Natural Law In Ancient and Modern Guise

The Federalist Society ^ | May, 2010 | Prof Richard Epstein

[Voption]

The Federalist Society's Georgetown Student Chapter presented its Seventh Annual Lifetime Service Award to Professor Richard A. Epstein on April 1, 2010.His address was titled "Natural Law in Ancient and Modern Guise".

[BEJ]

I only was able to listen to half of the video and found it quite interesting. Richard talks a blue steak from the top of his head and I don’t know if he felt he was under some time constraint so that he had to quickly cover his topic, or if that was his natural speaking style. The topic of natural law, both ancient and modern, is lengthy.

I like how Richard touched on the approach to studying natural law from various disciplines and it reminds me of Jordan Peterson when he brings culture, history, philosophy and science (biology and psychology) to bare on the study of man. I also liked the two sided aspect of natural law: the absolute and exceptional — the exceptional I would think would be along the lines of circumstantial ethics. I don’t see how Leo Strauss is related to the absolute side, although his student Allan Bloom tended to teach his students (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz) to test human nature in an absolutist kind of way, almost with the certainty of mathematical principles. I would think that mentioning Leo Strauss always gets a good response at the U of Chicago.

I don’t know much about natural law except that it was part of a course I took on Thomas Aquinas. Natural Law seems very close to one’s conscience and according to Peterson all of this is rooted in biology and from the fact that we have descended from animals. Richard makes a similar point. I don’t know if the source is biological or from God. I could see it coming from God and our body as just the biological platform from which it operates.

Anyway, I’ll check out the rest of the video at a later date.