While Crowe relies on well-founded language, natural facts are sometimes presented as purely epistemic significant: „It is not that basic goods are valuable to man because men are willing to value them; on the contrary, the fact that people are inclined to value goods proves their value to man” (p. 33). The epistemic link seems too weak to support Crowe`s goal of providing an „explanatory theory” of basic goods, one that „implies that normativity is natural in some way” (p. 34). If it is not because of our disposition to value pleasure that pleasure is good, the metaphysical question remains unanswered: What is good pleasure? The epistemic bond itself calls for a deeper explanation: what are our evaluative impulses and dispositions as evidence of evaluative truth? In general, I found the relationship between the evaluator and the natural under-theorized. Moreover, a complete demystification of morality would include an account of the nature of our judgments themselves and the evaluative concepts on which they are based, which Crowe takes for granted. In contrast to the multitude of Hobbes` laws, Cumberland states in the very first sentence of his treatise on the laws of nature that „all the laws of nature are reduced to one, benevolence towards all rationals.” [108] He later clarified, „By the name of rational, I ask permission to understand God and man; and I do so under the authority of Cicero. Cumberland argues that the mature development („perfection”) of human nature involves individual human will and action for the common good. [109] For Cumberland, human interdependence excludes the natural Hobbes right of each individual to wage war on all others in order to survive personally. In particular, these positivists might argue that the facts about legal obligations we have are merely descriptive facts about what the law says we should do – not normative facts about what we should really do (Shapiro 2011, 188; see also Hart 1994, 110). However, a question that arises for this position concerns the extent to which it is a different methodology than those discussed above. If metanormative inquiry focuses on legal thought and discourse, we seem quite close to the picture of conceptual analysis of how jurisprudence should proceed. On the other hand, if the subject of the inquiry focuses on how legal entities or real estate fit into reality in general, then the opinion seems quite close to the naturalistic position that the subject of the case-law investigation is the phenomenon of law itself.

Nevertheless, one of the particular attractions of the metanormative point of view is perhaps that it can show how the image of conceptual analysis and the naturalistic image capture different parts of the larger enterprise of the task at which the jurisprudence is concerned. Thus, instead of claiming to replace the other methods discussed above, the metanormative view, if reasonable, would remove a privileged starting point for jurisprudential investigation (such as the metaphysics of legal content, the semantic analysis of legal statements or the nature of legal obligations). The Italian Renaissance historian Leonardo Bruni praised Cicero as the person „who transported philosophy from Greece to Italy and nourished it with the golden river of his eloquence.” [31] The legal culture of Elizabethan England, exemplified by Sir Edward Coke, was „steeped in Ciceronian rhetoric.” [32] As a student in Glasgow, the Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson was „most attracted to Cicero, for whom he always expressed the greatest admiration.” [33] In eighteenth-century Britain, Cicero`s name was well known to educated people. [33] Similarly, „Cicero occupied a prominent place in the admiration of early Americans as an orator, political theorist, stylist, and moralist.” [34] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, a medieval scholar, scientist, and polymath, understood „natural law” as the survival of the fittest. He argued that the antagonism between people could only be overcome by a divine law, which he believed was sent by prophets. This should also be the general position of the Ashari school, the largest school of Sunni theology,[56] as well as of Ibn Hazm. Thus conceptualized, all „laws” are seen as stemming from subjective attitudes motivated by cultural ideas and individual preferences, and thus the notion of „divine revelation” is justified as a kind of „divine intervention” that replaces human positive laws criticized as relative with a single divine positive law. However, this also means that everything can be included in „divine law” as would be the case in „human laws,” but unlike the latter, „God`s law” is considered binding by virtue of „the power of God,” regardless of the nature of the commandments: since God is not subject to human laws and conventions, He can command anything He wants. Just as he can do what he wants. Throughout human history, law has been known as a coercive institution that imposed its practical demands on its subjects through threats and violence. This striking feature of law has made it very tempting for some philosophers to assume that the normativity of law lies in its coercive aspect.

But even within the legal positivist tradition, the coercive aspect of the law has led to fierce controversy. Early jurists such as Bentham and Austin argued that coercion is an essential feature of law and distinguishes it from other normative fields. Legal positivists of the 20th century tend to deny this, arguing that coercion is neither essential to the law nor really decisive for the performance of its functions in society. Before unpacking the various issues of this controversy, it is perhaps useful to note that the debate on the coercive aspect of the law is a good example of jurisprudential debates that deal with what might be an essential or necessary feature of the law, regardless of its particular manifestations in a particular legal system. How these claims about the nature of the law are to be understood, and whether these claims are metaphysical or something else, perhaps morality, is discussed in section 2.1. Going back to the enforcement side of the act, there are several issues at stake, and we should separate them carefully. John Austin asserted that any legal standard as such must contain a threat backed by sanctions. This implies at least two distinct assertions: in a sense, it can be understood as a thesis on the concept of law, asserting that what we call „law” can only be the norms supported by sanctions of the political sovereign. In a second sense, no less problematic, the close link between the law and the threat of sanctions is a thesis on the normativity of the law. It is a reductionist thesis on the normative character of law that asserts that the normativity of law consists in the ability of subjects to predict the chances of punishment or harm and in their presumed desire to avoid it.

Jurisprudence in natural law is currently in a phase of reformulation (as is legal positivism). The most prominent contemporary naturalist lawyer, Australian John Finnis, is based in Oxford, but there are also Americans Germain Grisez, Robert P. George and Canadian Joseph Boyle and Brazilian Emídio Brasileiro. All have tried to construct a new version of natural law. The 19th century anarchist and legal theorist, Lysander Spooner, was also a figure in the expression of modern natural law.