International law; Natural law; War (International law)
X. Natural right is the dictate of right reason, shewing the moral
turpitude, or moral necessity,[3] of any act from its agreement or
disagreement with a rational nature, and consequently that such an
act is either forbidden or commanded by God, the author of nature.
The actions, upon which such a dictate is given, are either binding
or unlawful in themselves, and therefore necessarily understood to be
commanded or forbidden by God. This mark distinguishes natural right,
not only from human law, but from the law, which God himself has been
pleased to reveal, called, by some, the voluntary divine right, which
does not command or forbid things in themselves either binding or
unlawful, but makes them unlawful by its prohibition, and binding by
its command. But, to understand natural right, we must observe that
some things are said to belong to that right, not properly, but, as
the schoolmen say, by way of accommodation. These are not repugnant to
natural right, as we have already observed that those things are called
JUST, in which there is no injustice. Some times also, by a wrong use
of the word, those things which reason shews to be proper, or better
than things of an opposite kind, although not binding, are said to
belong to natural right.
We must farther remark, that natural right relates not only to those
things that exist independent of the human will, but to many things
which necessarily follow the exercise of that will. Thus property,
as now in use, was at first a creature of the human will. But, after
it was established, one man was prohibited by the law of nature from
seizing the property of another against his will. Wherefore, Paulus the
Lawyer said, that theft is expressly forbidden by the law of nature.
Ulpian condemns it as infamous in its own nature; to whose authority
that of Euripides may be added, as may be seen in the verses of Helena:
"For God himself hates violence, and will not have us to grow rich by
rapine, but by lawful gains. That abundance, which is the fruit of
unrighteousness, is an abomination. The air is common to men, the earth
also, where every man, in the ample enjoyment of his possession, must
refrain from doing violence or injury to that of another."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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