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Full Idea
Some truths of natural law, concerning guides to moral good and evil, and duties not laid down by civil law and government, are necessarily supplied ot the human mind by the nature of things and of men.
Gist of Idea
Natural law is supplied to the human mind by reality and human nature
Source
Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.I.I)
Book Ref
'British Moralists 1650-1800 Vol. 1', ed/tr. Raphael,D.D. [Hackett 1991], p.79
A Reaction
I agree that some moral truths have the power of self-evidence. If you say they are built into the mind, we now ask what did the building, and evolution is the only answer, and hence we distance ourselves from the truths, seeing them as strategies.
| 6217 | Natural law is supplied to the human mind by reality and human nature [Cumberland] |
| 6924 | Plotinus was ashamed to have a body [Feuerbach] |
| 1568 | Nietzsche felt that Plato's views downgraded the human body and its brevity of life [Nietzsche, by Roochnik] |
| 7147 | Values are innate and inherited [Nietzsche] |
| 7190 | Our values express an earlier era's conditions for survival and growth [Nietzsche] |
| 18297 | We created meanings, to maintain ourselves [Nietzsche] |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| 23431 | Human defects are just like plant or animal defects [Foot] |
| 22187 | Genetic behaviours that have enhanced human success include aggression, rape and xenophobia [Wilson,EO, by Okasha] |
| 23515 | Human exceptionalism plagues biology, and most other human thinking [Seth] |