Natural law and human dignity

Natural law is one of the most ancient concepts, about which politicians, lawyers and philosophers "broke the spears," and this question has remained open until now. Although if you follow the development of this theory, you can see that, despite the resistance of the opponents, it has practically won the sphere of international legal relations. First of all, it is interesting because it originated in the era of antiquity, and maybe even earlier, but it was much later that it was perceived as a special teaching. Finally, from the New Time it became one of two opposing theories in the field of jurisprudence.

Although the understanding that certain properties are given to man by nature was indeed formed very early, in Ancient Greece it served as a justification for slavery, since even the great Aristotle believed that some kind of people are slaves by nature, and therefore others who were fortunate to be born free, Must manage. Ancient Roman lawyers own the very concept of "natural law" (or jus naturale), but in its definition they did not go beyond very abstract reasoning. In the era of the Middle Ages, theories of natural and divine standards were combined, and therefore this term was mainly used by canonists who developed the norms of church legislation, often on the basis of political considerations.

On the other hand, in certain sacred or mythological texts or moral maxims expressed in literary works or folk art, certain ideals gradually evolved about what truth, justice, equality, and so on. They were also understood as a kind of natural law, as they were the yardstick of how a person should behave and what his dignity meant. The new time seemed to be the catalyst of this theory and proclaimed that there are obvious things given to people from nature - this is life, freedom, equality - and belonging to them by the very fact of birth. Philosophical ideas that raised these truths on the shield were put forward by Hugo Grotius and many thinkers of the Enlightenment, in particular Holbach and Rousseau.

Natural law as a principle began to be fixed in legislative acts, such as the revolutionary French Declaration of 1789 on "sacred natural rights" or the American Declaration of Independence. Although it should be clarified that the French revolutionaries, writing an exalted text about the inalienability of freedom and equality, excluded women from there, which subsequently gave rise to the movement of suffragism. This is very significant for the development of this theory, because even many of those who shared the thesis that some privileges are an integral part of human nature, in practice, dealing with a society where different groups of people have opposite interests, justified those laws , Which protect the powers of ruling individuals and classes. Therefore, in the XIX century, when this understanding of the structure of human society was realized, the concepts of natural and positive law began to openly confront each other.

Defending the priority of norms and ideals of laws "from nature", philosophers often based on the notion of good, and not good. Natural law, both in its classical and modern sense, is a collection of such types of goods that can not be reduced either to each other or to any other elements. Life, dignity, sociality, freedom and other similar things and rules of behavior should be provided to a person in a complex so that he can live, not exist. One can not be neglected for the sake of another, because they "work" only in the aggregate. They can not be taken away as punishment or abandoned by any of them. Only then is the attainable good. A positive theory is based on "good", that is, on the notion that one can sacrifice something for the sake of greater good or somebody for the sake of general happiness.

Hence follows the concept on which the natural human rights rest, that is, the doctrine of powers given from birth. No power has given him these privileges, he is not obliged to anyone for them, and no one should thank anyone. Moreover, neither the state, nor the party leader, nor a group of people can take away from anybody these opportunities, even in the most democratic way. Any alienation of such rights can be legally interpreted only as their violation, which requires restoration. Strictly speaking, the source of these natural powers lies in the notion of dignity, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, because this property itself is not one that is inherent in one people and is absent in others, but a common social characteristic for all representatives of the human species.