The different meanings of natural law in the Declaration – in relation to world politics or first principles, such as protoliberal or conservative – come together when the declaration is considered an affirmation of political freedom and when political freedom is considered a good supported by natural law or promised by natural law. In an era like ours, where law is often seen as opposed to politics and nature as opposed to freedom, this proposition may seem paradoxical. Political freedom is the right of people to govern themselves, or at least to participate in the formation of their common life, and today we either take this for granted or we see it as an arbitrary choice in the rational management of an interdependent whole. For those who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, however, political freedom and natural law went hand in hand: nature calls man individually and collectively to self-government and guides him in the exercise of his decision-making power. The exercise of political freedom leads people to make their own laws and can thus obscure their natural legal foundation in this regard. The Declaration`s appeal to natural law means that political freedom—as an independent state on the one hand, and as republicanism, on the other—rests on a transcendent and rational terrain. Many historians agree that Jefferson expressed most of his beliefs about the importance of natural rights, which he expressed in the Declaration of Independence of the Second Treaty of Government, written in 1689 by the famous English philosopher John Locke, when the glorious English Revolution overthrew the reign of King James II. The United States Declaration of Independence states that it has become necessary for the people of the United States “to occupy the separate and equal position to which the laws of nature and the God of nature entitle them.” Some of the early American jurists and judges viewed natural law as too weak, amorphous, and transitory a legal basis for establishing concrete rights and government restrictions. [114] However, natural law has served as the authority for claims and legal rights in some judicial decisions, legislative acts, and legal decisions. [115] Robert Lowry Clinton argues that the Constitution of the United States is based on common law and that the common law is based on classical natural law.

[116] Sir Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius based their philosophy of international law on natural law. In particular, Grotius` writings on the freedom of the seas and the theory of just war were directly inspired by natural law. Of natural law itself, he wrote that “not even the will of an omnipotent being can change or abolish natural law,” which “would retain its objective validity even if we were to assume the impossible, that there is no God, or that he does not care about human affairs.” (De jure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI). This is the famous argument etiamsi daremus (non esse Deum), which no longer made natural law dependent on theology. German Church historians Ernst Wolf and M. Elze, however, disagreed, arguing that Grotius` concept of natural law had a theological basis. [117] According to Grotius, the Old Testament contained moral commandments (e.g., the Decalogue) that Christ affirmed and were therefore still valid. In addition, they were useful in explaining the content of natural law.

Biblical revelation and natural law come from God and therefore cannot contradict each other. [118] In the twelfth century, Gratian equated natural law with divine law. Albertus Magnus would address the subject a century later, and his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica I-II qq. 90-106 restored natural law to its independent state and affirmed natural law as the participation of the rational creature in eternal law. [45] However, since human reason could not fully comprehend the eternal law, it had to be supplemented by the revealed divine law. (See also Bible Law in Christianity.) Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas taught that all human or positive laws are to be judged by their conformity with natural law. An unjust law is not a law in the true sense of the word. It merely retains the “appearance” of the law, insofar as it is properly constituted and enforced, as it is a just law, but is itself a “perversion of the law.” [46] At this point, natural law was used not only to judge the moral value of various laws, but also to determine what those laws meant in the first place. This principle sowed the seeds of possible social tensions on tyrants. [47] In contrast to the multitude of Hobbes` laws, Cumberland states in the very first sentence of his treatise on the laws of nature that “all the laws of nature are reduced to that which is benevolent towards all rationals.” [108] He later clarified, “By the name of rational, I ask permission to understand God and man; and I do so under the authority of Cicero. Cumberland argues that the mature development (“perfection”) of human nature involves individual human will and action for the common good.

[109] For Cumberland, human interdependence excludes the natural Hobbes right of each individual to wage war on all others in order to survive personally.