This is because the concept of god would have been more widespread and common. However, as we get closer to the 21st century people started to question the idea of god and studied the area around them.
As a result of this people would eventually come to question the idea of natural law and question the reliability of its sources. People may say that if god did not provide them with these set of rules for the
Natural law, its critics claim, produces no certain knowledge. It is more often merely the rhetorical projection of whatever a person firmly believes but finds them self unable to prove. Appeals to natural law never solve moral conflict. People on the left and the right side of natural law come to conclusions that contradict each other on things such as marriage. Therefore it is better to find a clearer, more widely accepted basis for morality.
Let’s think what the term natural law really means; natural law - a term rarely used today, at least by scientists thinking about what they're saying. Nineteenth-century science presumed that it could arrive at immutable, absolutely true, universal statements about nature, and these were to be "natural laws. So newton’s ideas about gravity were called ‘the laws of gravity’, until the 20th century when Einstein came along. He proved that not all of newton’s laws were correct; this shows that not all ideas that have produced are true. This makes them more principles than laws.
Many philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle have conflicting ideas on what natural law is from. For Aquinas, the reason why nature had the order it did was because God had put it there but for Aristotle, did not believe that this order was divinely inspired but that it was brought about to create a society with a set of rules to live by. Back in the 13th century believing that natural law was a rule laid down by god would have been far easier to believe. This is because the concept of god would have been more widespread and common. However, as we get closer to the 21st century people started to question the idea of god and studied the area around them.
As a result of this people would eventually come to question the idea of natural law and question the reliability of its sources. People may say that if god did not provide them with these set of rules for the