Jewish Law, Morality, and Natural Law

A central question in Jewish legal philosophy is whether the Jewish tradition accepts the idea of natural law. This chapter shows that the debate around this question suffers from a confusion between two different meanings of this idea: moral and jurisprudential. According to the former, natural law refers to the view that the fundamental reasons for action are certain basic human goods whose status as goods is grounded in human nature. According to the latter, natural law refers to the view that law based on immoral or unjust grounds fails to provide decisive reasons for action and is defective as law (maybe to the extent that it is no longer law). This chapter argues that while the question about the natural law character of Judaism is usually presented as one in legal philosophy, the answer is best understood as belonging to moral philosophy. This chapter shows that while no Jewish thinker subscribes to natural law in its jurisprudential sense, the lion's share of Jewish philosophers and jurists subscribe to natural law as a theory of morality, namely, to the idea that the binding force of moral obligations is grounded in “nature,” not in divine revelation.