Natural Law and Liberalism

How is a natural law–based account of political community and political authority both similar to, and different from, a liberal account? Professor Melissa Moschella address this question in the following excerpt from Chapter 4 of her new book, Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025).

The natural law account of politics overlaps in many of its conclusions with liberal accounts, for both support limited government, the rule of law, respect for civil liberties, separation of church and state, and respect for a private sphere of freedom from government intrusion. (The book argues at length for these conclusions, but a brief defense of them can also be found in an earlier Public Discourse article.) Nonetheless, the natural law account’s justification of these limits on government power is quite different from those typically offered by liberal thinkers. Many of liberalism’s presuppositions—about human nature, the human good, morality, and the justification of political authority—are clearly at odds with the natural law account.

For example, liberalism encompasses a variety of perspectives, but liberal justifications of individual freedom and related arguments against purely paternalistic laws are often based on claims that the state should not govern with a view toward any particular substantive account of the human good. John Rawls, for instance, argues for the priority of the right over the good, that is, for an account of justice independent of comprehensive conceptions of the good. By contrast with most liberal accounts, the natural law account does not believe that government and law should be neutral about the good or take no interest in the moral virtue of citizens. Indeed, on the natural law view it is not possible to determine what justice requires independent of a substantive account of the human good, for acting justly is ultimately a matter of respecting the good of others in its various basic dimensions. And though I have argued previously that the government is not competent to inculcate the fullness of moral virtue in citizens, it is within the scope of government authority to command external acts of virtue (or forbid external acts of vice) insofar as these are related to the political common good of justice and peace, which includes the fostering and maintenance of public morality.

Further, the natural law account holds that the state should not facilitate activities or forms of life that are worthless or immoral, such as hedonistic drug use or prostitution, simply because some people want to engage in them. Although liberty is an important instrumental good, on the natural law view there is no value in unreasonable choices just as such. There might be reasons to legally tolerate such bad choices to avoid greater harm, but there is no reason to promote or facilitate such choices. The account I offer above defends liberty and limited government not on the grounds of relativism or neutrality about the good, but rather on the grounds that they are instrumentally important for human flourishing and respectful of citizens as self-governing agents with authority to direct themselves (and the communities in their care) toward their own good. 

The natural law account I have offered here presents political community as largely instrumental, but it nonetheless recognizes that there are some non-instrumental aspects of political community and the specifically political common good, and this is also a feature that differentiates it from liberalism. For there are aspects of political society that instantiate the basic human good of friendship, and are therefore non-instrumental. The cooperation of political society’s members in the pursuit of the overarching common good of the political community (not just the more limited political common good, but the all-around good of the community’s members) is a form of civic friendship. “In a really well-ordered society, the shared final end of each is the well-being of all,” writes Finnis. In addition, the administration of justice (which can be understood as in some sense restoring the social harmony that has been damaged by unjust behavior) is also an instantiation of the good of friendship. These aspects of political community are intrinsic goods worthy of pursuit for their own sake.

In addition, the natural law account differs from the liberal account in that it justifies political authority as natural—as a requirement of practical reason—because of its instrumental necessity for the resolution of coordination problems in view of the common good. The natural law account recognizes, along with Aristotle, that human beings are political by nature, meaning that the formation of political communities is natural to human beings because it is necessary for human flourishing. Liberal justifications of political authority, on the other hand, tend to view political community and political authority as in some sense artificial (absent from the “state of nature”), and therefore argue that it can only be justified with reference to actual or hypothetical consent. On the natural law view, consent is not necessary for the justification of political authority, but a practically reasonable person should consent to political authority insofar as it justly and efficiently resolves coordination problems for the common good. Unlike the liberal account, therefore, the natural law view sees the formation of political community and the establishment of political authority as natural—as requirements of practical reason—and therefore does not need to rely upon a voluntarist, consent-based account of political legitimacy.

Finally, the natural law account differs from the liberal account in viewing the family, rather than the autonomous individual, as the fundamental unit of society. The individualism of the liberal view is exemplified in the way Rawls sets up his hypothetical social contract, the parties to which are autonomous adults in the “Original Position,” shorn of all family and community ties, and of any substantive account of the human good. But where do Rawls’s autonomous adults come from? I emphasize in Chapter 3 of the book that the natural law view recognizes human beings as deeply relational and interdependent beings who only reach the relative independence of adulthood after years of almost complete dependence on parents and other caregivers and who are profoundly shaped by non-chosen ties to family, nation, and other communities in which we find ourselves. We come into this world as part of what MacIntyre calls a “network of givers and receivers,” a web of relationships, interdependencies, and mutual obligations. Similarly, Michael Sandel argues we are not the “unencumbered selves” that liberalism portrays us to be, but instead are “encumbered” by community bonds and non-chosen obligations that flow from those bonds. And these “encumbrances” are not a bad thing, but give stability, depth, and meaning to our lives and identities. To be a person entirely free of these encumbrances is not—as the liberal view would have it—to be “an ideally free and rational agent,” but is instead to be “a person wholly without character, without moral depth.” The non-chosen community bonds that MacIntyre and Sandel are referring to extend beyond the family, but they have the family at their core (as I argue in Chapter 3). Acknowledging that the family, rather than the autonomous individual, is the basic unit of society, has far-reaching political implications on issues ranging from parental rights to employment and welfare policies. This is, therefore, a crucial difference between liberalism and the natural law account of political community.

In sum, natural law theory recognizes that political community is crucial to human flourishing, and ultimately aims at the overall flourishing of its members. However, although natural law differs from liberalism in recognizing that political community as a whole exists for the sake of the all-around flourishing of its members—and can therefore not be neutral regarding the human good—the specific role of coercive political authority with respect to this end is limited and indirect. The specific role of political authority is to secure the conditions needed to facilitate the pursuit of flourishing by society’s members, remedying sub-political communities’ lack of self-sufficiency with respect to public order, restorative justice and dispute resolution, security, public goods, and social welfare. This is the specifically political common good—the aspect of the common good for which coercive political authority is responsible—and it is both limited and largely (but not entirely) instrumental to the good of the political community’s members (including both individuals and sub-political communities). This limited view of political authority’s scope may sound “liberal” in terms of practical implications, but it does not rest on a liberal commitment to keeping comprehensive views of the good life out of politics. On the contrary, it is defended precisely by considering the ways in which genuine human flourishing requires that we freely exercise our agency in pursuit of the good for ourselves and the communities under our care, and by attending to the inherent limits of the government’s capacity to lead people to the fullness of virtue. Such considerations help us to see that the limits on government relate to its subsidiary nature—that it exists to assist individuals and sub-political communities to direct themselves toward their own good—and to the related recognition that responsibility for securing the all-around flourishing of society’s members is distributed among the various layers of society in accordance with their spheres of competence. Thus, the natural law account acknowledges (in line with the Aristotelian tradition) that the purpose of political community is the all-around flourishing of its members, but it also acknowledges (in line with the liberal tradition) that the role of government in achieving this purpose is limited to securing the conditions that facilitate flourishing, which can be summarized as justice and peace. In this way, I believe that this account captures the best insights of both traditions, placing the defense of limited government on a more solid and satisfying foundation precisely by grounding it on the objective requirements of human flourishing.

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