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Words: | Submitted: Mon Feb 02 2004
... by natural law prescribe how things are and indeed ought to be. Aquinas believed the idea of law to work at four different levels. Natural law was our inborn sense of right and wrong, discovered through the conscience. However it also depends on the superior laws, eternal and divine. He said that behaviour should not be worked out exclusively on what is natural, but with reference to Holy Scripture and church teaching, with the imperative need to educate our consciences. Aquinas also involved Aristotle's ideas of potentiality and actuality of all existing beings. Potentiality is the possibility to alter within an existing thing, and actuality is the existence. For example a foetus has the potentiality to become a human. Aquinas felt that the more things that moved toward actuality, the better it becomes at fulfilling its purpose. David Hume disagreed and criticised Natural Law, believing that we are not required to ...
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