This Chapter argues that natural law philosophy gives the best conceptual resources for understanding the rights of the family in seminal international human rights instruments. The expression, ‘rights of the family,’ includes a broader discussion about marriage and the right to married life, rights of parents and children, the human person and his or her dignity. The interpretation of the texts is based on a good faith reading of the ordinary meaning of the words in their context taking into consideration the text’s object and purpose. Various challenges to the said interpretation are considered and responses to them are provided.

The New Natural Law Theory (NNLT) identifies the foundations of ethics in practical principles directing agents to aspects of human flourishing in an all-round reasonable manner. Other normative principles and concepts, including the concept of human rights, are understood in terms of their relationship to human flourishing, and the basic human goods that are constitutive aspects of that flourishing. NNLT thus possesses resources to explain the justification and importance of human rights, as well as the role rights talk plays in the overall economy of moral, political, and legal discourse. In this chapter, Section 2 discusses the logic of rights; Section 3 provides the general foundations for the justification of rights, both human and legal, in considerations of justice and common good. Section 4 looks at the paradigm case of human or natural rights: rights that are absolute and thus already conform to the logical structure of rights identified in Section 2. Section 5 identifies the scope of such rights as including all human beings. Section 6 addresses the relationship between human and legal rights. Finally, Section 7 addresses the metaphysical status of human rights.

Rodriguez-Blanco clarifies John Finnis’s objection to legal positivism in the shape of Hart’s theory, namely, that it is unstable because it uses the notion of an internal point of view, which does not have sufficient discriminatory power to distinguish between good and less good legal norms, between rational and non-rational court decisions, etc. Finnis’s view is that understanding a human action in law involves understanding what the point of the action is, that such understanding requires use of the Aristotelian focal meaning (or central case) methodology, that Hart’s internal point of view does not involve focal meaning and therefore cannot be used to understand the point of human actions, and that Hart’s theory is thus unstable. Rodriguez-Blanco argues that Anglophone legal philosophers’ focus in the past fifty years on Dworkin’s critique of Hart’s legal positivism has meant that they missed an opportunity to learn, through Finnis’s critique of Hart’s theory, about the philosophy of practical reason and the theory of action, and to contribute significantly to debates about normative questions, the nature of law and its relation to agency, reasons for action, and goodness.

This chapter examines Samuel Moyn and John Finnis’s heated exchange over Christian human rights. Their diverging methodologies and conclusions are rooted in different fundamental commitments, respectively, historicism and metaphysical realism. Furthermore, the debate implicitly acts out older, deeper tensions between anti-Catholic modernity and antimodern Catholicism. This longer trajectory reached a paradoxical climax after the Second Vatican Council when many Catholics turned toward the modern paradigm just as others were diagnosing its demise. Contemporary reflection on Christian human rights demonstrates how the sufficient reasons of history complicate predictable choices between secular and religious worldviews. One ongoing challenge, then, is to mediate such differences through mutual translation and dialogue.

The jurisprudence of Robert P. George is twofold, in that he is one of the most important public law, and especially constitutional law, scholars of the late twentieth and so far in the twenty-first centuries, and, at the same time, he is America’s leading legal exponent of natural law. He is a devout Roman Catholic. But the relationship between his religious convictions and his jurisprudence will strike some readers as paradoxical. George writes: “I want to show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality.” “My criticism of secular liberal views is not that they are contrary to faith; it is that they fail the test of reason.” This chapter explains how the “paradox” is merely apparent.

Liberals rightly value truth and truthfulness. But natural law theories frequently treat any choice to lie as an attack on flourishing, and this apparently extreme position might seem to make natural law theory a poor fit with liberalism. Chapter 2 emphasizes that, while there are good reasons to object to lying, an attractive reading of natural law theory might allow for the moral acceptability of a limited range of lies.