Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 77

Natural Law and Human Motives

makes little sense, we can agree, to include "paid vacations" in
a catalog of rights to be translated into all the languages of the
world, including those that have no word for "vacation" or for
"salary." On the other hand, paid vacations make perfect sense
among the very welcome and useful measures that one might
reasonably claim and establish in a productive society characterized by salaried work. It might be said that paid vacations, or
other such policies, fit no better in an account of the content of
the natural law than in a catalog of human rights.
This is true, but precisely a right understanding of natural law,
a right understanding of its practical character, saves us from the
tyranny of the explicit and the exhaustive that is the fate and the
scourge of the philosophy of human rights. This philosophy, having abandoned the perspective of the agent, can guide actions
only by absolute propositions that can in no way enter into practical deliberation since, once a human right has been declared,
there is nothing left to deliberate, but only strictly to apply. But
the very character of natural law excludes anything so dogmatically explicit, since it involves the "play" proper to practical life,
since it always leaves room to deliberate and then to choose.
That effectively makes it less explicit, and moreover less pretentious, but not less rigorous: it alone is in fact rigorous in practice
because, unlike declared rights, it is meant to be part of an actual
deliberation and not to replace one.
So conceived, natural law is not like Kantian moral law, in relation to which the agent must always necessarily fall short. Natural law guides action but does not determine it, and thus does
not command it. Only the agent, enlightened by the natural law
and alert to particular circumstances, is fit to make the reflective
choice that leads to effective action and commands it. Where the
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2018

Contents
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Modern Age - Winter 2018 - Contents
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