Different Approach to the Concept of Natural Law

This applies to the Prince because for Machiavelli, human nature tends toward pestiferous and needs to be controlled. The ruler is thus given the counterbalance to use immoral means to consolidate and preserve the world-beater that is incumbent to keep society from disintegrating. The protection of the state is of prevalent importance, and the Prince is justified to use whatever means be necessary to see that this is accomplished. However, this does non mean that Machiavelli advocated widespread vice or that he did non understand the need for and the nature of equity. A morally decadent society would not long stand, and the unfairness of the Prince was indeed allowed to enforce the godliness of the state itself and to promote morality among the people.

Machiavelli indeed saw Italy as a morally dash country that needed the strong hand of a leader to guide it back to a moral path. Yet, it also seems that "virtue" has a different meaning for Machiavelli than it had for a Christian theoriser such as St. Thomas Aquinas. Machiavelli creates two levels of virtue, angiotensin converting enzyme for the passel of people and one for the leader. In his view of what the mass should go for as a moral stance, Machiavelli is closer to Aquinas. Machiavelli may not admire such Christian virtues as humility, but he sees a value in these virtues as controlling agents for the masses. For the Prince, Machiavelli admires the virtues of capacity of c

haracter, the ability to achieve what one sets out to do, and the ability to acquire and maintain power. The law is fit(p) by need:

The strict moralist must detect actual or hypothetical examples of actions or states of affairs that are not only "evil in the generic guts" but morally evil as judged by " raw(a)" fair game standards, and perfectly free-floating, that is not evil simply because poisonous (in the liberal's sense), offensive, or exploitatively unfair, but evil in any role (Feinberg 49).

There is no pretence that the legitimacy of government's operations depends on their conformity with God's law, natural law, or any such prodigious standard. . . Machiavelli is thus a significant figure. . .

in the intellectual environ that was to lead through Hobbes and Rousseau towards the totalitarian state of the twentieth atomic number 6 (Kelly 172).

Kelly, J.M. A Short History of Western Legal Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

lymph gland states that the history of natural law is a long and foul one involving very different theories, many with theological origins. He states that Dworkin follows the natural law to the extent that he believes in reservation moral judgments as part of the question of whether the community has a right or duty do use its exacting powers. However, this does not mean that he accepts the idea that there is an objective answer "out there" which stands as the test of whether a law in this world is moral or not (Guest 84). The issue is important because the law requires justification, as Dworkin indicates when he writes:

This is another(prenominal) way in which the concept of natural law has pop off a point of discussion--theorists like Dworkin address the meaning of the linguistic process of the law.

Dworkin, Ronald. "Introduction." In Morality, Harm, and the Law, Ronald Dworkin (ed.). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. 1-5.

The concept of natural law provides a base for human law. It is not necessary to have haunt to a deity i
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