This chapter argues that an adequate account of group rights requires an embedded understanding of moral duties and rights within the context of common action for a common good. Drawing from Alasdair MacIntyre, I explain why group agency for a common good, through various social practices, grounds a framework of natural justice with correlative duties and rights, including various group moral rights. This account of natural justice is completed by an appeal to the common agency of an institutionalised political community for a political common good. I argue that human rights are a subset of moral rights, which ‘cry out’ as a matter of justice for political enforcement or realisation, whether against violations of fundamental natural law precepts or dereliction of core political responsibilities. These include group rights where the protected aspects of personal human flourishing are pursued through the common action of groups, such as families, trade unions, religious communities, and political communities. Moreover, group rights are essential to human rights – human rights presuppose the group moral right of political authority to administer justice for the common good.

Pacts or “social contracts” form the basis of sovereignty in many early modern theories of political authority, and in Pufendorf’s too. Most such theories treat the pact as the means by which a pre-existing right—for example, divine right, or the natural right of individuals grounded in their strength, reason, or property—is transferred to a sovereign on the condition that the right be protected, to be rescinded if it is not. For Pufendorf, however, there is no pre-existing right since the sovereignty pact creates a new right—the right to issue unchallengeable commands for the purposes of achieving social peace—by instituting two new moral personae: the citizen who obeys the sovereign in exchange for protection, and the sovereign invested with the right of absolute command to provide social peace. Since Pufendorf’s sovereignty is constituted not by a prior moral right, but rather by the capacity to exercise unchallengeable authority for the end of social peace, there is no naturally rightful form of government. Pufendorf thus takes a neutral and pluralistic view of the three traditional forms of government—monarchical, aristocratic and democratic—insofar as each is capable of exercising the capacity for sovereign rule.

Modern human rights instruments reflect earlier transformations of natural rights into constitutional rights. The effect of this transformation was most apparent in the intertwining of natural rights with emerging conceptions of the separation of governmental powers. For this to take place, early modern natural law theory needed to abandon its defence of absolutist forms of government and embrace ideas developed within the common law. This chapter traces the progress of this surprising marriage. It shows how the concern of common lawyers to secure freedom under law by separating governmental powers came to be justified increasingly in terms of natural law, rather than by reference to English constitutional history. This discursive shift was given political expression in the American revolution and finally adopted into Immanuel Kant’s natural law theory as a requirement of practical reason. The essentially collaborative understanding of the relationship between legislature and judiciary which emerged is still of value in the debate between modern-day natural law theorists over the role of judicial power in the protection of human rights.

As a doctrine of positive international law, jus cogens superveniens gives juridical effect to the natural law’s prohibition of conduct violative of aspects of the transnational common good that reflect absolute human rights. In order to be fully valid in the sense that it commands a moral obligation of compliance, a measure for regulating the life of a community must be reasonable. A measure cannot be reasonable if its purpose is not the preservation or enhancement of the common good. The common good is the full array of physical, cultural, and institutional arrangements that facilitate the ability of persons in their various communities, including the transnational community, to advance their human flourishing. Human rights are conclusions of practical reason that always constitute essential aspects of the common good. Some human rights are ‘absolute’ in that they are not subject to limitation or restriction on any grounds, because any such limitation or restriction can do nothing but damage the common good. Although natural law is binding in reason, the positive law and other juridical measures of official authority are frequently required to effectively serve the common good.

This chapter argues that Aquinas’ conception of eternal law implies a particular way of understanding human freedom, reflected in his treatment of natural rights. To make this argument plausible, it is necessary to show that Aquinas does endorse some notion of subjective natural rights. While he does not have a theory of natural rights, he does have a working knowledge of the legal norms of his time, including practices of claiming and vindicating natural rights. He accepts, seemingly without question, that individuals can, under certain circumstances, claim something or resist the claim of another on the basis of a natural or divine jus, or right, including most notably a right to material necessities of life, and a right to make decisions for one’s young children. Importantly, these are not just asserted as objective duties; he defends the power of individuals to assert these rights without fear of punishment or coercion, even in cases in which one asserts a right to do something wrong. These aspects of Aquinas’ thought raise illuminating connections between the theological conception of eternal law and an account of natural rights, taking Aquinas’ remarks as a starting point.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

In his theory of the family, Pufendorf treats it as a complex society composed of three simple societies or associations: those between husband and wife (matrimony), parents and children (paternal society), and master and servant, or slave (societas herilis), which are united under the domestic rule of the paterfamilias, or head of the family. Given that Pufendorf holds all human beings – women no less than men – to be naturally equal in virtue of their humanity, that is, the common moral status that they acquire through their subjection to the law of nature, the question arises as to how he justifies authority in the private realm of the family: how does his patriarchal account of marriage, and his justification of servitude, or slavery, fit with the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory? In focusing on the role of pacts and consent in the founding of the various modes of domination within the family, the chapter highlights Pufendorf’s critical attitude to traditional justifications of authority, but also indicates the limits of the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory. The chapter ends with a comparison between the rule of the head of the family and supreme sovereignty in the state.

Chapter 6 focuses on that part of the UK that was omitted from the Abortion Act: Northern Ireland. We show that, notwithstanding this formal exclusion, the Abortion Act has played an important role in the region such that a biography of the Abortion Act necessarily offers the story of not just a British law but, rather, of a UK one. Over the past five decades, Northern Irish women have travelled in large numbers to access legal abortions in Britain, with the Act offering a ‘release valve’ that would limit the numbers of dangerous backstreet abortions and the mortality and morbidity that have driven reform elsewhere. Further, the Abortion Act would form a key focus of campaigns for and against abortion law reform within Northern Ireland; when reform eventually came, the Act would play a role in shaping it, and the reform of Northern Ireland’s abortion law has given significant momentum to the campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion.

This chapter begins with an etymological and historical elucidation of the terms conscientia and synderesis. Philosophical and theological reflection on these terms, beginning with St. Jerome and proceeding through thinkers such as Peter Lombard and Philip the Chancellor, constitutes the background against which St. Thomas Aquinas develops his understanding, not only of conscientia and synderesis, but also of objective right (ius) or rights. Much of the debate regarding synderesis, the infallible basis of conscientia, concerns whether it is a power or habitus. Aquinas settles on understanding synderesis as a ‘habit’ of the potential intellect – which, following Aristotle, he understands as a sort of ‘blank slate’ upon which things can be written. One of the things written on the habit of synderesis is the practical version of the principle of non-contradiction: ‘good is to be done and pursued, evil avoided’. This allows him to develop a theory according to which objective rights are primary, although not to the exclusion of subjective rights. It also allows those in agreement with Aquinas to exclude subjective rights that contradict established objective rights.

This chapter outlines three positions on the desirability of a marriage of the natural law and natural rights traditions: (i) that natural law and natural rights may be united without any recourse to revelation; (ii) that natural law and natural rights may be united but only by recourse to revelation; and (iii) that any form of union between natural law and natural rights should be avoided as contrary to the common good and the well-being of the City of God. It is argued that the third position is the preferred on the grounds that the natural rights tradition is difficult to translate into a non-individualistic, communitarian framework. Social bonds and civic ties revolve primarily around mediating institutions such as the family and cultural, educational, and sports associations, not around the machinery of the state and abstract concepts. Unlike Bills of Rights that enumerate rights attached to individuals, the alternative Common Law tradition presupposes that human persons live in communities, that human life is relational, and that conflicts arise for adjudication when a clash of claims occur that need to be resolved with reference to some higher common good.

Contemporary thought on human rights is rooted in significant part in the soil of natural law theory. Some natural law theorists embrace the idea of enforceable rights to a range of desirable socioeconomic outcomes. But natural law theory is best understood as grounding rights that foster these outcomes indirectly. Such rights, as I envision them, qualify as socioeconomic rights because they directly concern the socioeconomic sphere and because they further those aspects of flourishing which alternative schemes of socioeconomic rights are often intended to protect. There is, I suggest, a plausible natural law case to be made for indirectly promoting these dimensions of well-being by enforcing legal rights to bodily integrity, property, and labor, and so accepting robust limits on the use of force. In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for an exploration of that case by elaborating the variety of natural law theory in which I seek to ground my understanding of socioeconomic rights. I go on to discuss norms germane to the institutional context of socioeconomic life and to propose a set of fundamental socioeconomic rights and briefly consider the significance of these rights.

Chapter 7 considers parliamentary debates regarding the reform of the Abortion Act from 1990 to 2021. Those leading the fight for restrictive reform would now be mainly Tory women who placed particular emphasis on Christian faith in driving parliamentary work and made the case for narrowly focused reform measures in a language of clinical advance, female empowerment and civil liberties. Pro-Choice MPs would move off the defensive and argue for further liberalisation of the law. Reflecting a significant shift in the centre ground of the debate, each side would now claim to be defending the interests of women, and each would claim to be supported by clinical science and medical opinion, with the gulf between them more than ever presented not as a moral but an empirical one. Above all, each would claim to be offering necessary modernisation of an outdated Abortion Act, whilst relying upon radically different visions of what such modernisation required.

We set forth and defend a natural law account of the fundamental dignity of persons. The basis of fundamental dignity--and of the possession of fundamental rights--is being a person: a being with a rational nature. What distinguishes human beings from other animals, what makes human beings persons rather than things, is their rational nature, that is, their having a nature oriented towards enabling them to shape their lives by their deliberate (rational) and free choices. One’s dignity and status as a person derives from the kind of substantial entity one is, namely, a human being, and, as such a creature whose nature is a rational nature. Because personhood is based on the kind of being one is – a substantial entity whose nature is a rational nature – one cannot lose one’s fundamental personal dignity as long as one exists. Although not all persons need be human beings (if, say, there are angels or intelligent Martians, they too are persons), all persons have a rational nature. And so every human being, from his or her coming to be until he or she ceases to be, is a person, and as such a bearer of inherent dignity and fundamental rights.

The Catholic Church holds the concept of natural law in reference to a created order. While this concept has been put aside in philosophy and science the Church deems that creation implies an inherent relationship between all its components. The Social doctrine of the Church is built on the concept of natural law accessible to human intelligence. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas drawing from Aristotle remains the main source of Catholic understanding of natural law. Natural law and natural rights are not to be confused. Right refers to a natural order of things, which is the natural law apprehended by reason at a given moment. The source of human rights is entailed in a measure inscribed in the order created by God. So natural rights are determined on the basis of what constitutes a just relationship between persons in accordance with natural law. The attention given today to the ecosystem including the biosphere and human society altogether brings us back to the core of natural law. The ecosystem witnesses to an order which pre-exists to our attempts to use it arbitrarily. ’Integral ecology’ apprehends the human being in its interdependence with the created order of the universe.