Natural Law Is the Basis of a Just Society

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The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them...

Natural law is the proposition that certain principles of justice exist independently of what any government decides to enact. It is the reason the Declaration of Independence does not say 'we hereby create these rights' but rather 'we hold these truths to be self-evident.' The Founders did not invent the rights they proclaimed. They recognized them — in nature, in reason, in the accumulated wisdom of human civilization.

This matters because without natural law, rights become whatever the strongest party says they are. If there is no standard higher than human legislation, then slavery was lawful when the law permitted it, and became wrong only when the law changed. The abolitionists understood this. Frederick Douglass did not argue that the Constitution as written was sufficient — he argued that it was answerable to a higher law. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail that 'an unjust law is no law at all,' quoting Augustine — a natural law argument made in the twentieth century using fourth-century reasoning.

Natural law does not tell you what to legislate. It tells you what no legislation can legitimately do. It draws a line that no majority, no executive, no court can cross without forfeiting its moral authority. In a world where legal systems are increasingly complex and often contradictory, the concept of natural law remains the simplest and most powerful accountability mechanism available: some things are right and some things are wrong, regardless of what the statute says.