Narrative, Nature, and the Natural Law: From Aquinas to International Human Rights [Paperback]

Beginning with Saint Thomas Aquinas and ending with the latest developments in international human rights, 'Narrative, Nature, and the Natural Law: From Aquinas to International Human Rights,' brings a fairly traditional interpretation of the natural law to some rather untraditional problems and areas, including evolutionary natural law.Saint Thomas: Putting Nature into Natural Law Maritain and the Love for the Natural Law The New Natural Law and Evolutionary Natural Law International Human Rights, Natural Law, and Locke Conclusion: Evil and the Limits of the Natural Law

A fresh and thoughtful exploration of the concept of human rights in light of natural law theory. Using the UN Declaration of 1948 as a baseline, Alford shows why human rights are a vitally important dimension of twentieth century political thinking. He makes a deft and probing use of Jacques Maritain s approach to natural law through connaturality and argues that such an approach is superior to the alternatives found in the new natural law thinking or biological approaches to morality. He confronts the challenge posed to natural law thinking by the evil of genocide and the Holocaust. In this book we find a very fruitful comparison and interaction between various and diverse currents of thinking about politics, morality, and rights - in addition to Maritain and his critics, classic sources such as Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas, Alford explores the thought of Arendt, Ignatieff, Freud, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, and others. This book is an insightful and thought provoking look at natural law and challenges of political thinking today. - John P. Hittinger, Professor of Philosophy, Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St Thomas, Houston, Texas

As claims to human rights today are transformed by legislatures into positive law,we easily forget their moral origins in natural law.C. Fred Alford reminds us of thispedigree employing theappealing teaching virtues of accessible narrls.