Our modern age has modified somewhat the definition of “family” as a way of thinking about relationships between men and women, parents and children, and brothers and sisters. Plutarch did not imagine these relationships in terms of sexuality and gender. Rather, affection, love, marriage, and the family were the key concepts in his study of “private life.” He also lived, however, during an era of change. This change had consequences for the idea of marriage, justifying a more in-depth analysis of Plutarch’s view of the subject. In order to distinguish between contemporary attitudes and original ideas in his works, we will clarify the notion of “private life,” the philosophical tradition, and contemporary idea(s) of the family before reintegrating familial relations into Plutarch’s view of human nature and code of ethics.

In book 1.11-20 of De Officiis, Cicero draws on the work of Panaetius to give an account of how the most basic, in-built features of human nature provide a foundation for the cardinal virtues. His account begins from the basic drive for self-preservation which is the usual starting point for the canonical Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis. The developments that Cicero claims follow from this fundamental starting point are, however, quite different from those which ensue on the other preserved accounts of oikeiōsis, such as that reported for Chrysippus in Diogenes Laërtius 7.85-86, the account in Cicero’s De Finibus 3.16-25 and the one in letter 121 of Seneca. It is also importantly different from the more complex account attributed to Posidonius by Galen in On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates 5.5.8-9. By comparing and contrasting Cicero’s theory in the De Officiis with these other accounts, this chapter will explore important facets of Cicero’s philosophical method, his originality in adapting Panaetius’ theory to his own purposes, and the merits of the novel doctrine he embraced in his final philosophical work.

It is standardly believed that Aristotle thinks that there are two kinds of happiness, one corresponding to intellectual contemplation and the other corresponding to ethically virtuous activities, and the former kind is superior to the latter. This is the Duality Thesis. It is notoriously problematic and does not follow from anything that Aristotle has said to that point. It also prevents solving the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Interpreters have felt forced to affirm the Duality Thesis by its apparent textual inescapability. However, the apparent claim depends on supplying “happy” or “happiest” from the previous sentence, as is standard among translators and interpreters. I argue for an alternative supplement that commits Aristotle to a much less problematic and unexpected position.

This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

In the Introduction the three interwoven theses of the book are presented. The first of these concerns the Anthropocene era and contends that a more accurate understanding of the history of natural law and its impact on the development of modern Europe, which, significantly, focuses and draws on previous transformations of the concept of nature, will facilitate the addressing of key current issues in respect of that era. The second concerns the metaphysics of human nature and nature more broadly and contends that the sceptical denial of the light of moral nature and of its epistemological freedom is related to the disappearance of nature as a sacred space. The third thesis concerns the modification of natural law in England during the seventeenth century and contends that the most important seventeenth-century scientists/natural lawyers buttressed their liberal politics by means of philosophical and ethical necessitarianism.

This chapter explores some philosophical quandaries facing the natural law outlook, with particular emphasis on the prospects for a natural law account of human rights. The chapter begins by considering challenges to natural law’s reliance on the notion of human nature. It then examines the role of time in natural law theories, focusing on the question of whether natural law changes. Next, the chapter looks at the place of rights in the natural law tradition, critically discussing the suggestion that the notion of rights is at odds with the core themes of the natural law outlook, before considering what natural law has to offer to human rights theory. Finally, I turn to the place of God within natural law theories, raising the issue of whether natural law assumes a theistic worldview. I argue throughout the chapter that a hermeneutic and historicised view of natural law, which sees it as shaped by and discovered through human social practices, holds important advantages in responding to each of these challenges.

This chapter focuses on Maritain’s analysis of the ontological and epistemological foundations of human rights, and his wider hope for ‘practical agreement’ on the content of those rights. On the ontological front, I argue that such agreement is not forthcoming on the basis of natural teleology or eternal law. Neither of these secures assent across the world’s major religious or philosophical traditions. On the epistemological front, neither rationalism nor naturalism holds great promise. While Maritain upholds the naturalist alternative, his efforts devolve into a performative contradiction. For he hopes to rest agreement about human rights on ‘natural inclinations’, which, at the same time, he confines to the realm of the non-conceptual, non-rational and pre-conscious. This constitutes a markedly weak, even incoherent basis for agreement. The stage is set, therefore, for ‘new’ natural law theory, which proposes a non-ontological, purely rationalist foundation. I conclude that this too is an unpromising basis for agreement on rights. Instead, we need a new approach, one that privileges the deliverances of the social sciences and does not strive for universal consensus.

This introductory chapter identifies the key questions, themes and debates addressed within the Handbook on Natural Law and Human Rights, and provides a conceptual overview of and integrated perspective on its contents. In particular, it argues that there is a perennial relationship between human rights and the phenomenon of natural law, which is revealed when we consider how human rights claims can justify the moral demands made on other agents and on the political community. Without prior moral duties – a natural law – human rights claims are impugned by the ‘individualist fallacy’, whereby the potential value of the right to the claimant is presumed sufficient to impose overriding duties, without due consideration being paid to the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter of common concern and action. The failure to come to grips with this problem, we argue, has led to certain blindspots in contemporary human rights theory and practice. This chapter draws to a close by identifying the key benefits we see accruing from a natural law theory of human rights.

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.

Chapter 6 examines Rousseau's claim that human societies are artificial and that recognizing this is crucial to understanding how theories of social pathology can ascribe non-arbitrary standards of healthy functioning to institutions. The most important sense in which society is made by us is expressed in the claim that institutions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of self-consciousness is intrinsic to social life, namely, collective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions, which, in the most fundamental institutions, includes a shared conception of the good that explains their "point," part of which consists in promoting the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance with such a conception is constitutive of activity in institutional life, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose activity those functions depend.

Technology has been at the heart of our species since the dawn of mankind. The genus homo, to which we all belong, split from a common hominin ancestor about 7 million years ago. This means ‘yesterday’ in geological time: if life on Earth were a 24-hour day, the genus homo would have inhabited this planet for only a couple of minutes. This recency is attested by our genetic heritage as our DNA is 98.8% identical to that of chimpanzees. In this relatively short time, our species and our species’ proximal ancestors established a dynamic and creative relationship with their environment. In particular, they developed the ability to modify their environment with the goal of developing technological tools by means of which they could, in turn, further modify that environment in a more radical and transformative way and thereby even modify themselves. We call ‘technology’ any product of human (and also, in principle, other species’) labor resulting in physical systems that would not be present in the natural environment in the absence of such labor. It has been estimated that as early as 3.4 million years ago, our remote ancestor Australopithecus afarensis, a small-brained early hominin species, used stone tools to separate meat from the bones of large mammals.

Guide, advisor, teacher, tutor – the connotations of ‘mentor’ are unambiguous enough, and the relationships that arose between the young and older Britten and more experienced acquaintances outside the immediate family are invariably matters of interest to biographers and critics. Britten first met the composer and conductor Frank Bridge in 1927, and remained in close contact until Britten’s move to America in 1939. He first met W. H. Auden on joining the GPO Film Unit in 1935, and soon encountered several of Auden’s literary associates, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. While in America (1939–42) Britten and Peter Pears lived for a time in Auden’s New York house, after a spell with the Mayer family on Long Island. The Bridges, the Mayers, and Auden and his associates all contributed to the social and aesthetic context within which Britten was able to produce his early compositions, and while a different set of mentors and friends could have had an identical effect, the distinctive qualities of those who actually filled these roles are what matters here. It was in Britten’s nature to resist potentially intrusive mentoring as much as to invite it.

This essay shows that Duns Scotus firmly believed in the dignities (plural) of human nature—both the natural human dignity celebrated by Aristotle, who maintained that the material world was made for the sake of rational animals, and the supernatural dignities paid to humankind by God in the Incarnation and to particular human beings by predestining them to glory. When it comes to identifying more concretely the features in which such dignities consist, Duns Scotus’s metaphysical views—about essential powers and about what is essential to powers—combine with his theological conviction that, when it comes to patterns of Divine concurrence with or obstruction of natural powers, God has different policies for different states of human history—to complicate his method.

The chapter provides an understanding of the relationship between peace and innerness while critiquing the mainstream psychological view on humanness.

The chapter discusses the impact of materialistic and reductionist perspectives on peace analysis and examines how they affect understanding human nature.

Aristotle is a political scientist and a student of biology. Political science, in his view, is concerned with the human good and thus it includes the study of ethics. He approaches many subjects from the perspective of both political science and biology: the virtues, the function of humans, and the political nature of humans. In light of the overlap between the two disciplines, I look at whether or not Aristotle’s views in biology influence or explain some of his theses in political science. I show that we should not seek a unified answer to this question, for the relationship between the two disciplines varies depending on the topic. In some cases, for example the nature of the human function, the biological background is likely to be endorsed as one of the presuppositions of the ethical enquiry. In other cases, for example the study of social hierarchies, even though the ethical works and the biological works come to similar conclusions, it is hard to establish that the biological approach is intended to provide support to the ethico-political approach. In conclusion, I show that Aristotle’s political science and his biology are in conflict at least in two important cases: his account of justice towards nonhuman animals and his exhortation to contemplate.