The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law . By

In this book S. Adam Seagrave enters into a modem controversy about the continuity and compatibility o f modern natural rights with the much older natural law tradition. It is a welcome and ingenious contribution to a debate in which some theorists, such as Leo Strauss and his students, have argued that there is a major break between ancient natural law doctrine and the modern idea o f natural rights, while others, such as Jacques Maritain and students more familiar with the history and evolution o f natural law ideas in the Middle Ages, find continuity between the older natural law and newer natural rights understandings. Seagrave sides with the Straussian doctrine o f discontinuity. He does so while attempting to preserve the compatibility o f classical natural law with the modern natural rights con­ ception through the elaboration o f a thinned-out version of ‘natural moral­ ity,’ derived from the thought o f John Locke, that provides a ‘new’ natural law largely limited to the rights o f life, liberty, and property. Only these survive as natural ‘laws’ that in Lockean terms can be perceived as par­ ticular rights that one possesses as an individual, self-owned person whose species-nature offers a “blueprint for action located within one’s humanity that one may contravene” (119). The arguments Seagrave makes to arrive at this conclusion are too detailed to replicate here. Suffice to say that his argument, though analytically admirable, leaves much out o f account. It is important to observe that Seagrave’s attempt to find a compro­ mise between the continuity/compatibility and the discontinuity/incompatibility theses, in favor o f his own solution o f discontinuity/compatibility, ends in rejection o f the continuity position. But his rejection does not constitute a convincing refutation. Although Seagrave cites Brian Tier­ ney’s magisterial work in this area, he essentially ignores the evidence and arguments Tierney marshaled to show that the idea o f natural rights was asserted in various ways by medieval thinkers, starting with the canonists o f the twelfth century. Tierny is on Seagrave’s reading list, but the can­ onists aren’t, and Tierney’s argument about the canonists’ contributions and their influence on later thought is ignored. Secondly, Seagrave, having dismissed the continuity argument, never gives full scrutiny to the fourth possible arrangement, namely that there might indeed be a certain continu­ ity in the history o f the rise o f natural rights from natural law systems of thought, but that the modern developments o f natural rights, which are de­ cidedly ‘anti-foundationalist’ and even postmodern in their contemporary