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Detmold, Michael --- "Natural law and physics: the state of nature" [2019] ELECD 2220; in Crowe, Jonathan; Lee, Y. Constance (eds), "Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 326

Book Title: Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory

Editor(s): Crowe, Jonathan; Lee, Y. Constance

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 20

Section Title: Natural law and physics: the state of nature

Author(s): Detmold, Michael

Number of pages: 22

Abstract/Description:

Michael Detmold’s chapter considers the physical and embodied character of natural law, focusing in particular on its relationship to causality. Natural law, Detmold argues, has its basis in human bonds, as exemplified by the law of contract. Contracts bind the parties – and they do so in a physical sense, by giving form to the parties’ freedom to act. A breach of contract disrupts the relations between the parties in a way that directly shapes their physical world. The natural law, understood in this way, is not something imposed on humans from some third position, as in Rawlsian accounts of justice or legal positivist theories of law - rather, it arises from the first and second positions of the parties themselves. Two parties in an original position have no choice but to deal with each other - without dealings, there would be no common world between them. Between two humans, many dealings may be possible, but the shortest distance between them - the one that least impedes their mutual freedom - is that dictated by the natural law (or what Detmold calls ‘the law of love’). Natural law, in this sense, creates causal order out of pure random. The beginning of the moral universe therefore mirrors the origins of the physical world.