"Natural law is the foundation of a just society and the guarantee against the whims of power."
Tomás Trigo, theologian at the University of Navarra, has coordinated the first book that compiles in Spanish the document of the International Theological Commission 'In search of a universal ethics: a new way of looking at the natural law'.
subject "The natural law is the firm ground on which the rights and duties of all men can be based, the foundation on which a just society can be built, a common basis for humanity and a guarantee against the whims of power, whatever they may be," said Tomás Trigo, professor at the University of Navarra. The expert of the School of Theology has coordinated the first book that gathers in Spanish the document of the International Theological Commission 'In search of a universal ethics: a new way of seeing the natural law'.
In addition to the translation, the interdisciplinary volume includes articles by professors Ana Marta González, Alejandro Vigo and Montserrat Herrero, from the School de Philosophy y Letras; and Enrique Molina, Antonio Aranda and Mikel Gotzon Santamaría, from the Schools Eclesiásticas.
As Tomás Trigo explained during the presentation of the volume, the text published by the Commission is the fruit of four years of work, commissioned by the then Cardinal Ratzinger: "First John Paul II and then Benedict XVI spoke of the importance of this document. Several universities, among them our campus, were invited to offer their contributions to elaborate it, in order to find in today's world a common denominator of moral principles based on the constitution of man and society".
For Professor Trigo, the relevance of the task lies precisely in the value of natural law itself, "which is the moral law that we can know and which should guide the life staff and professional life of citizens in all areas: jurisprudence, communication, biomedicine, Economics, politics...".
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A reference for articulating knowledge and information
For her part, Ana Marta González spoke at the presentation event about the relationship between natural law and the human and social sciences. "These are activities carried out by people who, as such, have the task of doing their work well, which implies searching for the truth proper to their subjects, and then contextualizing it in life in general. Likewise, all these sciences deal with human action, but unlike natural law, they do not refer to it from a normative point of view. The historian describes past events, but does not need to make moral judgments about them," he explained.
On the other hand, he emphasized the integrating role of natural law, which "grants an important core topic to articulate knowledge in a broader vision of man and reality. It has to do with ordering the truth of the different sciences -which deal with human goods in a partial way- around the human good in general". In this sense, he commented that today "we find ourselves with a great plurality of discourses and fragments of truths at our disposal, and we do not know what to do with them. That is why the meaningful articulation of all this information by the natural law is so necessary".
Sense to guide scientific progress
Lastly, Professor Alejandro Vigo focused on the link between natural law and the scientific vision of the world. For this philosopher from the University of Navarra, one of the problems currently posed by the understanding of natural law is the subject language in which it is formulated, so he called for "an effort to question the people of today". According to him, the terms 'law' and 'natural' are not associated with morality, but with scientific activities or with the State. "Natural law was given that name because what is natural for man is his rationality. However, current frameworks do not link the natural with ethics and consider that doing so constitutes a pretense of masking devices of domination or authoritarianism on the part of traditional morality."
Likewise, Professor Vigo pointed out that "the world that science talks about is increasingly dissociated from the world of life", and he suggested the need to recover that connection. For him, this implies "reminding scientists of the subject debt that the objectivity of science owes to the world of life, and the elementary fact that science works with formal objects that are obtained through abstraction, leaving many things by the wayside. From this 'forgetting' it is not possible to reconstruct the totality of the meaning that is given beforehand, long before any attempt of scientific approach".
"If we fail to recapture the classical idea of naturalness, the fundamentality of the tendencies towards human goods and the scale of description in which natural law is situated," he suggested, "we will see that technological action itself will be left without a meaningful orientation, because we will no longer know what we should seek through the possibilities of technology.