change is the law of nature essay

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

Essays on the Law of Nature

Learn about this topic in these articles:, discussed in biography.

The resulting Essays on the Law of Nature (first published in 1954) constitutes an early statement of his philosophical views, many of which he retained more or less unchanged for the rest of his life. Of these probably the two most important were, first, his commitment to…

Soaring temperatures in New York, July 2010. Photo by Eric Thayer/Reuters

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures.

by Clayton Page Aldern   + BIO

In February 1884, the English art critic and polymath John Ruskin took the lectern at the London Institution for a pair of lectures on the weather. ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ was his invective against a particular ‘wind of darkness’ and ‘plague-cloud’ that, in his estimate, had begun to envelope Victorian cities only in recent years. He had been taking careful meteorological measurements, he told a sceptical audience. He railed against the ‘bitterness and malice’ of the new weather in question; and, perhaps more importantly, about how it mirrored a certain societal ‘moral gloom’. You could read in us what you could read in the weather, he suggested.

July Thundercloud in the Val d’Aosta (1858) by John Ruskin. Courtesy Wikipedia

It was easy that February, and perhaps easy today, to disregard any alleged winds of darkness as the ravings of a madman. Clouds are clouds: even if Ruskin’s existed – which was a question of some contemporaneous debate – it would be untoward to imagine they bore any relationship with the human psyche. As Brian Dillon observed of the cloud lectures in The Paris Review in 2019, it can be hard to tell where Ruskin’s ‘bad weather ends and his own ragged, doleful mood begins.’ In 1886, Ruskin suffered a mental breakdown while giving a talk in Oxford. By the end of his life at the turn of the century, he was widely considered insane. His ramblings on meteorology and the human spirit aren’t exactly treated with the same gravitas as his books on J M W Turner.

And yet, for Ruskin, the clouds weren’t just clouds: they were juiced up by a ‘dense manufacturing mist’, as he’d noted in a diary entry. The plague-clouds embodied the miasma of the Industrial Revolution; the moral gloom was specifically that which arose from the rapid societal and environmental changes that were afoot. Ruskin’s era had seen relentless transformation of pastoral landscapes into industrial hubs. Everything smelled like sulphur and suffering. Soot-filled air, chemical and human waste, the clamour of machinery – these were more than just physical nuisances. They were assaults on the senses, shaping moods and behaviour in ways that were not yet fully understood.

Mining Area (1852-1905) by Constantin Meunier. Courtesy Wikipedia

Ruskin believed that the relentless pace of industrialisation, with its cacophony of tools and sprawling factories and environmental destruction, undermined psychological wellbeing: that the mind, much like the body, required a healthy social and physical environment to thrive. This was actually a somewhat new idea. (Isaac Ray, a founder of the American Psychiatric Association, wouldn’t define the idea of ‘mental hygiene’, the precursor to mental health, until 1893.) Instability in the environment, for Ruskin, begot instability in the mind. One reflected the other.

M ore than a century later, as we grapple with a new suite of breakneck environmental changes, the plague-clouds are again darkly literal. Global average surface temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the pre-industrial era, with most of this warming occurring in the past 40 years. Ice is melting; seas are steadily rising; storms are – well, you know this story. And yet, most frequently, it is still a story of the world out there: the world outside of us. The narrative of climate change is one of meteorological extremes, economic upheaval and biodiversity losses. But perhaps it is worth taking a maybe-mad Ruskin seriously. What of our internal clouds? As the climate crisis warps weather and acidifies oceans and shatters temperature records with frightening regularity, one is tempted to ask if our minds are changing in kind.

Here are some of the most concerning answers in the affirmative. Immigration judges are less likely to rule in favour of asylum seekers on hotter days. On such days, students behave as if they’ve lost a quarter-year of education, relative to temperate days. Warmer school years correspond to lower rates of learning. Temperature predicts the incidence of online hate speech. Domestic violence spikes with warmer weather. Suicide , too.

In baseball, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with their pitches on hot days

But you already know what this feels like. Perhaps you’re more ornery in the heat. Maybe you feel a little slow in the head. It’s harder to focus and easier to act impulsively. Tomes of cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics research back you up, and it’s not all as dire as domestic violence. Drivers honk their horns more frequently (and lean on them longer) at higher temperatures. Heat predicts more aggressive penalties in sport. In baseball, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with their pitches on hot days – and the outdoor temperature is an even stronger predictor of their tendency to retaliate in this manner if they’ve witnessed an opposing pitcher do the same thing.

In other words: it would appear the plague-clouds are within us, too. They illustrate the interconnectedness of our inner and outer worlds. They betray a certain flimsiness of human agency, painting our decision-making in strokes of environmental influence far bolder than our intuition suggests. And they throw the climate crisis into fresh, stark relief: because, yes, as the climate changes, so do we.

T he London Institution closed in 1912. These days, when you want to inveigh against adverse environmental-mind interactions, you publish a paper in The Lancet . And so that is what 24 mostly British, mostly clinical neurologists did in May 2024, arguing that the ‘incidence, prevalence, and severity of many nervous system conditions’ can be affected by global warming. For these researchers, led by Sanjay Sisodiya, professor of neurology at University College London in the UK, the climate story is indeed one of internal clouds.

In their survey of 332 scientific studies, Sisodiya and his colleagues show that climatic influence extends far beyond behaviour and deep into cortical fissures. Aspects of migraine, stroke, seizure and multiple sclerosis all appear to be temperature dependent. In Taiwan, report the authors, the risk of schizophrenia hospitalisation increases with widening daytime temperature ranges. In California , too, ‘hospital visits for any mental health disorder, self-harm, intentional injury of another person, or homicide’ rise with broader daily temperature swings. In Switzerland , hospitalisations for psychiatric disorders increase with temperature, with the risk particularly pronounced for those with developmental disorders and schizophrenia.

Outside the hospital, climate change is extending the habitable range of disease vectors like ticks, mosquitoes and bats, causing scientists to forecast an increased incidence of vector-borne and zoonotic brain maladies like yellow fever, Zika and cerebral malaria. Outside the healthcare system writ large, a changing environment bears on sensory systems and perception, degrading both sensory information and the biological tools we use to process it. Outside the realm of the even remotely reasonable, warming freshwater brings with it an increased frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, the likes of which release neurotoxins that increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

Experiencing natural disasters in utero greatly increases children’s risk of anxiety, depression and ADHD

Indeed, recent studies suggest that climate change may be exacerbating the already substantial burden of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In countries with warmer-than-average climates, more intense warming has been linked to a greater increase in Parkinson’s cases and, as Sisodiya et al note, the highest forecasted rates of increase in dementia prevalence are ‘expected to be in countries experiencing the largest effects of climate change’. Similarly, short-term exposure to high temperatures appears to drive up emergency department visits for Alzheimer’s patients. The air we breathe likely plays a complementary role: in Mexico City, for example, where residents are exposed to high levels of fine particulate matter and ozone from a young age, autopsies have revealed progressive Alzheimer’s pathology in 99 per cent of those under the age of 30.

The risks aren’t limited to those alive today. In 2022, for example, an epidemiological study revealed that heat exposure during early pregnancy is associated with a significantly increased risk of children developing schizophrenia, anorexia and other neuropsychiatric conditions. High temperatures during gestation have long been known to delay neurodevelopment in rats. Other scientists have shown that experiencing natural disasters in utero greatly increases children’s risk of anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorders later in life. Such effects cast the intergenerational responsibilities of the Anthropocene in harsh new light – not least because, as Sisodiya and colleagues write, there is a tremendous ‘global disparity between regions most affected by climate change (both now and in the future) and regions in which the majority of studies are undertaken.’ We don’t know what we don’t know.

What we do know is that the brain is emerging, in study after study, as one of climate change’s most vulnerable landscapes.

It is a useful reorientation. Return to the horn-honking and the baseball pitchers for a moment. A focus on the brain sheds some potential mechanistic light on the case studies and allows us to avoid phrases like ‘wind of darkness’. Higher temperatures, for example, appear to shift functional brain networks – the coordinated behaviour of various regions – toward randomised activity. In extreme heat, scientists have taken note of an overworked dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the evolutionarily new brain region that the neuroendocrinologist Robert M Sapolsky at Stanford University in the US calls ‘the definitive rational decider in the frontal cortex’. The dlPFC limits the degree to which people make impulsive decisions; disrupted dlPFC activity tends to imply a relatively heightened influence of limbic structures (like the emotionally attuned amygdala) on behaviour. More heat, less rational decision-making.

When extreme heat reaches into your mind and tips your scales toward violence, it is constraining your choices

The physicality of environmental influence on the brain is more widespread than the dlPFC – and spans multiple spatial scales. Heat stress in zebrafish, for example, down-regulates the expression of proteins relevant to synapse construction and neurotransmitter release. In mice, heat also triggers inflammation in the hippocampus, a brain region necessary for memory formation and storage. While neuroinflammation often plays an initially protective role, chronic activation of immune cells – like microglia and astrocytes – can turn poisonous, since pro-inflammatory molecules can damage brain cells in the long run. In people, hyperthermia is associated with decreased blood flow to this region. Psychologists’ observations of waning cognition and waxing aggression at higher temperatures makes a world of sense in the context of such findings.

The nascent field of environmental neuroscience seeks to ‘understand the qualitative and quantitative relationships between the external environment, neurobiology, psychology and behaviour’. Searching for a more specific neologism – since that particular phrase also encompasses environmental exposures like noise, urban development, lighting and crime – we might refer to our budding, integrative field as climatological neuroepidemiology. Or, I don’t know, maybe we need something snappier for TikTok. Neuroclimatology? Ecological neurodynamics?

I tend to prefer: the weight of nature.

The weight forces our hands, as in the case of the behavioural effects highlighted above. When extreme heat reaches into your mind and tips your scales toward violence, it is constraining your choices. By definition, impulsive decisions are rooted in comparatively less reflection than considered decisions: to the extent that a changing climate influences our reactions and decision-making, we should understand it as compromising our perceived free will. The weight of nature is heavy. It displaces us.

It is also a heavy psychological burden to carry. You are likely familiar with the notion of climate anxiety . The phrase, which tends to refer to a near-pathological state of worry and fear of impending environmental destruction, has never sat particularly well with me. Anxiety, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , is usually couched in terms of ‘excessive’ worry. I’m not convinced there’s anything excessive about seeing the climatic writing on the wall and feeling a sense of doom. Perhaps we ought to consider the climate-anxious as having more developed brains than the rest of the litter – that the Cassandras are the only sane ones left.

I ’m not exactly joking. Neuroscience has begun to study the brains in question, and not for nothing. The midcingulate cortex, a central hub in the brain’s threat-detection circuitry, may hold some clues to the condition’s biological basis: in one 2024 study , for example, researchers at Northern Michigan University in the US found that people who reported higher levels of anxiety about climate change showed distinct patterns of brain structure and function in this region, relative to those with lower levels of climate anxiety – and irrespective of base levels of anxiety writ large. In particular, the climate-anxious brain appears to play host to a smaller midcingulate (in terms of grey matter), but one that’s functionally more connected to other key hubs in the brain’s salience network, a system understood to constantly scan the environment for emotionally relevant information. In the salience network, the midcingulate cortex works hand in hand with limbic structures like the amygdala and insula to prepare the body to respond appropriately to this type of information. In people with climate anxiety, this network may be especially attuned to signals of climate-related threats.

Rather than indicating a deficiency, then, a diminutive midcingulate might reflect a more efficient, finely honed threat-detection system. The brain is well known to prune redundant connections over time, preserving only the most useful neural pathways. Selective sculpting, suggest the Michigan researchers, may allow the climate-anxious brain to process worrisome information more effectively, facilitating rapid communication between the midcingulate and other regions involved in threat anticipation and response. In other words, they write, the climate-anxious midcingulate might be characterised by ‘more efficient wiring’.

This neural sensitivity to potential dangers could be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it may attune some people to the very real perils of the future. The midcingulate is critical for anticipating future threats, and meta-analyses have found the region to be consistently activated when people contemplate unpredictable negative outcomes. Given the looming spectre of climate catastrophe, a hair-trigger threat-detection system could be an adaptive asset.

Climate anxiety is not just a sociocultural phenomenon. It has a theoretically identifiable neural correlate

On the other hand, argue the researchers:

[T]he complexity, uncertainty, as well as temporal and geographical distance of the climate crisis, in addition to its global nature, may lead individuals to deprioritising the risks associated with climate change, or becoming overwhelmed and disengaged – a state sometimes referred to as ‘eco-paralysis’.

An overactive midcingulate has been implicated in clinical anxiety disorders, and the new findings suggest that climate anxiety shares some of the same neural underpinnings. (It’s important to recall that climate anxiety seems to be distinct from generalised anxiety, though, as the brain differences observed in the Michigan study couldn’t be explained by overall anxiety levels.)

Ultimately, while speculative, these findings suggest that climate anxiety is not merely a sociocultural phenomenon, but one with theoretically identifiable neural correlates. They provide a potential biological framework for understanding why some people may be more psychologically impacted by climate change than others. And they raise intriguing questions about whether the brains of the climate anxious are particularly well-suited for confronting the existential threat of a warming world – or whether they are vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed by it. In all cases, though, they illustrate that world reaching inward.

T here is perhaps a flipside to be realised here. A changing climate is seeping into our very neurobiology. What might it mean to orient our neurobiology toward climate change?

Such is the premise of a 2023 article in Nature Climate Change by the neuroscientist Kimberly Doell at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues, who argue that the field is well positioned to inform our understanding of climate-adaptation responses and pro-environmental decision-making. In the decades since Ruskin shook his fists at the sky, environmental neuroscience has begun to probe the reciprocal dance between organisms and their ecological niches. We know now that the textures of modern environments – green spaces, urban sprawl, socioeconomic strata – all leave their mark on the brain. Climate change is no different.

Accordingly, argue Doell et al, scientists and advocates alike can integrate findings from neuroscience to improve communications strategies aimed at spurring climate action. They want to turn the tables, taking advantage of insights from neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience to more effectively design climate solutions – both within ourselves and for society as a whole.

The Anthropocene’s fever dream is already warping our wetware

We have models for this type of approach. Poverty research, for instance, has long implicated socioeconomic conditions with subpar health. In more recent years, neuroscience has reverse-engineered the pathways by which poverty’s various insults – understimulation, toxic exposures, chronic stress – can erode neural architecture and derail cognitive development. Brain science alone won’t solve poverty, yet even a limited understanding of these mechanisms has spurred research in programmes like Head Start, a family-based preschool curriculum that has been shown to boost selective attention (as evident in electrophysiological recordings) and cognitive test scores. While the hydra of structural inequity is not easily slain, neuroscientists have managed to shine some light on poverty’s neural correlates, flag its reversible harms, and design precision remedies accordingly. This same potential, argue Doell and her colleagues, extends to the neuroscience of climate change.

To realise this potential, though, we need to further understand how the Anthropocene’s fever dream is already warping our wetware. Social and behavioural science have begun cataloguing the psychological fallout of a planet in flux, but a neural taxonomy of climate change awaits. The field’s methodological and conceptual arsenal is primed for the challenge, but honing it will demand alliances with climate science, medicine, psychology, political science and beyond.

Some are trying. For example, the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, US, recognising a need for answers, last year put out a call for scientists to investigate how neural systems are responding to ecological upheaval. With a trial $5 million, the foundation aims to illuminate how habitat loss, light pollution and other environmental insults may be influencing the molecular, cellular and circuit-level machinery of brains, human and otherwise. The central question is: in a biosphere where change is the only constant, are neural systems plastic enough to keep pace, or will they be left struggling to adapt?

The first wave of researchers to take up Kavli’s challenge are studying a diverse array of creatures, each uniquely positioned to reveal insights about the brain’s resilience in the face of planetary disruption. Wolfgang Stein at Illinois State University in the US and Steffen Harzsch at University of Greifswald in Germany, for example, focus on crustaceans, seeking to understand how their neural thermal regulators cope with rising temperatures in shallow and deep waters. Another group has targeted the brains of cephalopods, whose RNA-editing prowess may be key to their ability to tolerate plummeting oxygen levels in their increasingly suffocating aquatic habitats. A third Kavli cohort, led by Florence Kermen at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, is subjecting zebrafish to extreme temperatures, scouring their neurons and glial cells for the molecular signatures that allow them to thrive – even as their watery world heats up.

These initial investments have sparked federal curiosity. In December 2023, the US National Science Foundation joined forces with Kavli, inviting researchers to submit research proposals that seek to probe the ‘modulatory, homeostatic, adaptive, and/or evolutionary mechanisms that impact neurophysiology in response to anthropogenic environmental influence’. We may not be in arms-race territory yet, but at least there’s a suggestion that we’re beginning to walk in the right direction.

T he brain, that spongy command centre perched atop our spinal cord, has always been a black box. As the climate crisis tightens its grip, and the ecological ground beneath our feet grows ever more unsteady, the imperative to pry it open and peer inside grows more urgent by the day. Already, we’ve begun to glimpse the outlines of a new neural cartography, sketched in broad strokes by the likes of Sisodiya and his colleagues. We know now that the brain is less a static lump of self-regulating tissue than it is a dynamic, living landscape, its hills and valleys shaped by the contours of our environment. Just as the Greenland ice sheet groans and buckles under the heat of a changing climate, so too do our synapses wither and our neurons wink out as the mercury rises. Just as rising seas swallow coastlines, and forests succumb to drought and flame, the anatomical borders of our brains are redrawn by each new onslaught of environmental insult.

But the dialogue between brain and biosphere is not a one-way street. The choices we make, the behaviours we pursue, the ways in which we navigate a world in crisis – all of these decisions are reflected back onto the environment, for good or for ill. So, I offer: in seeking to understand how a changing climate moulds the contours of our minds, we must also reckon with how the architecture of our thoughts might be renovated in service of sustainability.

Bit by bit, synapse by synapse, we can chart a course through the gathering plague-cloud

The cartographers of the Anthropocene mind have their work cut out for them. But in the hands of neuroscience – with its shimmering brain scans and humming electrodes, its gene-editing precision and algorithmic might – there is something approaching a starting point. By tracing the pathways of environmental impact to their neural roots, and by following the cascading consequences of our mental processes back out into the world, we might yet begin to parse the tangled web that binds the fates of mind and planet.

This much is clear: as the gears of the climate crisis grind on, our brains will be swept along for the ride. The question is whether we’ll be mere passengers, or whether we’ll seize the controls and steer towards something resembling a liveable future. The weight of nature – the immensity of the crisis we face – is daunting. But it need not be paralysing. Bit by bit, synapse by synapse, we can chart a course through the gathering plague-clouds. It was Ruskin, at a slightly more legible moment in his life, who offered: ‘To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.’ Even if we somehow could, we ought not banish the alleged imperfections of environmental influence on the mind. Instead, we ought to read in them an intimate, vital relationship between self and world.

In this, climatological neuroepidemiology – young and untested though it may be – is poised to play an outsized role. In gazing into the black box of the climate-altered mind, in illuminating the neural circuitry of our planetary predicament, the field offers something precious: a flicker of agency in a world that often feels as if it’s spinning out of control. It whispers that the levers of change are within reach, lodged in the squishy confines of our crania, waiting to be grasped. And it suggests that, even as the weight of nature presses down upon us, we might yet find a way to press back.

Political philosophy

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

Daniel Waldenström

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

Computing and artificial intelligence

Mere imitation

Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI?

Anthropology

Your body is an archive

If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?

Helena Miton

Illness and disease

Empowering patient research

For far too long, medicine has ignored the valuable insights that patients have into their own diseases. It is time to listen

Charlotte Blease & Joanne Hunt

ADVERTISEMENTS:

1344 Words Essay on Change is the Law of Nature

In one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems, the brave and bold fighter McArthur is seriously wounded and is about to die. His General Bedivere feels sad and asks him what they would do without him. McArthur says: “Old order changes, yielding place to new.” Since then the line has become an adage as it contains the great reality of life-change is the law of nature.

All the manifestations of nature-sun, moon, stars, trees, oceans, mountains, rivers, animals and birds undergo change. In the cosmic world, the heavenly bodies appear to us permanent and unchangeable. But, even they are liable to change. Space scientists have established that stars, even galaxies are born and they die.

The black holes gobble up the stars. The planets that revolve around the stars undergo certain changes in their cosmic position as well as in their internal structure all the time. The revolution of the earth along its axis brings day and night alternatively in the two hemispheres of the earth. When it is day there is brightness and all-around activity; when there is night, there is darkness, comparative quietness and the time to sleep. The revolving of the earth around the sun, brings change of seasons.

Image Source : cdn.publishyourarticles.net

The change of seasons-winter, spring, autumn and summer bring great changes in the atmosphere as well as in the activities of living beings including the humans. When it is winter, the temperature falls to nearabout 0° Celsius. There is snowfall in many areas. The mountains are covered with snow; the trees do not give a green look. The animals cut off their activities to save themselves from cold. People wear woollen clothes.

The lifestyle of people undergoes a change. They look for warmth through heaters and blowers. Hot soups, coffee and tea are preferred to cold drinks and ice-creams. There are fog and mist at early morning and evening. The nights are long and days short. Work schedules are changed accordingly.

With the advent of spring, the bite in the cold vanishes. Trees look greener, and flowers bloom everywhere. Birds and animals come out more frequently from their nesting places. The bees and beetles come out to suck the nectar of abundant flowers. The air is fresh and there is happiness all around.

What a change, one thinks, from the depressing cold conditions of winter. People wear bright coloured clothes which appear commensurate with the season. The spring season does not, however, last long and is followed by dry winds of autumn. The trees shed their leaves, the flowers are reduced in number and the mercury rises a little. In a couple of months the season undergoes another change heralded by the bright sunshine and high temperatures of summer. People wear light clothes.

They look towards the sky hoping for a shower of rain. At the peak of summer, the dry hot wind called loo, further raises the temperature. People desperately look for a downpour. If that is not forthcoming, they take a plunge in pools, ponds, streams, brooks, and in cities- in their bathtubs. Cold drinks and ice lollies are in great demand. When the rainy season arrives-which actually is the part of long summer-people welcome it.

Children bathe in the showers and put paper-boats on the water that get accumulated in their yards or streets. The rainy season passes quickly leaving people perspiring and at the mercy of mosquitoes. In a few months, winter season returns with its fog and mist, snow and falling temperature. This cycle of change of seasons goes on for ever as per the law of nature.

The human civilisation is about 4000 years old. During this period, which is very small as compared to the cosmic times, the human beings and their living style have undergone huge changes. There was a time when man lived in caves, wore animal skin or leaves, and hunted animals for food. He led a nomadic life as food-gathers. A change came in man’s life when he settled on the river banks in large number and started a settled life after learning to grow crops. This was the beginning of civilisation.

With the invention of wheel people started moving to other places. Trade flourished with other civilisations. There was exchange of information along with trade of goods. With the invention of metals, mining of minerals, different trades flourished. Civilisations in different continents were replaced by various countries. Different clans and communities ruled these nations after frequent tests of power-through wars. Man had come a long way from his primitive style of living.

The 19th and the 20th centuries can be called the period of scientific discoveries. Steam engine, electricity, bulb, telephone, TV, computer-all were invented during this period. Man conquered mighty oceans by making big ships and overcame mountains by making aeroplanes. The application of new technologies has made man’s life comfortable.

There are cars, roads, trains, choppers and aeroplanes for speedy journey; malls and shopping complexes for buying various kinds of articles; banks to look after his financial dealings; hospitals and clinics to take care of health and thousands of types of medicines to provide relief in various kinds of ailments; schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions to pursue various types of courses. The process of change has been slow but sure. It is still going on. The world hundred years from now may be vastly different from what we see it today-because everything is under the great law of change.

Our great nation-India has witnessed big changes over the last 2000 years. Under the Gupta rulers it reached the pinnacle of glory. The in-fighting between various local rulers led to a decline in social values and economic prosperity. The foreign invaders plundered its wealth time and again.

The Muslim rulers like Akbar tried to maintain its secular character. The fanatic kings like Aurangzeb did a great harm to the secular Indian spirit and proved to be a slur on India’s face. The British came to India as traders but established their rule for about two centuries through the East India Company upto 1857 and then through the British Monarchy. The patriotic Indians like Bhagat Singh had to make supreme sacrifices to end the atrocious British rule.

When India achieved independence in 1947, its economy was in a bad shape. There were poverty, unemployment, backwardness and many social evils. The founding fathers not only adopted the democratic form of government, made India a republic, but also launched a massive programme of development through Five-Year Plans. Today, the economy is back on track with an annual GDP growth of about 9 per cent, at number two position in the world after China. But, during this journey, the country had to see many changes in its society.

Human life itself is subject to constant changes. When a child is born, it is tiny and weak. As the child grows into a young boy or girl he not only looks different but also acquires many new abilities and knowledge. A young man or woman looks more attractive and strong. But slowly and slowly, the youth fades away.

The old men or women are weak. Their hair turn grey and their skin have wrinkles. And one day they die. Similar is the case with all other living beings. They are born and, after completing their life span they die. As people die, the new people take their place in society. The process of change never stops.

It is said, and with a fair degree of truth that changes is always for the better. A new teacher in the class brings new ideas; a new player in the team brings his own style, strategy and fervour; and a new singer adds freshness to the world of music.

We must accept change in our life; otherwise we would remain orthodox, old and backward. However, it must be kept in mind that only those changes should be accepted which benefit us, the society and the nation. Change for the sake of change, and change for the worse must be resisted if it is within our reach.

Related Essays:

• 303 words essay on A Visit to a Religious Place
• 399 words essay on Vocational Guidance
• 342 words short essay on Pleasures of Reading Books
• Free Sample essay on India and CTBT

Privacy Overview

• Advanced Search
• All new items
• Journal articles
• Manuscripts
• All Categories
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Epistemology
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Religion
• Value Theory
• Applied Ethics
• Meta-Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• Philosophy of Law
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Value Theory, Miscellaneous
• Science, Logic, and Mathematics
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Computing and Information
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Physical Science
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Philosophy of Probability
• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Science, Misc
• History of Western Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
• 17th/18th Century Philosophy
• 19th Century Philosophy
• 20th Century Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophical Traditions
• African/Africana Philosophy
• Asian Philosophy
• Continental Philosophy
• European Philosophy
• Philosophy of the Americas
• Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous
• Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies
• Philosophy, General Works
• Teaching Philosophy
• Philosophy, Miscellaneous
• Other Academic Areas
• Natural Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Cognitive Sciences
• Formal Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Professional Areas
• Other Academic Areas, Misc
• Submit a book or article
• Upload a bibliography
• Personal page tracking
• Archives we track
• Information for publishers
• Introduction
• Submitting to PhilPapers
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Subscriptions
• Editor's Guide
• The Categorization Project
• For Publishers
• For Archive Admins
• PhilPapers Surveys
• Bargain Finder
• About PhilPapers
• Create an account

John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature

Reprint years, other versions.

No versions found

PhilArchive

External links.

• From the Publisher via CrossRef (no proxy)
• jstor.org (no proxy)
• jstor.org [2] (no proxy)

Through your library

• Sign in / register and customize your OpenURL resolver
• Configure custom resolver

Similar books and articles

Citations of this work, references found in this work.

No references found.

We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Essays on the law of nature. The Latin text, with a translation, introd. and notes, together with transcripts of Locke's shorthand in his journal for 1676

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

309 Previews

13 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station37.cebu on February 15, 2020

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

The Nature of Law

Lawyers are typically interested in the question: What is the law on a particular issue? This is always a local question and answers to it are bound to differ according to the specific jurisdiction in which they are asked. In contrast, philosophy of law is interested in the general question: What is Law? This general question about the nature of law presupposes that law is a unique social-political phenomenon, with more or less universal characteristics that can be discerned through philosophical analysis. General jurisprudence, as this philosophical inquiry about the nature of law is called, is meant to be universal. It assumes that law possesses certain features, and it possesses them by its very nature, or essence, as law, whenever and wherever it happens to exist. However, even if there are such universal characteristics of law—which is controversial, as we will later discuss—the reasons for a philosophical interest in elucidating them remain to be explained. First, there is the sheer intellectual interest in understanding such a complex social phenomenon which is, after all, one of the most intricate aspects of human culture. Law, however, is also a normative social practice: it purports to guide human behavior, giving rise to reasons for action. An attempt to explain this normative, reason-giving aspect of law is one of the main challenges of general jurisprudence. These two sources of interest in the nature of law are closely linked. Law is not the only normative domain in our culture; morality, religion, social conventions, etiquette, and so on, also guide human conduct in many ways which are similar to law. Therefore, part of what is involved in the understanding of the nature of law consists in an explanation of how law differs from these similar normative domains, how it interacts with them, and whether its intelligibility depends on other normative orders, like morality or social conventions.

Contemporary legal theories define these two main interests in the nature of law in the following terms. First, we need to understand the general conditions that would render any putative norm legally valid. Is it, for example, just a matter of the source of the norm, such as its enactment by a particular political institution, or is it also a matter of the norm’s content? This is the general question about the conditions of legal validity. Second, there is the interest in the normative aspect of law. This philosophical interest is twofold: A complete philosophical account of the normativity of law comprises both an explanatory and a justificatory task. The explanatory task consists of an attempt to explain how legal norms can give rise to reasons for action, and what kinds of reasons are involved. The task of justification concerns the question of whether people ought to comply—morally speaking or all things considered—with law’s demands. In other words, it is the attempt to explain the moral legitimacy of law and the subjects’ reasons for complying with it. A theory about the nature of law, as opposed to critical theories of law, concentrates on the first of these two questions. It purports to explain what the normativity of law actually consists in. Some contemporary legal philosophers, however, doubt that these two aspects of the normativity of law can be separated. (We will return to this later.)

Thus, elucidating the conditions of legal validity and explaining the normativity of law form the two main subjects of any general theory about the nature of law. In section 1, we will explain some of the main debates about these two issues. In section 2, we will discuss some of the methodological debates about the nature of general jurisprudence. In the course of the last few centuries, two main rival philosophical traditions have emerged about the nature of legality. The older one, dating back to late mediaeval Christian scholarship, is called the natural law tradition. Since the early 19th century, natural law theories have been fiercely challenged by the legal positivism tradition promulgated by such scholars as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin . The philosophical origins of legal positivism are much earlier, though, probably in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes . The main controversy between these two traditions concerns the conditions of legal validity. Basically, legal positivism asserts, and natural law denies, that the conditions of legal validity are purely a matter of social facts. In contrast to positivism, natural law claims that the conditions of legal validity are not exhausted by social facts; the moral content of the putative norms also bears on their legal validity. As the famous dictum, commonly attributed to Saint Augustine, has it: lex iniusta non est lex (unjust law is not law). (Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, I, 5; see also Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 96, Art. 4.)

1.1 The Conditions of Legal Validity

1.2 the normativity of law, 2.1.1 conceptual analysis views, 2.1.2 investigating law itself, 2.1.3 the metanormative inquiry view, 2.1.4 the prescriptive view, 2.1.5 constructive interpretation of legal practice, 2.2.1 preliminaries, 2.2.2 is legal theory evaluative in the relevant sense, other internet resources, related entries, 1. general jurisprudence.

The main insight of legal positivism, that the conditions of legal validity are determined by social facts, involves two separate claims which have been labeled The Social Thesis and The Separation Thesis. The Social Thesis asserts that law is, profoundly, a social phenomenon, and that the conditions of legal validity consist of social—that is, non-normative—facts. Early legal positivists followed Hobbes’ insight that the law is, essentially, an instrument of political sovereignty, and they maintained that the basic source of legal validity resides in the facts constituting political sovereignty. Law, they thought, is basically the command of the sovereign. Later legal positivists have modified this view, maintaining that social rules, and not the facts about sovereignty, constitute the grounds of law. Most contemporary legal positivists share the view that there are rules of recognition, namely, social rules or conventions which determine certain facts or events that provide the ways for the creation, modification, and annulment of legal standards. These facts, such as an act of legislation or a judicial decision, are the sources of law conventionally identified as such in each and every modern legal system. One way of understanding the legal positivist position here is to see it as a form of reduction: legal positivism maintains, essentially, that legal validity is reducible to facts of a non-normative type, that is, facts about people’s conduct, beliefs and attitudes.

Natural lawyers deny this insight, insisting that a putative norm cannot become legally valid unless it passes a certain threshold of morality. Positive law must conform in its content to some basic precepts of natural law, that is, universal morality, in order to become law in the first place. In other words, natural lawyers maintain that the moral content or merit of norms, and not just their social origins, also form part of the conditions of legal validity. And again, it is possible to view this position as a non-reductive conception of law, maintaining that legal validity cannot be reduced to non-normative facts. See the entry on natural law theories .

The Separation Thesis is an important negative implication of the Social Thesis, maintaining that there is a conceptual separation between law and morality, that is, between what the law is, and what the law ought to be. The Separation Thesis, however, has often been overstated. It is sometimes thought that natural law asserts, and legal positivism denies, that the law is, by necessity, morally good or that the law must have some minimal moral content. The Social Thesis certainly does not entail the falsehood of the assumption that there is something necessarily good in the law. Legal positivism can accept the claim that law is, by its very nature or its essential functions in society, something good that deserves our moral appreciation. Nor is legal positivism forced to deny the plausible claim that wherever law exists, it would have to have a great many prescriptions which coincide with morality. There is probably a considerable overlap, and perhaps necessarily so, between the actual content of law and morality. Once again, the Separation Thesis, properly understood, pertains only to the conditions of legal validity. It asserts that the conditions of legal validity do not depend on the moral merits of the norms in question. What the law is cannot depend on what it ought to be in the relevant circumstances.

Many contemporary legal positivists would not subscribe to this formulation of the Separation Thesis. A contemporary school of thought, called inclusive legal positivism , endorses the Social Thesis, namely, that the basic conditions of legal validity derive from social facts, such as social rules or conventions which happen to prevail in a given community. But, inclusive legal positivists maintain, legal validity is sometimes a matter of the moral content of the norms, depending on the particular conventions that happen to prevail in any given community. The social conventions on the basis of which we identify the law may, but need not, contain reference to moral content as a condition of legality (see, for example, Waluchow 1994).

The natural law tradition has undergone a considerable refinement in the 20th century, mainly because its classical, popular version faced an obvious objection about its core insight: it is just difficult to maintain that morally bad law is not law. The idea that law must pass, as it were, a kind of moral filter in order to count as law strikes most jurists as incompatible with the legal world as we know it. Therefore, contemporary natural lawyers have suggested different and more subtle interpretations of the main tenets of natural law. For example, John Finnis (1980) views natural law (in its Thomist version) not as a constraint on the legal validity of positive laws, but mainly as an elucidation of an ideal of law in its fullest, or highest sense, concentrating on the ways in which law necessarily promotes the common good. As we have noted earlier, however, it is not clear that such a view about the necessary moral content of law is at odds with the main tenets of legal positivism. To the extent that there is a debate here, it is a metaphysical one about what is essential or necessary to law, and about whether the essential features of law must be elucidated in teleological terms or not. Legal positivists do not tend to seek deep teleological accounts of law, along the lines articulated by Finnis, but whether they need to deny such metaphysical projects is far from clear.

The idea that the conditions of legal validity are at least partly a matter of the moral content or merits of norms is articulated in a sophisticated manner by Ronald Dworkin’s legal theory. Dworkin is not a classical natural lawyer, however, and he does not maintain that morally acceptable content is a precondition of a norm’s legality. His core idea is that the very distinction between facts and values in the legal domain, between what the law is and what it ought to be, is much more blurred than legal positivism would have it: Determining what the law is in particular cases inevitably depends on moral-political considerations about what it ought to be. Evaluative judgments, about the content law ought to have or what it ought to prescribe, partly determine what the law actually is.

Dworkin’s legal theory is not based on a general repudiation of the classical fact-value distinction, as much as it is based on a certain conception of legal reasoning. This conception went through two main stages. In the 1970s Dworkin (1977) argued that the falsehood of legal positivism resides in the fact that it is incapable of accounting for the important role that legal principles play in the law. Legal positivism envisaged, Dworkin claimed, that the law consists of rules only. However, this is a serious mistake, since in addition to rules, law is partly determined by legal principles. The distinction between rules and principles is a logical one. Rules, Dworkin maintained, apply in an “all or nothing fashion.” If the rule applies to the circumstances, it determines a particular legal outcome. If it does not apply, it is simply irrelevant to the outcome. On the other hand, principles do not determine an outcome even if they clearly apply to the pertinent circumstances. Principles provide judges with a legal reason to decide the case one way or the other, and hence they only have a dimension of weight. That is, the reasons provided by the principle may be relatively strong, or weak, but they are never “absolute.” Such reasons, by themselves, cannot determine an outcome, as rules do.

The most interesting, and from a positivist perspective, most problematic, aspect of legal principles, however, consists in their moral dimension. According to Dworkin’s theory, unlike legal rules, which may or may not have something to do with morality, principles are essentially moral in their content. It is, in fact, partly a moral consideration that determines whether a legal principle exists or not. Why is that? Because a legal principle exists, according to Dworkin, if the principle follows from the best moral and political interpretation of past judicial and legislative decisions in the relevant domain. In other words, legal principles occupy an intermediary space between legal rules and moral principles. Legal rules are posited by recognized institutions and their validity derives from their enacted source. Moral principles are what they are due to their content, and their validity is purely content dependent. Legal principles, on the other hand, gain their validity from a combination of source-based and content-based considerations. As Dworkin put it in the most general terms: “According to law as integrity, propositions of law are true if they figure in or follow from the principles of justice, fairness, and procedural due process that provide the best constructive interpretation of the community’s legal practice” (Dworkin 1986, 225). The validity of a legal principle then, derives, from a combination of facts and moral considerations. The facts concern the past legal decisions which have taken place in the relevant domain, and the considerations of morals and politics concern the ways in which those past decisions can best be accounted for by the correct moral principles.

Needless to say, if such an account of legal principles is correct, the Separation Thesis can no longer be maintained. But many legal philosophers doubt that there are legal principles of the kind Dworkin envisaged. There is an alternative, more natural way to account for the distinction between rules and principles in the law: the relevant difference concerns the level of generality, or vagueness, of the norm-act prescribed by the pertinent legal norm. Legal norms can be more or less general, or vague, in their definition of the norm-act prescribed by the rule, and the more general or vague they are, the more they tend to have those quasi-logical features Dworkin attributes to principles. More importantly, notice that if you make the legal validity of norms, such as legal principles, depend on moral argument, you allow for the possibility that an entire legal community may get its laws wrong. Any moral mistake in the reasoning leading to a legal principle might render the conclusion about the principle unsound, and the principle itself thus not legally valid. Since there is nothing to prevent judges and other legal actors from making moral mistakes, there is nothing to prevent a result whereby an entire legal community, and for a long time, gets its laws wrong (Marmor 2011, chapter 4). Perhaps Dworkin would have not found this problematic, but others might; the idea that an entire legal community can be systematically mistaken about its own laws might strike legal theorists as deeply problematic.

In the 1980s Dworkin radicalized his views about these issues, striving to ground his anti-positivist legal theory on a general theory of interpretation, and emphasizing law’s profound interpretative nature. Despite the fact that Dworkin’s interpretative theory of law is extremely sophisticated and complex, the essence of his argument from interpretation can be summarized in a rather simple way. The main argument consists of two main premises. The first thesis maintains that determining what the law requires in each and every particular case necessarily involves interpretative reasoning. Any statement of the form “According to the law in \(S\), \(x\) has a right/duty etc., to \(y\)” is a conclusion of some interpretation or other. Now, according to the second premise, interpretation always involves evaluative considerations. More precisely, perhaps, interpretation is neither purely a matter of determining facts, nor is it a matter of evaluative judgment per se , but an inseparable mixture of both. Clearly enough, one who accepts both these theses must conclude that the Separation Thesis is fundamentally flawed. If Dworkin is correct about both theses, it surely follows that determining what the law requires always involves evaluative considerations.

Notably, the first premise of Dworkin’s general argument is highly contestable. Some legal philosophers have argued that legal reasoning is not as thoroughly interpretative as Dworkin assumes. Interpretation, according to this view, long maintained by H.L.A. Hart (1961, chapter 7), is an exception to the standard understanding of language and communication, rendered necessary only when the law is, for some reason, unclear. However, in most standard instances, the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation (Marmor 2011, chapter 6).

Dworkin’s legal theory shares certain insights with the inclusive version of legal positivism. Note, however, that although both Dworkin and inclusive legal positivists share the view that morality and legal validity are closely related, they differ on the grounds of this relationship. Dworkin maintains that the dependence of legal validity on moral considerations is an essential feature of law that derives from law’s profoundly interpretative nature. Inclusive positivism, on the other hand, maintains that such a dependence of legal validity on moral considerations is a contingent matter; it does not derive from the nature of law or of legal reasoning as such. Inclusive positivists accept the Social Thesis; they claim that moral considerations affect legal validity only in those cases where this is dictated by the social rules or conventions which happen to prevail in a given legal system. The relevance of morality is determined in any given legal system by the contingent content of that society’s conventions. As opposed to both these views, traditional, or as it is now called, exclusive legal positivism maintains that a norm’s legal validity is never dependent on its moral content. Legal validity, according to this view, is entirely dependent on the conventionally recognized factual sources of law.

It may be worth noting that those legal theories maintaining that legal validity partly depends on moral considerations must also share a certain view about the nature of morality. Namely, they must hold an objective stance with respect to the nature of moral values. Otherwise, if moral values are not objective and legality depends on morality, legality would also be rendered subjective, posing serious problems for the question of how to identify what the law is. Some legal theories, however, do insist on the subjectivity of moral judgements, thus embracing the skeptical conclusions that follow about the nature of law. According to these skeptical theories, law is, indeed, profoundly dependent on morality, but, as these theorists assume that morality is entirely subjective, it only demonstrates how the law is also profoundly subjective, always up for grabs, so to speak. This skeptical approach, fashionable in so-called post-modernist literature, crucially depends on a subjectivist theory of values, which is rarely articulated in this literature in any sophisticated way.

Throughout human history the law has been known as a coercive institution, enforcing its practical demands on its subjects by means of threats and violence. This conspicuous feature of law made it very tempting for some philosophers to assume that the normativity of law resides in its coercive aspect. Even within the legal positivist tradition, however, the coercive aspect of the law has given rise to fierce controversies. Early legal positivists, such as Bentham and Austin, maintained that coercion is an essential feature of law, distinguishing it from other normative domains. Legal positivists in the 20th century have tended to deny this, claiming that coercion is neither essential to law, nor, actually, pivotal to the fulfillment of its functions in society. Before we unpack the various issues involved in this controversy, it might be worth noting that the debate about law’s coercive aspect is one good example of debates in jurisprudence that focus on what might be an essential or a necessary feature of law, regardless of its particular manifestations in this or that legal system. How to understand these claims about the essence of law, and the question of whether these claims are about metaphysics or something else, perhaps about morality, will be discussed in section 2.1.

Returning to law’s coercive aspect, there are several issues entangled here, and we should carefully separate them. John Austin famously maintained that each and every legal norm, as such, must comprise a threat backed by sanction. This involves at least two separate claims: In one sense, it can be understood as a thesis about the concept of law, maintaining that what we call “law” can only be those norms which are backed by sanctions of the political sovereign. In a second, though not less problematic sense, the intimate connection between the law and the threat of sanctions is a thesis about the normativity of law. It is a reductionist thesis about law’s normative character, maintaining that the normativity of law consists in the subjects’ ability to predict the chances of incurring punishment or evil and their presumed desire to avoid it.

In addition to this particular controversy, there is the further question, concerning the relative importance of sanctions for the ability of law to fulfill its social functions. Hans Kelsen, for instance, maintained that the monopolization of violence in society, and the law’s ability to impose its demands by violent means, is the most important of law’s functions in society. Twentieth century legal positivists, like H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz, deny this, maintaining that the coercive aspect of law is much more marginal than their predecessors assumed. Once again, the controversy here is actually twofold: is coercion essential to what the law does? And even if it is not deemed essential, how important it is, compared with the other functions law fulfills in our lives?

Austin’s reductionist account of the normativity of law, maintaining that the normative aspect of law simply consists in the subjects’ desire to avoid sanctions, was discussed extensively, and fiercely criticized, by H.L.A. Hart. Hart’s fundamental objection to Austin’s reductionist account of law’s normativity is, on his own account, “that the predictive interpretation obscures the fact that, where rules exist, deviations from them are not merely grounds for prediction that hostile reactions will follow…. but are also deemed to be a reason or justification for such reaction and for applying the sanctions” (Hart 1961, 82). This emphasis on the reason-giving function of rules is surely correct, but perhaps not enough. Supporters of the predictive account could claim that it only begs the further question of why people should regard the rules of law as reasons or justifications for actions. If it is, for example, only because the law happens to be an efficient sanction-provider, then the predictive model of the normativity of law may turn out to be correct after all. In other words, Hart’s fundamental objection to the predictive model is actually a result of his vision about the main functions of law in society, holding, contra Austin and Kelsen, that those functions are not exclusively related to the ability of the law to impose sanctions.

It is arguable, however, that law’s functions in our culture are more closely related to its coercive aspect than Hart seems to have assumed. Contemporary use of “game theory” in the law tends to show that the rationale of a great variety of legal arrangements can be best explained by the function of law in solving problems of opportunism, like the so called Prisoner’s Dilemma situations. In these cases, the law’s main role is, indeed, one of providing coercive incentives for the mutual benefit of all parties concerned. Be this as it may, we should probably refrain from endorsing Austin’s or Kelsen’s position that law’s only function in society is essentially tied to its coercive aspects. Solving recurrent and multiple coordination problems, setting standards for desirable behavior, proclaiming symbolic expressions of communal values, resolving disputes about facts, and such, are important functions which the law serves in our society, and those have very little to do with law’s coercive aspect and its sanction-imposing functions.

The extent to which law can actually guide behavior by providing its subjects with reasons for action has been questioned by a very influential group of legal scholars in the first half of the 20 th century, called the Legal Realism school. American Legal Realists claimed that our ability to predict the outcomes of legal cases on the basis of the rules of law is rather limited. In the more difficult cases which tend to be adjudicated in the appellate courts, legal rules, by themselves, are radically indeterminate as to the outcome of the cases. The Legal Realists thought that lawyers who are interested in the predictive question of what the courts will actually decide in difficult cases need to engage in sociological and psychological research, striving to develop theoretical tools that would enable us to predict legal outcomes. Thus Legal Realism was mainly an attempt to introduce the social sciences into the domain of jurisprudence for predictive purposes. To what extent this scientific project succeeded is a matter of controversy. Be this as it may, Legal Realism paid very little attention to the question of the normativity of law, that is, to the question of how the law does guide behavior in those cases in which it seems to be determinate enough.

A much more promising approach to the normativity of law is found in Joseph Raz’s theory of authority, which also shows how such a theory about the normativity of law entails important conclusions with respect to the conditions of legal validity (Raz 1994). The basic insight of Raz’s argument is that the law is an authoritative social institution. The law, Raz claims, is a de facto authority. However, it is also essential to law that it must be held to claim legitimate authority. Any particular legal system may fail, of course, in its fulfillment of this claim. But law is the kind of institution which necessarily claims to be a legitimate authority.

According to Raz, the essential role of authorities in our practical reasoning is to mediate between the putative subjects of the authority and the right reasons which apply to them in the relevant circumstances. An authority is legitimate if and only if it helps its putative subjects to comply better with the right reasons relevant to their actions—i.e., if they are more likely to act in compliance with these reasons by following the authoritative resolution than they would be if they tried to figure out and act on the reasons directly (without the mediating resolution). For example, there may be many reasons that bear on the question of how fast to drive on a particular road—the amount of pedestrian traffic, impending turns in the road, etc.—but drivers may comply better with the balance of those reasons by following the legal speed limit than if they tried to figure out all the trade-offs in the moment. The legitimacy of the legal speed limit would thus be derived from the way in which it aids people in acting in better compliance with the balance of the right reasons.

Now, it follows that for something to be able to claim legitimate authority, it must be of the kind of thing capable of claiming it, namely, capable of fulfilling such a mediating role. What kinds of things can claim legitimate authority? There are at least two such features necessary for authority-capacity: First, for something to be able to claim legitimate authority, it must be the case that its directives are identifiable as authoritative directives, without the necessity of relying on those same reasons which the authoritative directive replaces. If this condition is not met, namely, if it is impossible to identify the authoritative directive as such without relying on those same reasons the authority was meant to rely on, then the authority could not fulfill its essential, mediating role. In short, it could not make the practical difference it is there to make. Note that this argument does not concern the efficacy of authorities. The point is not that unless authoritative directives can be recognized as such, authorities could not function effectively. The argument is based on the rationale of authorities within our practical reasoning. Authorities are there to make a practical difference, and they could not make such a difference unless the authority’s directive can be recognized as such without recourse to the reasons it is there to decide upon. In other words, it is pointless to have an authoritative directive if, in order to discover what the directive is, you have to engage in the same reasoning that reliance on the directive is supposed to replace. Secondly, for something to be able to claim legitimate authority, it must be capable of forming an opinion on how its subjects ought to behave, distinct from the subjects’ own reasoning about their reasons for action; authority requires some authorship.

Raz’s conception of legal authority provides very strong support for exclusive legal positivism because it requires that the law, qua an authoritative resolution, be identifiable on its own terms, that is, without having to rely on those same considerations that the law is there to resolve. Therefore a norm is legally valid (i.e., authoritative) only if its validity does not derive from moral or other evaluative considerations that the law is intended to replace. Notably, Raz’s theory challenges both Dworkin’s anti-positivist legal theory, and the inclusive version of legal positivism. This challenge, and the controversies it gave rise to, form one of the main topics discussed in contemporary general jurisprudence.

Explaining the rationale of legal authority, however, is not the only component of a theory about the normativity of law. If we hold the legal positivist thesis that law is essentially founded on social conventions, another important question arises here: how can a conventional practice give rise to reasons for action and, in particular, to obligations? Some legal philosophers claimed that conventional rules cannot, by themselves, give rise to obligations. As Leslie Green observed, Hart’s “view that the fundamental rules [of recognition] are ‘mere conventions’ continues to sit uneasily with any notion of obligation,” and this Green finds troubling, because the rules of recognition point to the “sources that judges are legally bound to apply” (Green 1996, 1697). The debate here is partly about the conventional nature of the rules of recognition, and partly about the ways in which conventions can figure in our reasons for action. According to one influential theory, inspired by David Lewis (1969) conventional rules emerge as solutions to large-scale and recurrent coordination problems. If the rules of recognition are, indeed, of such a coordination kind, it is relatively easy to explain how they may give rise to obligations. Coordination conventions would be obligatory if the norm subjects have an obligation to solve the coordination problem which initially gave rise to the emergence of the relevant convention. It is doubtful, however, that the conventions at the foundations of law are of a coordinative kind. In certain respects the law may be more like a structured game, or an artistic genre, which are actually constituted by social conventions. Such constitutive conventions are not explicable as solutions to some pre-existing recurrent coordination problem. The conventional rules constituting the game of chess, for example, are not there to solve a coordination problem between potential players. Antecedent to the game of chess, there was no particular coordination problem to solve. The conventional rules of chess constitute the game itself as a kind of social activity people would find worthwhile engaging in. The constitutive conventions partly constitute the values inherent in the emergent social practice. Such values, however, are only there for those who care to see them. Constitutive conventions, by themselves, cannot ground an obligation to engage in the practice they constitute.

From a moral point of view, the rules of recognition, by themselves, cannot be regarded as sources of obligation to follow the law. Whether judges, or anybody else, should or should not respect the rules of recognition of a legal system, is ultimately a moral issue, that can only be resolved by moral arguments (concerning the age old issue of political obligation). And this is more generally so: the existence of a social practice, in itself, does not provide anyone with an obligation to engage in the practice. The rules of recognition only define what the practice is, and they can say nothing on the question of whether one should or should not engage in it. But of course, once one does engage in the practice, playing the role of judge or some other legal official, as it were, there are legal obligations defined by the rules of the game. In other words, there is nothing special in the idea of a legal obligation to follow the rules of recognition. The referee in a soccer game is equally obliged to follow the rules of his game, and the fact that the game is conventional poses no difficulty from this, let us say, “internal-player’s” perspective. But again, the constitutive rules of soccer cannot settle for anyone the question of whether they should play soccer or not. Similarly, the rules of recognition cannot settle for the judge, or anyone else for that matter, whether they should play by the rules of law, or not. They only tell us what the law is . Unlike chess or soccer, however, the law may well be a kind of game that people have an obligation to play, as it were. But if there is such an obligation, it must emerge from external, moral, considerations, that is, from a general moral obligation to obey the law. The complex question of whether there is such a general obligation to obey the law, and whether it depends on certain features of the relevant legal system, is extensively discussed in the literature on political obligation. A complete theory about the normativity of law must encompass these moral issues as well. (See the entries on political obligation and legal obligation .)

More recently, however, a number of philosophers have started to question the idea that there is something unique to the normativity of law, inviting us to see how laws might affect our reasons for action in ways that are not closely tied to the nature of law (Greenberg 2014, Enoch 2011, Marmor 2016 [2018]). Some of these views (e.g., Enoch, Marmor) purport to show that there are different ways in which the existence of various norms bear on people’s reasons for action, present in law as elsewhere, without denying that the law often makes a difference; these views only deny that there is something unique to the way law changes its subjects’ reasons for action, compared with other types normative demands. Others challenge law’s normativity from an opposite angle (Greenberg 2014, Hershovitz 2015), arguing that the only aspect of law that is of normative significance is the moral difference that it makes to people’s reasons for action.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, new challenges to general jurisprudence, and particularly to legal positivism, have taken an interesting methodological turn. This methodological turn gained momentum with the publication of Dworkin’s Law’s Empire (1986), arguing that not only the law, as a social practice, is a profoundly interpretative (and thus partly, but necessarily, evaluative in nature), but that any theory about the nature of law is also interpretative in a similar way, and thus, equally evaluative. Many of those who do not necessarily share Dworkin’s views about the interpretative nature of legal practice, or the specifics of his theory of interpretation, have joined him in this methodological skepticism about the traditional aims of general jurisprudence, that is, about the possibility of developing a theory about that nature of law that would have general application and remain morally neutral. These, and other resultant methodological challenges to traditional general jurisprudence are taken up in the next section.

It would be fair to say, however, that in the last few years, many legal philosophers have expressed a growing frustration with these traditional debates about the nature of law, calling for legal philosophy to move beyond the Hart-Dworkin debates and explore new avenues of research. Some of these new critics are content to abandon the project altogether, declaring the death of general jurisprudence (Hershovitz 2015). Others, however, are engaged in exploring new challenges. One emerging area of research concerns the artifact nature of law, aiming to learn something about the nature of law from the fact that law seems to be an artifact, created and sustained by humans for particular purposes. (See, for example, Burazin et al. eds., 2018.) Others explore connections between law’s features as artifact and fictionalism, suggesting that their underlying logic and metaphysics share a great deal in common (Marmor 2018). Another new and potentially fruitful area of research focuses on applications of philosophy of language to law, brining new developments in philosophy of language, particularly in pragmatics, to bear on questions of legal interpretation and understanding of legal content (Asgeirsson forthcoming, Asgeirsson 2015, Marmor 2014). This linguistic direction is not uncontroversial, however; some legal philosophers express skepticism about the idea that legal content is determined by linguistic factors (Greenberg 2011) and there is an ongoing debate about these issues. Finally, there also seems to be a growing interest in recent developments in metaphysics that might bear on a theory about the nature of law, and even debates about meta-metaphysics are beginning to emerge in the context of general jurisprudence, purporting to show that ways in which we think about the tasks of metaphysical inquiry may bear on ways we think about the law (Rosen 2010). For example, if the main task of metaphysics is to determine what really exists in the world, irrespective of what we think about it or ways in which we represent the world, metaphysics may not have much to say about the nature of law or, perhaps, it may indicate that only a scientific approach to jurisprudence can yield metaphysically respectable results. If, however, the task of metaphysical inquiry is also to figure out what is more foundational than something else, giving us a hierarchical structure of the world, where some things ground others, then metaphysics might be a very fruitful framework to work with in trying to elucidate the foundations of legality and legal phenomena more generally. This potential metaphysical interest in jurisprudence is at its infancy presently, and time will tell if this new approach gets us interesting results.

2. The Methodology of Jurisprudence

When it comes to the methodology of jurisprudence, we find two main issues. While one is not directly concerned with normativity, the second is. The first asks about the aims and success criteria for philosophical theories about the nature of law:

What is the target that first-order theories of law aim to capture, and when do they succeed in doing so?

The second asks about the role of evaluation in jurisprudential methodology:

Are first-order legal theories inherently or necessarily evaluative or can they be purely descriptive?

Each of these questions will be discussed in turn.

2.1 The Target of a Theory of Law

The first important class of methodological questions in jurisprudence concerns the target of first-order theories of law—that is, what phenomenon such theories aim to provide an account of. In taking a stand on what the proper target of a first-order legal theory is, one incurs a number of other methodological commitments. These include adopting a view about when such theories are successful, taking a stand on what sort of data such theories aim to systematize and explain, and determining what sorts of arguments are legitimately used in deciding between one of these theories and its competitors.

There are five main families of views on this question. One view takes jurisprudence to be a form of conceptual analysis, which is to say that theories of law aim to provide an account of some concept of law. This approach is often associated with Hart’s influential work, The Concept of Law (1994). A second sort of view adopts a more skeptical stance towards the methodology of conceptual analysis and takes theories of law to be in the business of offering a reductive explanation of law itself, not some concept of it. Another recent view sees general jurisprudence as just another branch of metanormative inquiry, which renders it continuous with other philosophical fields like metaethics. Fourth, the prescriptive view takes it that the aim of a theory of law is to specify the notion of law that it would be most desirable for us to adopt. A fifth kind of view, associated with Dworkin’s work, takes it that legal theories are in the business of offering a constructive interpretation of legal practice. In what follows, each of these five views, as well as some of the main issues they face, will be discussed in more depth.

On conceptual analysis views, theories of law aim to capture the concept of law and they succeed to the extent that they provide a coherent account of the relevant data about that concept and related concepts. In particular, the data to be systematized are taken to be people’s intuitions involving some shared concept of law (or cognate concepts like legal validity or legal obligation). In their simplest form, such intuitions can be thought of as judgments about whether the relevant concept does or does not apply to particular cases. Accordingly, on this sort of view, a theory of law aims to provide an account of the conditions under which the target concept of law (or one of its cognates) applies.

What’s more, such a theory can be arrived at by employing the method of conceptual analysis, undertaken from the proverbial armchair. The idea is that the theorist starts with a putative set of criteria for the correct application of the target concept, and then she tests this account against her intuitions about that concept. If the account entails that the concept applies to particular cases that it intuitively does not apply to, then this provides reason to reject or revise the account in question. By contrast, if the account entails that the target concept applies to certain cases and this is the intuitively correct result, this tends to provide affirmative support for the account. The account successfully captures the target concept to the extent that it yields intuitively correct results about particular cases, and does so in an explanatorily satisfying way (as opposed to an ad hoc manner). (For a more in depth discussion of the methodology of conceptual analysis as applied to the concept of law, see Shapiro 2011, 16–22.)

Jurisprudence has been influenced by two main ways of understanding the relevant intuitions (or data) that theories of law aim to systematize. This, in turn, is due to the fact that one might understand concepts themselves, and our intuitions about them, in two different ways. Accordingly, we find two main varieties of the conceptual analysis view of methodology.

The first understanding of concepts takes concept possession to be mainly a matter of linguistic competence. That is, to possess the concept of law is to know when the word “law” as used in its juridical sense (not the scientific sense) applies. Thus, intuitions about the concept of law are to be understood as linguistic intuitions about how to use the word “law.” On the present view, then, conceptual analysis is a mode of linguistic analysis. This sort of view was famously discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of Dworkin’s Law’s Empire (Dworkin 1986, 32, 43–46). It arguably traces back to the kind of ordinary language philosophy associated with J.L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle (Marmor 2013, 210–212).

However, this understanding of concept possession has drawbacks. Perhaps the biggest source of concern in the present context is that this sort of view fuels a version of Dworkin’s “semantic sting” argument (Dworkin 1986, 43–46). The argument may be summarized as follows. Suppose legal theories aim to capture the concept of law and that concept possession just is a matter of knowing when the word “law” applies. If so, the argument runs, legal theories cannot explain disagreement about the grounds of law, that is, about the conditions of legal validity. After all, if legal theories are in this way semantic in nature, then disagreement about what the grounds of law are must boil down to disagreement about when the word “law” applies—at least assuming the parties to the disagreement are not merely talking past one another. But now a dilemma arises. Either legal practitioners possess the same concept of law or they do not. If they do possess the same concept, then it seems they cannot fail to agree about what it takes for a norm to count as law. After all, they all know when the word expressing their shared concept of law applies. But this is implausible, since legal practice in fact is rife with disagreement about what the grounds of law are (and thus, what counts as law or as legal). On the other hand, if legal practitioners do not share the same concept of law, then their disagreement about what the grounds of law are must just be due to the fact that they are talking past one another. But that, too, is implausible. Legal practice, as Dworkin puts it, is not “a grotesque joke” (Dworkin 1986, 44). Accordingly, there must be something wrong with construing legal theories as mere semantic accounts of when the word “law” applies.

If, in light of this argument, we are to abandon the idea that first-order legal theories are semantic theories, there are two obvious ways to proceed. First, one might simply abandon the idea that legal theories are exercises in conceptual analysis. This was Dworkin’s preferred response, though, as we’ll see, one can reject conceptual analysis without adopting Dworkin’s own favored methodology. (More on that in sub-section 2.1.2.) Second, if one wants to still say that legal theories are in the business of analyzing the concept of law, then the obvious response to the semantic sting argument is to deny that concept possession just is a matter of knowing how the word “law” in its juridical sense is to be applied. This suggests a second, richer form of conceptual analysis that legal theorists might be engaged in.

The basic idea behind the richer view is to take it that concept possession, rather than merely being a matter of knowing when words apply, involves something meatier: namely, the possession of a wide range of substantive beliefs or intuitions about the concept, its essential features and its proper application. The assumption is that the intuitions one is disposed to have in virtue of possessing the concept of law will be fertile enough to constitute a particular substantive conception of what the law is and how it functions. The aim of a theory of law, then, would be to systematize these pre-theoretic judgments about the concept of law in order to provide an account of some substantive conception of law. (This sort of richer view of concept possession is discussed, e.g., in Raz 2004, 4–7; Stravopoulos 2012, 78–79; Shapiro 2011, 16–22. It is perhaps also the sort of view presupposed by Hart.) On this view, legal disagreement remains possible because while practitioners might all be using the same concept of law, the richness of the concept allows that they nonetheless might not possess the concept determinately enough, or understand its application conditions thoroughly enough, to guarantee consensus on theoretical questions about what the grounds of law actually are.

However, also this richer understanding of concept possession, and the meatier picture of conceptual analysis it gives rise to, has been widely criticized (Marmor 2013, 215–217; Raz 2004, 10; Leiter 2007, 177–79). One question that immediately arises is which concept of law, exactly, constitutes the proper target of a theory of law. Is it the concept of law that is possessed by the legal practitioners in a particular jurisdiction? Or is it some universally shared concept of law? Worries loom either way. If a legal theory only aims to capture the concept of law employed in a particular jurisdiction, then that would render the theory parochial and it might lose its interest for those who are not concerned with that particular jurisdiction. On the other hand, one might doubt that there really is a universally shared concept of law that is employed by practitioners in all jurisdictions—or if there is one, it is doubtful that it is anything more than the sort of thin concept that one possesses in virtue of knowing what the word “law” in its juridical sense means.

A deeper worry about all forms of conceptual analysis is the question of why we should care about anybody’s concept of law in the first place (Marmor 2013, 216–217; Leiter 2007, 177–79). After all, as philosophers, it seems that it is the nature of law itself that we care about understanding (Raz 2004, 7, 10). Granted, there are interesting sociological questions to be asked about what various groups of people believe to be the case about how law functions. But it is not obvious that there is anything distinctively philosophical about such questions. Insofar as philosophers (qua philosophers) are interested in what people believe about a given concept, this would be because understanding people’s beliefs about the concept is a route to understanding that which it is a concept of (Raz 2004, 4, 10). Accordingly, one might think that what theories of law aim to capture is not anybody’s concept of law in particular, but rather the nature of law itself. (See also the entry on concepts , section 5.2.)

A possible response to this objection is to assert that since law is a social phenomenon and is in part constituted by practitioners’ own understanding of the practice they are engaged in, collecting evidence about the concept of law possessed by legal practitioners is an especially useful way to investigate law itself (Stravopoulos 2012, 79). Still, one might wonder whether this route to investigating the nature of law itself would be the most effective strategy to employ, given its indirectness. Why limit ourselves to asking questions about concepts if law can be studied directly?

A very different response would be to adopt a Platonist account of concepts, according to which they are not mental representations at all, but rather abstract objects akin to the objects of mathematical inquiry. The concept of law, then, would be the abstract object one must grasp in order to think about law. Accordingly, it is this abstract object— the concept of law—that philosophers care about and aim to investigate using the method of conceptual analysis (cf. Bealer 1998). Nonetheless, this view of concepts faces familiar objections. For one, an account is needed of how we can have access to the concept of law, conceived of as an independently existing abstract object. Moreover, even if we can access it, a puzzle arises about how different people who all determinately grasp the concept of law could possibly end up disagreeing about its nature (Sarch 2010, 468–73). Finally, while it might be plausible that a priori disciplines like mathematics and logic aim to investigate abstract objects (see the entry on platonism in the philosophy of mathematics ), it is not clear that the investigation of a social phenomenon like the law, which is heavily dependent on human beliefs, attitudes and behavior, can be understood analogously. While mathematicians might be investigating the nature of abstract objects like numbers or sets, it seems more doubtful that legal philosophers are investigating the abstract object law .

Given the above doubts about conceptual analysis, several views have been suggested according to which first-order legal theories are primarily in the business of describing and explaining the nature of law itself , not any concept of it. Reductionist and naturalistic views fall into this category. (As noted below, such views need not completely eschew the armchair methods just sketched, but to the extent these methods remain viable, a very different explanation of their defensibility would have to be given.)

In particular, reductionist views take it that illuminating the nature of law is a matter of explaining what the law is, and how it operates, in terms of more foundational facts. As a result, first-order theories of law succeed to the extent that they accomplish this in an explanatorily powerful way (Marmor 2013). The goal of a first-order theory, on this sort of view, is to offer a metaphysical reduction of law: that is, to show that the phenomenon of law is actually constituted by, and fully reducible to, some other more foundational type of phenomenon (in the way that chemistry could in principle be reduced to particle physics). Thus construed, positivism, for example, would seek to explain the nature of law by reducing facts about what the law is, how it functions and what it requires, to more foundational social facts—e.g., about people’s behavior, beliefs and dispositions. By providing a reduction of this kind, a theory like positivism purports to illuminate the phenomenon of law itself by breaking it down into its constituents and explaining how they together make up the complex social practice that is the law. (For more on metaphysical reduction in general, see Schroeder 2007, 61–83; see also the entry on scientific reduction .)

One well-known type of reductionist view is naturalized jurisprudence. Brian Leiter has been the most prominent defender of this position (Leiter 2007). Like other reductionist views, naturalized jurisprudence takes the aim of legal theories to be to explain the nature of law itself (not anybody’s concept of it). But what is characteristic of naturalized jurisprudence is that it also insists that a purely empirical methodology should be used in doing so (Leiter 2007, 180–81, 183–99). (See also the entry on naturalism in legal philosophy .)

Naturalists might part company with adherents of other reductionist views over whether or not the armchair methods of philosophers, and related appeals to intuitions, thought experiments and the like, are misguided. The naturalist is likely to reject this mode of inquiry, while other reductionists may be more amenable to using it. A reductionist could in principle defend this sort of inquiry, for instance, by claiming that our particular-case intuitions involve a concept that we have acquired from experience with legal practice, and so such intuitions can be one useful source of information about the nature of law itself. Moreover, if legal practice (as a social phenomenon) is partially constituted by practitioners’ own beliefs and attitudes towards the practice they are engaged in, then evidence about legal practitioners’ concept of law might prove especially relevant as evidence about the law itself (Stravopoulos 2012, 79).

By contrast, naturalists tend not to endorse the armchair method of testing theories of law against intuition, given their aim of making “philosophical theorizing continuous with and dependent upon scientific theorizing” (Leiter 2007, 35). Leiter argues that our intuitions about law are too unreliable to be afforded much epistemic weight (as others have argued with respect to intuitions in other areas of philosophy) (Leiter 2007, 180, 184; cf. Cummins 1998). On Leiter’s view, philosophers generally should aim to unpack the “concepts that have been vindicated by their role in successful explanation and prediction of empirical phenomena” (Leiter 2007, 184). Thus, he suggests a methodology that “tak[es] seriously the…social scientific literature on law…to see what concept of law figures in the most powerful explanatory and predictive models of legal phenomena such as judicial behavior” (Leiter 2007, 184). This methodological view, however, raises questions about why the legal philosopher should study only judicial behavior and not something else. More generally, the naturalist owes an account of what features of law are most in need of explication and why.

A different sort of concern that arises for reductionist views (and perhaps naturalistic views as well) is that it may pose particular problems for positivism. Specifically, if law is a normative phenomenon that gives rise to legal obligations, one might worry that it is not possible to reduce legal facts (i.e., facts about what our legal obligations are) to a set of purely non-normative facts, e.g., social ones. One might think that this would impermissibly transgress the familiar (though not uncontroversial) is-ought gap. (For a discussion of this sort of worry about positivism, see Shapiro 2011, 47–49.)

In response, one route that positivists who want to be reductionists could take is to maintain that legal facts really are descriptive in nature, not genuinely normative. In particular, such positivists might claim that facts about what legal obligations we have simply are descriptive facts about what the law holds that we ought to do—not normative facts about what we really ought to do (Shapiro 2011, 188; see also Hart 1994, 110).

Another recent methodological view developed by Plunkett and Shapiro (2017) takes general jurisprudence to be just another branch of metanormative inquiry. The latter kind of inquiry as a general matter aims to explain how normative thought, talk, and entities (if any) fit into reality. Metaethics is another branch of metanormative inquiry, which focuses on how ethical thought, talk and entities fit into reality. Thus, on the present view the subject of inquiry in general jurisprudence would be legal thought, talk and entities (if any), and the aim of the field would be to explain how such thought and talk about law—as well as legal structures and legal properties (if any)—are best accounted for in one’s general philosophical view of reality. On this view, jurisprudential inquiry would be continuous with—and methodologically quite similar—to the work done in other areas of normative inquiry, especially ethics and aesthetics.

One question that arises for this position, however, concerns the extent to which this is a distinct methodology from those discussed above. If the focus of one’s metanormative inquiry is legal thought and talk, we seem to get rather close to the conceptual analysis picture of how jurisprudence should proceed. On the other hand, if the focus of inquiry emphasizes how legal entities or properties fit into reality in general, then the view ends up seeming rather close to the naturalist position that the topic of jurisprudential inquiry is phenomenon of law itself. Nonetheless, perhaps a particular attraction of the metanormative view is that it can show how both the conceptual analysis picture and the naturalist picture capture distinct pieces of the bigger enterprise of the task that jurisprudence is engaged in. Thus, rather than purporting to replace the other methodologies discussed above, the metanormative view, if sound, would do away with there being a privileged starting point for jurisprudential inquiry (such as metaphysics of legal content, the semantic analysis of legal statements, or the nature of legal obligations).

A different sort of approach to methodology in jurisprudence takes it that the proper aim of a legal theory is to specify a substantive conception of law that it would be especially desirable for people to adopt. Moreover, even if the conception of law that this inquiry ends up supporting departs radically from our pre-theoretical understanding of law, then the resulting theory would recommend abandoning that prior understanding of law. Accordingly, if jurisprudence is chiefly a prescriptive endeavor, then theories of law might end up being radically revisionist in nature (though, of course, not necessarily).

As explained in the next sub-section, Dworkin’s methodological view incorporates some prescriptive elements. But one prominent advocate of an exclusively prescriptive project is Neil MacCormick (MacCormick 1985; see also Campbell 1996; Murphy 2001; Postema 1989; Schauer 1996; Waldron 2001). MacCormick argues that there are compelling normative arguments in favor of adopting a positivist conception of law. In particular, he suggests that values like autonomy and freedom of conscience demand that the law not regulate with a heavy hand “the sphere of aspirational values, of duties of self-respect and of duties of love,” a sphere that concerns “questing for the good beyond duty, or for the right lines of development of a self, or for the proper regard to bestow upon one’s family, friends or neighbors” (MacCormick 1985, 35–36). Values like autonomy and freedom of conscience, McCormack thinks, support the claim that at least within this sphere of conduct, it is desirable to keep the question of what the law requires entirely separate from the question of what morality requires. (However, MacCormick also allows that the law properly can regulate the sphere of “duties of justice,” as these duties are in some sense weightier (MacCormick 1985, 35).) Accordingly, at least in some spheres of conduct, the question of what the law is ought to be held distinct from the question of what morality requires. Thus, MacCormick seems to be offering a normative argument for a claim that has often been associated with positivism, namely a version of the Separation Thesis. (Though, as seen earlier, it is not clear that all positivists must be committed to a strong version of this thesis.)

While the question of what conception of law it is most desirable that people adopt is surely a significant one, it is important to note that the prescriptive view of methodology in jurisprudence is not genuinely in competition with either the conceptual analysis view or the reductionist approach. After all, it might turn out, for example, that positivism provides the best account of our concept of law, or perhaps is the best reductive account of the phenomenon of law itself, even though there are compelling normative arguments for changing the practice or adopting a new concept of it that, say, comports with natural law theory. Accordingly, accounts of the concept of law, or reductive theories of law, are not necessarily inconsistent with prescriptive accounts of what legal theory it would be most desirable from the moral point of view to adopt.

A final methodological view, which deserves separate treatment both because of its influence and sophistication, is Dworkin’s (Dworkin 1986). This view takes it that (i) the target of a first-order theory of law is existing legal practice and (ii) these theories succeed to the extent that they offer a defensible constructive interpretation (in Dworkin’s sense) of that practice. According to the constructive interpretation view, the aim of a first-order theory of law is not to analyze any concept or to reduce legal facts to other more foundational facts. Rather, the aim of a legal theory is to reconstruct the behavior and self-understandings of participants in legal practice and, moreover, to do so in a way that casts this practice in its best moral light. As a result, a theory of law is more successful the better it both fits with the data about how legal practitioners understand the practice they are engaged in, while also normatively justifying that practice (Dworkin 1986; Perry 1995, 129–31; see also the entry on legal interpretivism ).

One concern about the constructive interpretation view of methodology in jurisprudence is that it may not be in genuine competition with either the conceptual analysis or reductive views of methodology. After all, one sort of project is to explain what law actually is and how it operates (perhaps according to our concept of it). But it is a very different sort of project to explain how we should conceive of the law in order for legal practice to be normatively justified. It seems possible that our account of what law actually is tells us one thing (e.g., that certain features of it are essential and others not), while our account of what law should be like in order for the practice to be as justified as possible tells us to think of law in a rather different way (e.g., as having different essential features). Accordingly, some have argued that the constructive interpretation view engages with the other methodological views mentioned above only if it denies what they assert: viz., that legal theories attempt to provide an explanation (perhaps of some particular kind—e.g., reductive) of the actual nature of law (or perhaps our concept of it).

One way that adherents of the constructive interpretation view might deny what certain other methodological views assert is by denying that it is even possible to give a reductive explanation of law. (For discussion, see Marmor 2013, 218.) The thought would be to claim that law is a normative practice, and normative facts cannot be reduced to purely non-normative facts without losing something essential. In response, the reductionist might either deny that legal facts are genuinely normative (in which case the sought-after reduction would be unproblematic), or she might assert that any successful reduction will have to reduce legal facts to a set of facts that includes normative facts (in which case a version of natural law theory might appear attractive).

2.2 Is Legal Theory Inherently Evaluative?

A second widely-discussed question about jurisprudential methodology is whether first-order legal theories are inherently evaluative. The above views about the proper target of first-order theories of law have different implications about this second question. But before explaining that, we must first get the relevant question more clearly in view.

To begin with, one might wonder where the interest in the question of whether legal theory is inherently evaluative comes from. Some of this interest likely traces to the skeptical worry that legal theories purporting to be purely descriptive in fact are pushing some hidden ideological or political agenda. (For more on this, see, e.g., John Gardner’s introduction to Dickson 2004.) A second source of the interest in this question may be the suspicion (or hope) that if legal theory proves to be inherently evaluative, that would be an independent reason to adopt some version of natural law theory. Whether this is so remains doubtful, however, since meta-questions about the methodology of legal theory prima facie seem to be independent of questions in first-order legal theory like what the determinants of the content of law are. What is more, legal scholars might be drawn to the present issue through consideration of Dworkin’s argument that there is a very tight connection between the evaluative nature of theorizing about the law and the evaluative nature of law itself, rendering the content of law inevitably dependent, at least in part, on moral-political considerations. Regardless of the motivations for engaging in the debate about whether legal theory is inherently evaluative, however, this debate has taken on independent significance and has been a fruitful source of insight in its own right.

To avoid confusion, the question we are concerned with here must be clarified in several ways. For there are a number of uncontroversial ways in which legal theory plausibly is or might be evaluative, and these do not go to the heart of the methodological debates in jurisprudence.

First, there are several trivial ways in which legal theory, like theories about any topic , plausibly cannot be entirely value-free. In particular, it seems that one cannot engage in the business of theorizing about law without evaluating the extent to which various theories are coherent, simple, clear, elegant, comprehensive, and so on (Dickson 2004, 32–33). Granted this means that legal theorists must engage in a form of evaluation. But there is nothing special about legal theory in this regard. After all, these meta-theoretical virtues are criteria for the success of theories about any subject matter.

A second seemingly uncontroversial way in which legal theory is evaluative is that one cannot begin to develop a theory of law without determining which of its central features are to be accounted for (Dickson 2001, 38–45). John Finnis, for example, argues that one cannot do first-order legal theory without taking a stand on what the important features of law are that adequate theories must explain (e.g., the law’s claim to authority). However, this seems to require evaluation (Finnis 1980, 9–15).

Nonetheless, it is not likely to be especially controversial that legal theory is evaluative in this way. To see why, distinguish between (a) thick evaluative claims , which predicate some kind of moral goodness, or perhaps all-things-considered value, of an item and (b) thin evaluative claims , which do not. (This distinction roughly tracks Julie Dickson’s distinction between directly evaluative propositions and indirectly evaluative propositions. See Dickson 2001, 51–55.) Thus, the simplest thick evaluative claims have the form: \(X\) is morally [all-things-considered] good [bad] . Such claims might also be comparative in nature, such that they have the form: \(X\) is morally [all-things-considered] better [worse] than \(Y\). By contrast, thin evaluative claims judge how well some item fares relative to a standard that is neither moral nor all-things-considered normative. Such claims do not entail any thick evaluative claims either. Examples of thin evaluative claims thus would include “\(X\) is important” and “\(X\) is interesting”. Accordingly, even if legal theorists must make thin evaluative claims in order to be able to begin the project of developing a first-order legal theory, this does not mean that they must make thick evaluative claims in order to do so. After all, one might construct a theory that captures a range of legal phenomena that are deemed central or important, while still remaining agnostic about whether these phenomena are themselves valuable.

A third way in which legal theory could in principle be evaluative, though uncontroversially so, is suggested by the prescriptive view discussed in section 2.1.3. If the job of a first-order theory of law is to identify the concept of law it would be most desirable for us to employ, then there is a sense in which the resulting theory of law would of course be evaluative. Nonetheless, as seen above, prescriptive theories aim to answer a different question from theories in the conceptual analysis, reductive or interpretive categories. Thus, what matters to the debate about whether legal theory is evaluative is not whether legal theory in principle could be evaluative, but whether it is inevitably or necessarily so.

Now we are in a position to fully appreciate the question of primary interest here. In particular, it is whether theories about the nature of existing legal practice (or perhaps our concept of it) necessarily involve or entail thick evaluative claims about the law. That is, does offering a first-order theory of law of either the conceptual analysis, reductive or constructive interpretation varieties require one to accept claims about how valuable the law, or some feature of it, is? This is the question to be discussed in the remainder of this entry.

Some answers to the question that was discussed in section 2.1 suggest that theories of law are inherently evaluative in the sense of committing advocates of these theories to thick evaluative claims about the law. As we will see, this is most plausibly the case on the constructive interpretation view of methodology. By contrast, other answers to the question discussed in section 2.1 do not obviously entail that first-order legal theories commit their proponents to thick evaluative claims. In particular, this is the case for the conceptual analysis and reductive views of jurisprudential methodology. At least on their face, both these views seem to allow that there can be purely descriptive accounts of law—i.e., accounts that capture the central features of law without being committed to any moral or all-things-considered evaluation of the law. After all, one might think that a particular account does a good job of capturing some widely shared concept of law, but this does not obviously commit one to saying that law, on this concept of it, is good . Likewise, one might endorse a reduction of legal facts to some more foundational set of facts (e.g., certain social facts) without this committing one to thinking that the law is valuable or morally justified.

As a result, at least on their face, both the conceptual analysis and reductive views seem to allow that there can be first-order theories of law that are purely descriptive. Some argument would be needed if one is to endorse the opposite conclusion. Accordingly, let us consider some prominent arguments for thinking that legal theory must be inherently evaluative in nature. (For an overview, see Marmor 2011, 122–35.)

The argument from legal functions

One central argument to the effect that legal theory must be evaluative in the relevant sense begins from the idea that understanding what the law is requires taking a view about what functions it serves (Finnis 1980, 12–17; Perry 1995, 114–20). Moreover, one might think that functions are evaluative in the sense that attributing a function to something is to endorse a standard by which that thing may be judged as successful or unsuccessful. In this way, one might think that legal theory, too, is inherently evaluative.

While this line of thinking plausibly shows that legal theory requires accepting some evaluative claims, it does not obviously show that legal theory necessarily involves thick evaluative claims (Dickson 2001, 114–125). Claims of the form “the function of \(X\) is \(F\)” are naturally classified together with “\(X\) is important” (or more precisely, “\(X\) is important for some purpose \(Y\)”) as thin evaluative claims. Accordingly, asserting that the function of law is \(F\) does not obviously entail any thick evaluative claims about law. After all, it is not obvious why attributing a function to something requires believing that performing that function is either all-things-considered or morally good . Thus, attributing a function to law need not entail any thick evaluative claims.

The argument from the internal point of view

A second natural argument in favor of seeing legal theory as inherently evaluative in the relevant sense relies on the idea that any adequate theory of law must take account of the internal point of view that legal practitioners tend to adopt towards the law. More specifically, taking the internal point of view towards the law is a matter of adopting some kind of attitude of endorsement towards it, seeing it as in some sense justified or as providing reasons for action (Shapiro 2011, 96–97; Perry 1995, 99–100; see also the entry on legal positivism ). Moreover, it is common to think that a critical mass of the participants in legal practice must adopt the internal point of view towards the practice in order for the practice to genuinely count as law. This is a fact that any adequate theory of law must account for, one might think. Accordingly, since the internal point of view involves a positive evaluation of the law, and since any adequate legal theory must account for this point of view, one might infer that any adequate theory of law must itself be inherently evaluative. (One finds versions of such an argument, e.g., in Perry 1995, 121–25; Waldron 2001, 423–28.)

It is unclear whether this argument succeeds, however. After all, it seems in principle possible to explain what kinds of considerations legal practitioners endorse, and why, without oneself endorsing those considerations. Similarly, a first-order legal theory might be able to plausibly explain the truism that legal practitioners tend to take the internal point of view towards (i.e., endorse) the law in their respective jurisdictions without the theory thereby being committed to the claim that the law in any particular jurisdiction (or the law in general) is valuable or justified. Accordingly, it is not obvious why a theory of law cannot in principle capture the internal point of view taken by legal practitioners towards the law without itself being committed to any thick evaluative claims about the law.

The argument from interpretation

Probably the most influential argument for thinking that legal theory is inherently evaluative proceeds from the idea that legal theory is an interpretive endeavor in Dworkin’s sense (Dworkin 1986; for criticism, see Dickson 2001, 105; Marmor 2011, 126–30). To say that legal theory is an interpretive project is to claim that fully understanding what the law is requires construing it as the best instance it can be of the type of thing that it is. Moreover, one might think that in order to construe legal practice as the best instance of the kind of thing that it is requires making thick evaluative claims about the law. (See the entry on legal interpretivism .)

One might attempt to respond to this argument in two ways. A natural, though ultimately unsuccessful, reply is that construing something as the best instance of its kind that it can be does not require taking that kind to be good . Saying that Bernie Madoff was (for a time) the best fraudster in history does not entail that one approves of fraud. As a result, saying that the law must be thus-and-so in order to be a good instance of its kind does not commit one to any thick evaluative claims. Nonetheless, there is a deeper or more interesting sense in which Dworkin’s view renders legal theory inherently evaluative. For Dworkin, legal theory is an interpretive enterprise, and offering a constructive interpretation of legal practice requires construing it in its best moral light . Thus, offering an interpretation of legal practice would require taking a stand on which of the available ways of construing that practice is morally better than the others. Of course, this does not necessarily require asserting that the law, on any particular construal, is good —full stop. But it does seem to require at least saying that some construals of legal practice are morally better than other construals would be. This looks to be a thick evaluative claim, albeit a comparative one. Moreover, one cannot make such comparative judgments without having a view about what would make one construal of legal practice morally better than another. Thus, in at least this sense, taking legal theory to be an endeavor that is interpretive in Dworkin’s sense would make legal theory count as inherently evaluative in the sense we are concerned with here.

Accordingly, if one wants to maintain the possibility of purely descriptive first-order legal theories, a more promising strategy for responding to the argument from interpretation would be to question its key premise—viz., that legal theory necessarily is an interpretive endeavor in Dworkin’s sense. In order for a proponent of the argument from interpretation to assert this premise, some rationale would have to be given for it. That is, some argument would be needed to explain why we should think that understanding law requires giving a constructive interpretation of it. A critic of the argument from interpretation, then, might claim that the argument’s proponents have not carried their burden of providing a rationale for this premise, on which the argument crucially depends.

One possible rationale that might be offered here is that since social practices essentially involve communication, and understanding any form of communication necessarily involves interpreting speakers’ claims, understanding the social practice of law necessarily involves interpreting it. However, this rationale is too quick. Even if it is true that understanding any social practice requires interpretation of some kind or other , it does not follow that doing so requires a constructive interpretation in Dworkin’s sense —i.e., identifying a construal of the practice that casts it in its best moral light (Marmor 2011, 127–28). But the latter claim, of course, is what proponents of the argument from interpretation need to establish in order to reach their desired conclusion that legal theory is inherently evaluative.

Accordingly, we seem to be left in the following dialectical situation. Whether or not legal theory is inherently evaluative in the relevant sense depends on whether the argument from interpretation succeeds. Whether that argument succeeds, in turn, depends on its key premise, i.e., the claim that understanding the law necessarily requires giving a constructive interpretation of it. If a non-question begging argument can be given for this claim, then there would be reason to think that legal theory necessarily is evaluative in nature. By contrast, if no non-question begging argument can be given for thinking that understanding law requires a constructive interpretation, then one would be free to maintain that there can be purely descriptive first-order legal theories.

Of course, even if the argument from interpretation fails and purely descriptive legal theories remain possible , it could still be a worthwhile project to attempt to give a constructive interpretation of legal practice, and the output of this project would indeed be a partially evaluative theory. Nonetheless, these two types of theory would not genuinely be in conflict, as they would be addressed to answering different questions. In the end, therefore, “methodological pluralism” may be the most apt characterization of the state of play in jurisprudence.

• Asgeirsson, Hrafn, forthcoming, The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law , Oxford: Hart Publishing.
• –––, 2015, “On the Instrumental Value of Vagueness in the Law”, Ethics , 125(2): 425–448.
• Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologica , available online in English translation .
• Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio , On Free Choice of the Will, translated by Thomas Williams, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995.
• Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954.
• Bealer, George, 1998, “Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy”, in M. DePaul and W. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 201–239.
• Burazin, Luka, Kenneth Einar Himma and Corrado Roversi (eds.), 2018, Law as An Artifact , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, Tom D., 1996, The Legal Theory of Ethical Positivism , Aldershot: Dartmouth.
• Coleman, Jules, 1998, “Incorporationism, Conventionality, and The Practical Difference Thesis”, Legal Theory , 4: 381–425.
• –––, 2001a, The Practice of Principle , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Coleman, Jules (ed.), 2001b, Hart’s postscript: Essays on the Postscript to ‘The Concept of Law’ , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cummins, Robert, 1998, “Reflection on Reflective Equilibrium”, Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry , M. DePaul and W. Ramsey (eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 113–128.
• Dickson, Julie, 2001, Evaluation and Legal Theory , Oxford: Hart Publishing.
• –––, 2004, “Methodology in Jurisprudence: a critical survey”, Legal Theory , 10(3): 117–156.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously , London: Duckworth.
• –––, 1986, Law’s Empire , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Enoch, David, 2011, “Giving Practical Reasons”, The Philosopher’s Imprint , 11(4): 1–22.
• Finnis, John, 1980, Natural Law and Natural Rights , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Gardner, John, 2001, “Legal Positivism: 5 ½ Myths”, American Journal of Jurisprudence , 46: 199–227.
• Green, Leslie, 1996, “The Concept of Law Revisited”, Michigan Law Review , 94(6): 1687–1717.
• Greenberg, Mark, 2014, “The Moral Impact Theory of Law”, Yale Law Journal , 123: 1118.
• Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press; 2nd edition with postscript by J. Raz & P. Bulloch (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Hershovitz, Scott, 2015, “The End of Jurisprudence”, Yale Law Journal , 124: 1160.
• Kelsen, Hans, 1945/1961, General Theory of Law and State , translated by Anders Wedberg, New York: Russell & Russell.
• Leiter, Brian, 2007, Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lewis, David. 1969. Convention , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• MacCormick, Neil, 1985, “A Moralistic Case for A-Moralistic Law?”, Valparaiso University Law Review , 20(1): 1–41.
• Marmor, Andrei, 1992, Interpretation and Legal Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press; revised 2nd edition, Hart Publishing, 2005.
• –––, 2001, Positive Law & Objective Values , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2011, Philosophy of Law , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Farewell to Conceptual Analysis (in Jurisprudence)”, in Waluchow & Sciaraffa (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of the Nature of Law , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 209–229.
• –––, 2014, The Language of Law , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2016 [2018], “Norms, Reasons and the Law”, Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 16-19 ; reprinted in K. Himma et al. (eds.), Unpacking Normativity , Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018.
• –––, 2018, “Law as Authoritative Fiction”, Law and Philosophy , 37: 473.
• –––, 2019, “What’s Left of General Jurisprudence: On Law’s Ontology and Content”, Jurisprudence , 10: 151–170.
• Moore, Michael, 1998, “Hart’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript”, Legal Theory , 4: 301–327 .
• Murphy, Liam, 2001, “The Political Question of the Concept of Law,” in Coleman, Jules (ed.), Hart’s postscript: Essays on the Postscript to ‘The Concept of Law’ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 371–409.
• Perry, Stephen, 2001, “Hart’s Methodological Positivism”, in Coleman, Jules (ed.), Hart’s postscript: Essays on the Postscript to ‘The Concept of Law’ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 311–354.
• Plunkett, David and Scott Shapiro, 2017, “Law, Morality, and Everything Else: General Jurisprudence as a Branch of Metanormative Inquiry”, Ethics , 128(1): 37–68.
• Postema, Gerald, 1989, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Raz, Joseph, 1972, “Legal Principles and the Limits of Law”, The Yale Law Journal , 81 (5): 823–854; reprinted in M. Cohen (ed.), Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence , Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984.
• –––, 1979, The Authority of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 1994, “Law, Authority and Morality”, in J. Raz, Ethics In The Public Domain , Oxford: Clarendon Press, Chapter 9.
• –––, 2004, “Can there be a Theory of Law?”, in Golding & Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Rosen, Gideon, 2010, “Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction”, in B. Hale & A. Hoffman (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic and Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 109–136.
• Sarch, Alexander, 2010, “Bealer and the Autonomy of Philosophy,” Synthese , 172: 451–474.
• Schauer, Fredrick, 1996, “Positivism as Pariah,” in The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism , Robert P. George (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 31–55.
• Schroeder, Mark, 2007, Slaves of the Passions , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Shapiro, Scott, 2011, Legality , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Stavropoulos, Nicos, 2012, “Obligations and the Legal Point of View,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law , A. Marmor (ed.), London: Routledge.
• Waldron, Jeremy, 2001, “Normative (or Ethical) Positivism”, in Jules Coleman (ed.), Hart’s postscript: Essays on the Postscript to ‘The Concept of Law’ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 410–434.
• Waluchow, Wil, 1994, Inclusive Legal Positivism , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the authors with suggestions.]

Austin, John | Bentham, Jeremy | concepts | feminist philosophy, interventions: philosophy of law | Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy | law: and language | legal obligation and authority | legal reasoning: interpretation and coherence in | legal rights | limits of law | mathematics, philosophy of: Platonism | naturalism: in legal philosophy | nature of law: interpretivist theories | nature of law: legal positivism | nature of law: natural law theories | political obligation | reduction, scientific

Copyright © 2019 by Andrei Marmor < am2773 @ cornell . edu > Alexander Sarch < a . sarch @ surrey . ac . uk >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• Try the new Google Books
• Advanced Book Search
• Oxford University Press
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Books-A-Million
• Find in a library
• All sellers  »

Get Textbooks on Google Play

Rent and save from the world's largest eBookstore. Read, highlight, and take notes, across web, tablet, and phone.

Go to Google Play Now »

Selected pages

Common terms and phrases

References to this book.

About the author  (2002)

Bibliographic information.

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Numismatics
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Social History
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Legal System - Costs and Funding
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Restitution
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Social Issues in Business and Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Social Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Sustainability
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• Ethnic Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Qualitative Political Methodology
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Disability Studies
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

Laws of Nature

• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

The concept of a law of nature, while familiar, is deeply puzzling. Theorists such as Descartes think a divine being governs the universe according to the laws which follow from that being’s own nature. Newton detaches the concept from theology and is agnostic about the ontology underlying the laws of nature. Some later philosophers treat laws as summaries of events or tools for understanding and explanation, or identify the laws with principles and equations fundamental to scientific theories. In the first part of this volume, essays from leading historians of philosophy identify central questions: are laws independent of the things they govern, or do they emanate from the powers of bodies? Are the laws responsible for the patterns we see in nature, or should they be collapsed into those patterns? In the second part, contributors at the forefront of current debate evaluate the role of laws in contemporary Best System, perspectival, Kantian, and powers- or mechanisms-based approaches. These essays take up pressing questions about whether the laws of nature can be consistent with contingency, whether laws are based on the invariants of scientific theories, and how to deal with exceptions to laws. These twelve essays, published here for the first time, will be required reading for anyone interested in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the histories of these disciplines.

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

Essays on the Law of Nature

The latin text with a translation, introduction and notes, together with transcripts of locke's shorthand in his journal for 1676, by john locke.

• 5 Want to read
• 1 Currently reading
• 0 Have read

My Reading Lists:

Use this Work

Create a new list

My book notes.

My private notes about this edition:

Check nearby libraries

• Library.link

Buy this book

This edition doesn't have a description yet. Can you add one ?

Showing 10 featured editions. View all 10 editions?

Add another edition?

Book Details

First sentence.

"I BEGIN with a general description of the large manuscript collection of which Locke's essays on the law of nature form a part."

Community Reviews (0)

• Created April 29, 2008
• 7 revisions

Wikipedia citation

Copy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help?

As per my perspective, change is the law of nature and everyone encounters a different category of change in one’s life.

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Writing9 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Fully explain your ideas

To get an excellent score in the IELTS Task 2 writing section, one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).

For we to consider an essay structure a great one, it should be looking like this:

• Paragraph 1 - Introduction
• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
• Sentence 3 - Discussion
• Sentence 4 - Conclusion
• Paragraph 3 - Second supporting paragraph
• Paragraph 4 - Conclusion
• Sentence 1 - Summary
• Sentence 2 - Restatement of thesis
• Sentence 3 - Prediction or recommendation

Our recommended essay structure above comprises of fifteen (15) sentences, which will make your essay approximately 250 to 275 words.

Discover more tips in The Ultimate Guide to Get a Target Band Score of 7+ » — a book that's free for 🚀 Premium users.

• Check your IELTS essay »
• Find essays with the same topic
• View collections of IELTS Writing Samples
• Show IELTS Writing Task 2 Topics

It is expected in the near future that there will be a higher proportion of old people compared to younger population in some countries. Is it a positive or negative development? Give your opinion and examples.

More and more students are choosing to study at colleges and universities in foreign countries. discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this., some people think that when recruiting, companies should aim to take on people who are innovative and able to work independently while others considered they should recruit people who are able to work in a team and follow instructions. discuss both views., uestion:the most important aim of science should be to improve people's lives. do you agree or disagre with this statement, nowadays, children spend too much time watching tv and playing computer games. some people believe this has negative effects on children's mental abilities. to what extent do you agree or disagree.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Student Opinion

If You Could Change the Laws of Nature, What Would You Change?

Would you want to be able to time travel? To be in two places at once? To predict whether someone would laugh at your joke? Share your wildest ideas.

By Natalie Proulx

Have you ever wished you could do something that is physically impossible in our current reality?

For instance, have you ever wanted to travel through time, or stop it altogether? Have you ever wanted to put someone on mute? To be in multiple places at once? To immediately understand what people are saying, no matter what language they are speaking?

If you could “hack” the universe, what changes would you make? What features would you add?

In “ Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, and Can We Hack It? ” Dennis Overbye writes about a computer scientist who asked this very question:

If you could change the laws of nature, what would you change? Maybe it’s that pesky speed-of-light limit on cosmic travel — not to mention war, pestilence and the eventual asteroid that has Earth’s name on it. Maybe you would like the ability to go back in time — to tell your teenage self how to deal with your parents, or to buy Google stock. Couldn’t the universe use a few improvements? That was the question that David Anderson, a computer scientist, enthusiast of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), musician and mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, recently asked his colleagues and friends. In recent years the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all of our innermost thoughts, is a computer simulation, running on a thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low. In an influential essay in 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford and director of the Institute for the Future of Humanity, proposed the idea , adding that it was probably an easy accomplishment for “technologically mature” civilizations wanting to explore their histories or entertain their offspring. Elon Musk, who, for all we know, is the star of this simulation, seemed to echo this idea when he once declared that there was only a one-in-a-billion chance that we lived in “base reality.”

The article continues:

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Laws of nature.

Laws of Nature are to be distinguished both from Scientific Laws and from Natural Laws . Neither Natural Laws, as invoked in legal or ethical theories, nor Scientific Laws, which some researchers consider to be scientists’ attempts to state or approximate the Laws of Nature, will be discussed in this article. Instead, it explores issues in contemporary metaphysics.

Within metaphysics, there are two competing theories of Laws of Nature. On one account, the Regularity Theory, Laws of Nature are statements of the uniformities or regularities in the world; they are mere descriptions of the way the world is. On the other account, the Necessitarian Theory, Laws of Nature are the “principles” which govern the natural phenomena of the world. That is, the natural world “obeys” the Laws of Nature. This seemingly innocuous difference marks one of the most profound gulfs within contemporary philosophy, and has quite unexpected, and wide-ranging, implications.

Some of these implications involve accidental truths, false existentials, the correspondence theory of truth, and the concept of free will. Perhaps the most important implication of each theory is whether the universe is a cosmic coincidence or driven by specific, eternal laws of nature.  Each side takes a different stance on each of these issues, and to adopt either theory is to give up one or more strong beliefs about the nature of the world.

Table of Contents

• Laws of Nature vs. Laws of Science
• Necessitarianism
• Shared Elements in the Competing Theories
• Accidental Truths vs. Laws of Nature
• False Existentials
• Doom vs. Failure
• Naturalizing Philosophy
• Revisiting Physical Impossibility
• Regularity and Explanation
• Problems with Necessitarianism I—Its Inverting the Truth-making Relation
• Problems with Necessitarianism II—Its Unempiricalness
• The Regularists’ Trump Card—The Dissolution of the Problem of Free Will and Determinism
• Statistical Laws
• Is the Order in the Universe a Cosmic Coincidence?
• References and Further Reading

1. Laws of Nature vs. Laws of Science

In 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Michael Scriven read a paper that implicitly distinguished between Laws of Nature and Laws of Science. Laws of Science (what he at that time called “physical laws”) – with few exceptions – are inaccurate, are at best approximations of the truth, and are of limited range of application. The theme has since been picked up and advanced by Nancy Cartwright.

If scientific laws are inaccurate, then – presumably – there must be some other laws (statements, propositions, principles), doubtless more complex, which are accurate, which are not approximation to the truth but are literally true.

When, for example, generations of philosophers have agonized over whether physical determinism precludes the existence of free will (for example, Honderich), they have been concerned with these latter laws, the laws of nature itself.

It is the explication of these latter laws, the Laws of Nature, that is the topic of this article. It does not examine the “approximate truths” of science. Thus, to cite just one example, the controversy over whether scientific laws are (merely) instruments lies outside the topic of this article.

2. The Two Principal Views

Theories as to the features of Laws of Nature fall into two, quite distinct, schools: the Humeans (or Neo-Humeans) on the one side, the Necessitarians on the other.

a. Regularity

Recent scholarship (for example, that of J. Wright and of Beauchamp and Rosenberg) makes a convincing case that the received view as to what David Hume offered as an explication of the concept of law of nature was quite mistaken, indeed the very opposite of what Hume was arguing. What, historically, until late in the Twentieth Century, was called the “Humean” account of Laws of Nature was a misnomer. Hume himself was no “Humean” as regards laws of nature. Hume, it turns out, was a Necessitarian – i.e. believed that laws of nature are in some sense “necessary” (although of course not logically necessary). His legendary skepticism was epistemological . He was concerned, indeed even baffled, how our knowledge of physical necessity could arise. What, in experience, accounted for the origin of the idea? What, in experience, provided evidence of the existence of the property? He could find nothing that played such a role.

Yet, in spite of his epistemological skepticism, he persisted in his belief that laws of nature are (physical) necessities. So as not to perpetuate the historical error as to what “Humean” properly connotes, this arsticle abandons that term altogether and adopts the relatively unproblematical term “Regularity” in its stead. At the very least, the Regularists’ Theory of Laws of Nature denies that Laws of Nature are ‘physically necessary’. There is no physical necessity, either in laws or in nature itself. There is no intermediate state between logical necessity on the one hand and sheer contingency on the other.

b. Necessitarianism

Necessitarians, in contrast, argue that there is physical (or as they sometimes call it “nomic” or “nomological”) necessity. They offer two different accounts. According to some Necessitarians, physical necessity is a property of the Laws of Nature (along with truth, universality, etc.); according to other Necessitarians, physical necessity inheres in the very woof and warp (the stuff and structure) of the universe.

Thus, for example, on the first of these two Necessitarian theories, electrons will bear the electrical charge -1.6 x 10 -19 Coulombs because there is a Law of Nature to that effect, and the universe conforms to, or is ‘governed’ by, this physically necessary (i.e. nomological) principle (along with a number of others, of course).

On the second of the two Necessitarian theories, the “necessity” of an electron’s bearing this particular electrical charge “resides” in the electron itself. It is of the very ‘nature’ of an electron, by necessity, to have this particular electrical charge. On this latter account, the statement “All electrons bear a charge of -1.6 x 10 -19 Coulombs” is a Law of Nature because it correctly (veridically) describes a physical necessity in the world. [ 1 ]

3. Shared Elements in the Competing Theories

Regularists and Necessitarians agree as to five conditions necessary for a statement’s being a Law of Nature.

Are these five conditions jointly sufficient for a proposition’s being a Law of Nature? Regularists say “yes”; Necessitarians, “no”.

4. The Case for Necessitarianism

Necessitarians lay claim to a number of examples which, they say, can be explicated only by positing a sixth necessary condition for laws of nature, namely, by positing natural (physical /nomic /nomological) necessity.

a. Accidental Truths vs. Laws of Nature

Moas (a large flightless bird that lived in New Zealand) have been extinct for more than a century. We can assume (this example is Popper’s [ The Logic of Scientific Discovery , Appendix *x]) that some one of them (we needn’t know which one) was the oldest Moa ever to have lived. Suppose it died at the age of n years. Thus the statement “No moa lives beyond the age of n years” is true (where “lives” is being used as a tenseless verb). Moreover this statement satisfies all the other necessary conditions specified above .

But, Necessitarians will argue, the statement “No moa lives beyond the age of n years” is not a law of nature. It is counterintuitive to believe that such a statement could be on the same (metaphysical) footing as “No perpetual motion machine of the first kind exists”, or, citing another example, “No object having mass is accelerated beyond the speed of light”. The latter statements are bona fide laws of nature; the former a mere ‘accidental’ truth. The difference lies in the (alleged) fact that the latter two cases (about perpetual motion machines and about massy objects) are physically necessary truths; the former (about moas) is a mere accidental truth. To use Popper’s terminology, genuine laws of nature “forbid” certain things to happen; accidental truths do not. Suppose the oldest moa – we’ll call him Ludwig – died, of an intestinal infection, at the age of (let’s say) 12 years. (I haven’t any idea what the average life span of moas was. It’s irrelevant for our purposes.) Now suppose that Ludwig had a younger brother, Johann, hatched from the same clutch of eggs, one hour later than Ludwig himself. Poor Johann – he was shot by a hunter 10 minutes before Ludwig died of his illness. But, surely, had Johann not been shot, he would have lived to a greater age than Ludwig. Unlike his (very slightly) older brother, Johann was in perfect health. Johann was well on his way to surviving Ludwig; it’s just that a hunter dispatched him prematurely. His death was a misfortune; it was not mandated by a law of nature.

b. False Existentials

False existential statements of the sort “Some silver burns at -22° Celsius” and “There is a river of cola” are logically equivalent to statements satisfying all of the five necessary conditions specified above. If those conditions were to constitute a set of sufficient conditions for a statement’s being a law of nature, then the statement “No river is constituted of cola” would be a law of nature. [ 3 ]

The oddity goes even more deeply. Given that what it is to be physically impossible is to be logically inconsistent with a law of nature, then every false existential statement of the sort “Some S is P” or “There is an S that is a P” would turn out to be, not just false, but physically impossible.

But surely the statement “There is a river of cola”, although false, is not physically impossible. There could be such a river. It would merely require a colossal accident (such as befell Boston in 1912 when a huge vat of molasses ruptured), or the foolish waste of a great deal of money.

If “there is a river of cola” is not to be regarded as physically impossible, then some one or more further conditions must be added to the set of necessary conditions for lawfulness. Physical necessity would seem to be that needed further condition.

c. Doom vs. Failure

Suppose (1) that Earth is the only planet in the universe to have supported intelligent life; and (2) that all life on Earth perished in 1900 when the earth was struck by a meteor 10,000 km in diameter. Clearly, under those conditions, the Wright Brothers would never have flown their plane at Kitty Hawk. Even though tinkerers and engineers had been trying for centuries to build a heavier-than-air motorized flying machine, everyone had failed to produce one. But their failure was merely failure; these projects were not doomed. Yet, if the universe had had the slightly different history just described, the statement “there is a heavier-than-air motorized flying machine” would turn out to be physically impossible; hence the project was doomed . But, Necessitarians will argue, not all projects that fail are doomed. Some are doomed, for example, any attempt to accelerate a massy object beyond the speed of light, or, for example, to build a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. Again, just as in the case of accidental truths and lawful truths, we do not want to collapse the distinction between doom and failure. Some projects are doomed ; others are mere failures . The distinction warrants being preserved, and that requires positing physical necessity (and—what is the other side of the same coin—physical impossibility).

5. The Case for Regularity

With the dawning of the modern, scientific, age came the growing realization of an extensive sublime order in nature. To be sure, humankind has always known that there is some order in the natural world—for example, the tides rise and fall, the moon has four phases, virgins have no children, water slakes thirst, and persons grow older, not younger. But until the rise of modern science, no one suspected the sweep of this order. The worldview of the West has changed radically since the Renaissance. From a world which seemed mostly chaotic, there emerged an unsuspected underlying order , an order revealed by physics, chemistry, biology, economics, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, geology, evolutionary theory, pharmacology, epidemiology, etc.

And so, alongside the older metaphysical question, “Why is there anything, rather than nothing?”, there arises the newer question, “Why is the world orderly, rather than chaotic?” How can one explain the existence of this pervasive order? What accounts for it?

a. Naturalizing Philosophy

Even as recently as the Eighteenth Century, we find philosophers (e.g. Montesquieu) explicitly attributing the order in nature to the hand of God, more specifically to His having imposed physical laws on nature in much the same way as He imposed moral laws on human beings. There was one essential difference, however. Human beings – it was alleged – are “free” to break (act contrary to) God’s moral laws; but neither human beings nor the other parts of creation are free to break God’s physical laws.

In the Twentieth Century virtually all scientists and philosophers have abandoned theistic elements in their accounts of the Laws of Nature. But to a very great extent—so say the Regularists—the Necessitarians have merely replaced God with Physical Necessity. The Necessitarians’ nontheistic view of Laws of Nature surreptitiously preserves the older prescriptivist view of Laws of Nature, namely, as dictates or edicts to the natural universe, edicts which – unlike moral laws or legislated ones – no one, and no thing, has the ability to violate.

Regularists reject this view of the world. Regularists eschew a view of Laws of Nature which would make of them inviolable edicts imposed on the universe. Such a view, Regularists claim, is simply a holdover from a theistic view. It is time, they insist, to adopt a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy of science, one which is not only purged of the hand of God, but is also purged of its unempirical latter-day surrogate, namely, nomological necessity. The difference is, perhaps, highlighted most strongly in Necessitarians saying that the Laws of Nature govern the world; while Regularists insist that Laws of Nature do no more or less than correctly describe the world.

b. Revisiting Physical Impossibility

Doubtless the strongest objection Necessitarians level against Regularists is that the latter’s theory obliterates the distinction between laws of nature (for example, “No massy object is accelerated beyond the speed of light”) and accidental generalizations (e.g. “No Moa lives more than n years”). Thus, on the Regularists’ account, there is a virtually limitless number of Laws of Nature. (Necessitarians, in contrast, typically operate with a view that there are only a very small number, a mere handful, of Laws of Nature, that these are the ‘most fundamental’ laws of physics, and that all other natural laws are logical consequences of [i.e. ‘reducible to’] these basic laws. I will not further pursue the issue of reductivism in this article.)

What is allegedly wrong with there being no distinction between accidental generalizations and ‘genuine’ Laws of Nature? Just this (say the Necessitarians): if there is a virtually limitless number of Laws of Nature, then (as we have seen above) every false existential statement turns out to be physically impossible and (again) the distinction between (mere) failure and doom is obliterated.

How can Regularists reply to this seemingly devastating attack, issuing as it does from deeply entrenched philosophical intuitions?

Regularists will defend their theory against this particular objection by arguing that the expression “physically impossible” has different meanings in the two theories: there is a common, or shared, meaning of this expression in both theories, but there is an additional feature in the Necessitarians’ account that is wholly absent in the Regularists’.

The common (i.e. shared) meaning in “physically impossible” is “inconsistent with a Law of Nature”. That is, anything that is inconsistent with a Law of Nature is “physically impossible”. (On a prescriptivist account of Laws of Nature, one would say Laws of Nature “rule out” certain events and states-of-affairs.)

On both accounts – Necessitarianism and Regularity – what is physically impossible never, ever, occurs – not in the past, not at present, not in the future, not here, and not anywhere else.

But on the Necessitarians’ account, there is something more to a physically impossible event’s nonoccurrence and something more to a physically impossible state-of-affair’s nonexistence. What is physically impossible is not merely nonoccurrent or nonexistent. These events and states-of-affairs simply could not occur or exist. There is, then, in the Necessitarians’ account, a modal element that is entirely lacking in the Regularists’ theory. When Necessitarians say of a claim – e.g. that someone has built a perpetual motion machine of the first kind – that it is physically impossible, they intend to be understood as claiming that not only is the situation described timelessly and universally false, it is so because it is nomically impossible.

In contrast, when Regularists say that some situation is physically impossible – e.g. that there is a river of cola – they are claiming no more and no less than that there is no such river, past, present, future, here, or elsewhere. There is no nomic dimension to their claim. They are not making the modal claim that there could not be such a river; they are making simply the factual (nonmodal) claim that there timelessly is no such river. (Further reading: ‘The’ Modal Fallacy .)

According to Regularists, the concept of physical impossibility is nothing but a special case of the concept of timeless falsity. It is only when one imports from other theories (Necessitarianism, Prescriptivism, and so forth) a different, modal, meaning of the expression, that paradox seems to ensue. Understand the ambiguity of the expression, and especially its nonmodal character in the Regularity theory, and the objection that the Necessitarians level is seen to miss its mark.

(There is an allied residual problem with the foundations of Necessitarianism. Some recent authors [e.g. Armstrong and Carroll] have written books attempting to explicate the concept of nomicity. But they confess to being unable to explicate the concept, and they ultimately resort to treating it as an unanalyzable base on which to erect a theory of physical lawfulness.)

c. Regularity and Explanation

Another philosophical intuition that has prompted the belief in Necessitarianism has been the belief that to explain why one event occurred rather than another, one must argue that the occurring event “had to happen” given the laws of nature and antecedent conditions. In a nutshell, the belief is that laws of nature can be used to explain the occurrence of events, accidental generalizations—’mere truths devoid of nomic force’—can not be so utilized.

The heyday of the dispute over this issue was the 1940s and 50s. It sputtered out, in more or less an intellectual standoff, by the late 60s. Again, philosophical intuitions and differences run very deep. Regularists will argue that we can explain events very well indeed, thank you, in terms of vaguely circumscribed generalities; we do not usually invoke true generalities, let alone true generalities that are assumed to be nomically necessary. In short, we can, and indeed do several times each day, explain events without supposing that the principles we cite are in any sense necessary . Regularists will point to the fact that human beings had, for thousands of years, been successfully explaining some events in their environment (e.g. that the casting cracked because it had been cooled down too quickly) without even having the concept of nomicity, much less being able to cite any nomologically necessary universal generalizations.

Necessitarianism, on this view, then, is seen to dovetail with a certain – highly controversial – view of the nature of explanation itself, namely, that one can explain the occurrence of an event only when one is in a position to cite a generalization which is nomologically necessary. Few philosophers are now prepared to persist with this view of explanation, but many still retain the belief that there are such things as nomologically necessary truths. Regularists regard this belief as superfluous.

d. Problems with Necessitarianism I—Its Inverting the Truth-making Relation

Religious skeptics – had they lived in a society where they might have escaped torture for asking the question – might have wondered why (/how) the world molds itself to God’s will. God, on the Prescriptivist view of Laws of Nature, commanded the world to be certain ways, e.g. it was God’s will (a law of nature that He laid down) that all electrons should have a charge of -1.6 x 10 -19 Coulombs. But how is all of this supposed to play out? How, exactly, is it that electrons do have this particular charge? It is a mighty strange, and unempirical, science that ultimately rests on an unintelligible power of a/the deity.

Twentieth-century Necessitarianism has dropped God from its picture of the world. Physical necessity has assumed God’s role: the universe conforms to (the dictates of? / the secret, hidden, force of? / the inexplicable mystical power of?) physical laws. God does not ‘drive’ the universe; physical laws do.

But how ? How could such a thing be possible? The very posit lies beyond (far beyond) the ability of science to uncover. It is the transmuted remnant of a supernatural theory, one which science, emphatically, does not need.

There is another, less polemical, way of making the same point.

Although there are problems aplenty in Tarski’s theory of truth (i.e. the semantic theory of truth, also called the “correspondence theory of truth”), it is the best theory we have. Its core concept is that statements (or propositions) are true if they describe the world the way it is, and they are false otherwise. Put metaphorically, we can say that truth flows to propositions from the way the world is. Propositions ‘take their truth’ from the world; they do not impose their truth on the world. If two days before an election, Tom says “Sylvia will win”, and two days after the election, Marcus says, “Sylvia won”, then whether these statements are true or false depends on whether or not Sylvia is elected. If she is, both statements are true; if she is not, then both statements are false. But the truth or falsity of those statements does not bring about her winning (or losing), or cause her to win (or lose), the election. Whether she wins or loses is up to the voters, not to certain statements.

Necessitarians – unwittingly perhaps – turn the semantic theory of truth on its head. Instead of having propositions taking their truth from the way the world is, they argue that certain propositions – namely the laws of nature – impose truth on the world.

The Tarskian truth-making relation is between events or state-of-affairs on the one hand and properties of abstract entities (propositions) on the other. As difficult as it may be to absorb such a concept, it is far more difficult to view a truth-making relationship the ‘other way round’. Necessitarianism requires that one imagine that a certain privileged class of propositions impose their truth on events and states of affairs. Not only is this monumental oddity of Necessitarianism hardly ever noticed, no one has ever tried to offer a theory as to its nature.

e. Problems with Necessitarianism II—Its Unempiricalness

Eighteenth-century empiricists (Hume most especially) wondered where, in experience, there was anything that prompted the concept of physical necessity. Experience, it would seem, provides at best only data about how the world is , not how it must be , i.e. experience provides data concerning regularity, not (physical) necessity. Hume’s best answer, and it is clearly inadequate, lay in a habit of mind.

Twentieth-century empiricists are far more concerned with the justification of our concepts than with their origins. So the question has now evolved to “what evidence exists that warrants a belief in a physical necessity beyond the observed and posited regularities in nature?”

A number of Necessitarians (see, for example, von Wright) have tried to describe experiments whose outcomes would justify a belief in physical necessity. But these thought-experiments are impotent. At best – as Hume clearly had seen – any such experiment could show no more than a pervasive regularity in nature; none could demonstrate that such a regularity flowed from an underlying necessity.

f. The Regularists’ Trump Card—The Dissolution of the Problem of Free Will and Determinism

In the Regularity theory, the knotted problem of free will vs. determinism is solved (or better, “dissolved”) so thoroughly that it cannot coherently even be posed.

On the Regularists’ view, there simply is no problem of free will. We make choices – some trivial, such as to buy a newspaper; others, rather more consequential, such as to buy a home, or to get married, or to go to university, etc. – but these choices are not forced upon us by the laws of nature. Indeed, it is the other way round. Laws of nature are (a subclass of the) true descriptions of the world. Whatever happens in the world, there are true descriptions of those events. It’s true that you cannot “violate” a law of nature, but that’s not because the laws of nature ‘force’ you to behave in some certain way. It is rather that whatever you do, there is a true description of what you have done. You certainly don’t get to choose the laws that describe the charge on an electron or the properties of hydrogen and oxygen that explain their combining to form water. But you do get to choose a great many other laws. How do you do that? Simply by doing whatever you do in fact do.

For example, if you were to choose(!) to raise your arm, then there would be a timelessly true universal description (let’s call it “D 4729 ”) of what you have done. If, however, you were to choose not to raise your arm, then there would be a (different) timelessly true universal description (we can call it “D 5322 ”) of what you did (and D 4729 would be timelessly false).

Contrary to the Necessitarians’ claim – that the laws of nature are not of our choosing – Regularists argue that a very great many laws of nature are of our choosing. But it’s not that you reflect on choosing the laws. You don’t wake up in the morning and ask yourself “Which laws of nature will I create today?” No, it’s rather that you ask yourself, “What will I do today?”, and in choosing to do some things rather than others, your actions – that is, your choices – make certain propositions (including some universal statements containing no proper names) true and other propositions false.

A good example embodying the Regularists’ view can be found in the proposition, attributed to Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579) but already known earlier, called – not surprisingly – “Gresham’s Law”:

[Gresham’s Law is] the theory holding that if two kinds of money in circulation have the same denominational value but different intrinsic values, the money with higher intrinsic value will be hoarded and eventually driven out of circulation by the money with lesser intrinsic value.

In effect what this “law” states is that ‘bad money drives out good’. For example, in countries where the governments begin issuing vast amounts of paper money, that money becomes next-to-worthless and people hoard ‘good’ money, e.g. gold and silver coins, that is, “good” money ceases to circulate.

Why, when paper money becomes virtually worthless, do people hoard gold? Because gold retains its economic value – it can be used in emergencies to purchase food, clothing, flight (if need be), medicine, etc., even when “bad” paper money will likely not be able to be so used. People do not hoard gold under such circumstances because Gresham’s “Law” forces them to do so. Gresham’s “Law” is purely descriptive (not prescriptive) and illustrates well the point Regularists insist upon: namely, that laws of economics are not causal agents – they do not force the world to be some particular way rather than another. (Notice, too, how this non-nomological “Law” works perfectly adequately in explaining persons’ behavior. Citing regularities can, and does, explain the way the world is. One does not need to posit an underlying, inaccessible, nomicity.)

The manner in which we regard Gresham’s “Law” ought, Regularists suggest, to be the way we regard all laws of nature. The laws of physics and chemistry are no different than the laws of economics. All laws of nature – of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of economics, of psychology, of sociology, and so forth – are nothing more, nor anything less, than (a certain subclass of) true propositions.

Persons who believe that there is a problem reconciling the existence of free will and determinism have turned upside down the relationship between laws of nature on the one side and events and states of affairs on the other. It is not that laws of nature govern the world. We are not “forced” to choose one action rather than another. It is quite the other way round: we choose, and the laws of nature accommodate themselves to our choice. If I choose to wear a brown shirt, then it is true that I do so; and if instead I were to choose to wear a blue shirt, then it would be true that I wear a blue shirt. In neither case would my choosing be ‘forced’ by the truth of the proposition that describes my action. And the same semantic principle applies even if the proposition truly describing my choice is a universal proposition rather than a singular one.

To make the claim even more pointedly: it is only because Necessitarianism tacitly adopts an anti-semantic theory of truth that the supposed problem of free will vs. determinism even arises. Adopt a thoroughgoing Regularist theory and the problem evaporates.

6. Statistical Laws

Many, perhaps most, of workaday scientific laws (recall the first section above) are statistical generalizations – e.g. the scientific claims (explanatory principles) of psychology, economics, meteorology, ecology, epidemiology, etc.

But can the underlying, the “real,” Laws of Nature itself be statistical?

With occasional reluctance, especially early in the Twentieth Century, physicists came to allow that at least some laws of nature really are statistical, for example, laws such as “the half-life of radium is 1,600 years” which is a shorthand way of saying “in any sample of radium, 50% of the radium atoms will radioactively decay within a period of 1,600 years”.

Regularists take the prospect (indeed the existence) of statistical laws of nature in stride. On the Regularists’ account, statistical laws of nature – whether in areas studied by physicists or by economists or by pharmacologists – pose no intellectual or theoretical challenges whatsoever. Just as deterministic (i.e. exceptionless) laws are descriptions of the world, not prescriptions or disguised prescriptions, so too are statistical laws.

Necessitarians, however, frequently have severe problems in accommodating the notion of statistical laws of nature. What sort of metaphysical ‘mechanism’ could manifest itself in statistical generalities? Could there be such a thing as stochastic nomicity? Popper grappled with this problem and proposed what he came to call “the propensity theory of probability”. On his view, each radium atom, for example, would have its “own”(?) 50% propensity to decay within the next 1,600 years. Popper really did see the problem that statistical laws pose for Necessitarianism, but his solution has won few, if any, other subscribers. To Regularists, such solutions appear as evidence of the unworkability and the dispensability of Necessitarianism. They are the sure sign of a theory that is very much in trouble.

7. Is the Order in the Universe a Cosmic Coincidence?

An important subtext in the dispute between Necessitarians and Regularists concerns the very concepts we need to ‘make sense’ of the universe.

For Regularists, the way-the-world-is is the rock bottom of their intellectual reconstruction. They have reconciled themselves to, and embraced, the ultimately inexplicable contingency of the universe.

But for Necessitarians, the way-the-world-is cannot be the rock bottom. For after all, they will insist, there has to be some reason, some explanation, why the world is as it is and is not some other way. It can’t simply be, for example, that all electrons, the trillions upon trillions of them, just happen to all bear the identical electrical charge as one another—that would be a cosmic coincidence of an unimaginable improbability. No, this is no coincidence. The identity of electrical charge comes about because there is a law of nature to the effect that electrons have this charge. Laws of nature “drive” the world. The laws of physics which, for example, describe the behavior of diffraction gratings (see Harrison) were true from time immemorial and it is because of those laws that diffraction gratings, when they came to be engineered in modern times, have the peculiar properties they do.

Regularists will retort that the supposed explanatory advantage of Necessitarianism is illusory. Physical necessity, nomicity if you will, is as idle and unempirical a notion as was Locke’s posit of a material substratum. Locke’s notion fell into deserved disuse simply because it did no useful work in science. It was a superfluous notion. (The case is not unlike modern arguments that minds are convenient fictions, the product of “folk” psychology.)

At some point explanations must come to an end. Regularists place that stopping point at the way-the-world-is. Necessitarians place it one, inaccessible, step beyond, at the way-the-world-must-be.

The divide between Necessitarians and Regularists remains as deep as any in philosophy. Neither side has conceived a theory which accommodates all our familiar, and deeply rooted, historically-informed beliefs about the nature of the world. To adopt either theory is to give up one or more strong beliefs about the nature of the world. And there simply do not seem to be any other theories in the offing. While these two theories are clearly logical contraries, they are – for the foreseeable future – also exhaustive of the alternatives.

• Throughout this article, the term “world” is used to refer to the entire universe, past, present, and future, to whatever is near and whatever is far, and to whatever is known of that universe and what is unknown. The term is never used here to refer to just the planet Earth.Clearly, one presupposition of this article is that the world (i.e. the universe) is not much of our making. Given the sheer size of the universe, our human effect on it is infinitesimal. The world is not mind-constructed. The world is some one particular way, although it remains a struggle to figure out what that way is. [ Return ]
• A perpetual motion machine of the first kind is a hypothetical machine in which no energy is required for performing work. [ Return ]
• In detail, t he statement “There is a river of cola” is an existential affirmative statement (a classical so-called I -proposition). Its contradictory (or better, among its contradictories) is the statement “No river is constituted of cola” (a classical so-called E -proposition). Now, given that “There is a river of cola” is, ex hypothesi, timelessly false , then the universal negative proposition, “No river is constituted of cola”, is timelessly true . But since the latter satisfies all five of the necessary conditions specified (above) for being a law of nature, it would turn out to be a law of nature. [ Return ]

9. References and Further Reading

• Armstrong, David M., What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1983.
• Beauchamp, Tom L., editor, Philosophical Problems of Causation , (Encino, CA: Dickenson Publishing Co., Inc.), 1974.
• Beauchamp, Tom L. and Alexander Rosenberg, Hume and the Problem of Causation , (New York: Oxford University Press), 1981.
• Berofsky, Bernard, Freedom from Necessity: The Metaphysical Basis of Responsibility , (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1987.
• Carroll, John W., Laws of Nature , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1994.
• Cartwright, Nancy, How the Laws of Physics Lie , (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1983.
• Clarke, Randolph, “Recent Work on Freedom and Determinism”, in Philosophical Books , vol. 36, no. 1 (Jan. 1995), pp. 9-18.
• Dretske, Fred, “Laws of Nature,” in Philosophy of Science , vol. 44, no. 2 (June 1977), pp. 248-268.
• Gerwin, Martin, “Causality and Agency: A Refutation of Hume”, in Dialogue (Canada), XXVI (1987), pp. 3-17.
• Harrison, George R., “Diffraction grating,” in McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Physics , edited by Sybil P. Parker, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.), 1983, pp. 245-247.
• Honderich, Ted, “One Determinism,” (revised with added introduction) in Philosophy As It Is , edited by Ted Honderich and Myles Burneat, (New York: Penguin Books), 1979. The original paper appeared in Essays on Freedom of Action , edited by Ted Honderich (London: Kegan Paul Ltd.), 1973.
• Hume, David A., A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, (London: Oxford University Press), 1888, reprinted 1960.
• Kneale, William, “Natural Laws and Contrary-to-Fact Conditionals,” in Analysis , vol. 10, no. 6 (June 1950), pp. 121-125. Reprinted in Beauchamp (1974) [see above], pp. 46-49.
• Maxwell, Nicholas, “Can there be necessary connections between successive events?”, in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , vol. 19 (1968), pp. 1-25.
• Molnar, George, “Kneale’s Argument Revisited,” in The Philosophical Review , vol.78, no. 1 (Jan. 1969) pp. 79-89. Reprinted in Beauchamp (1974) [see above], pp. 106-113.
• Montesquieu, Baron de, The Spirit of the Laws , [1st edition 1748; last edition (posth.) 1757], translated and edited by Abbe M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1988.
• Popper, Sir Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery , (New York: Basic Books), 1959.
• Popper, Sir Karl, “The Propensity interpretation of the calculus of probability, and the quantum theory”, in Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics , [1957] edited by Stephen Korner, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.) 1962, pp. 65-70.
• Popper, Sir Karl, “The Propensity Interpretation of Probability,” in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , vol. 10 (1959), pp. 25-42.
• Popper, Sir Karl, “Suppes’s Criticism of the Propensity Interpretation of Probability and Quantum Mechanics,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper , edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, (La Salle, IL: Open Court), 1974, pp. 1125-1140.
• Reichenbach, Hans, Nomological Statements and Admissible Operations , (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publ. Co.), 1954.
• This important paper implicitly adopts a Regularity theory of laws of nature.
• Scriven, Michael, “The Key Property of Physical Laws – Inaccuracy,” in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science – Proceedings of Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1959 , edited by H. Feigl and G. Maxwell, (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston), 1961, pp. 91-104.
• Strawson, Galen, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume , (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1989.
• Swartz, Norman, The Concept of Physical Law , (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1985.
• Swartz, Norman, “Reply to Ruse,” in Dialogue (Canada), XXVII, (1988), pp. 529-532.
• This volume contains a very extensive bibliography, pp. 52-64.
• Wright, Georg Henrik von, Causality and Determinism , (New York: Columbia University Press), 1974.
• Wright, John P., The Sceptical Realism of David Hume , (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1983.

Author Information

Norman Swartz Email: [email protected] Simon Fraser University Canada

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

GREAT THINKERS John Locke

Essays on the law of nature.

Recommended edition:  Political Essays , ed. Mark Goldie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79-133.

Since God shows Himself to us as present everywhere and, as it were, forces Himself upon the eyes of men as much in the fixed course of nature now as by the  frequent evidence of miracles in time past, I assume there will be no one to deny the existence of God, provided he recognizes either the necessity for some rational account of life, or that there is a thing that deserves to be called virtue or vice. This then being taken for granted, and it would be wrong to doubt it, namely, that some divine being presides over the world…it seems just therefore to inquire whether man alone has come into the world  altogether exempt from any law applicable to himself, without a plan, rule, or any pattern of his life. No one will easily believe this, who has reflected upon Almighty God, or the unvarying consensus of the whole of mankind at every time and in every place, or even upon himself or his conscience.

Online: Amazon (Recommended Edition)

Causation and Laws of Nature

• Open Access
• First Online: 30 April 2022

Cite this chapter

You have full access to this open access chapter

• Andrew Loke 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion ((PFPR))

4354 Accesses

I define the key terms of the Causal Principle, namely ‘whatever’, ‘begins to exist’, and ‘cause’, and the related terms ‘time’, ‘eternal’, ‘event’, ‘change’, ‘perdurantism’, and ‘uncaused’. In particular, something has a beginning if it has a temporal extension, the extension is finite, and it has temporal edges/boundaries, that is, it does not have a static closed loop or a changeless/timeless phase that avoids an edge. This definition is compatible with both dynamic and static theories of time. While causal eliminativists and causal reductionists have claimed that causation has no basis in fundamental physics others have replied that fundamental physics does not provide a complete description of reality, and that it does not exclude causation and causal properties which operate at a more fundamental level as the ground of the regularities described by fundamental physics (Weaver, Fundamental Causation: Physics, Metaphysics, and the Deep Structure of the World . London: Routledge, 2019). Quantum physics has not shown that the Causal Principle is violated given that (1) quantum particles emerge from the quantum vacuum which is not non-being but something with vacuum fields, (2) radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei exhibit statistical regularities that strongly indicate the existence of more fundamental ordered causes, and (3) many different interpretations of quantum physics exist, and some are perfectly deterministic.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter and the next, I shall explain the notions of causality and the laws of nature which are fundamental for KCA-TA (Kalām Cosmological Argument-Teleological Argument), and defend the Causal Principle ‘whatever begins to exist has a cause’. The defence of the Causal Principle is very important for philosophy of religion debates and science and religion dialogues, as it provides the basis for a response to Hawking’s claim that

You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in. (Hawking 2018 , p. 38)

I shall respond to Hawking’s claim in Chap. 6 after establishing the Causal Principle in Chaps. 2 and 3 .

In his Inquiry and Essays , the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796) declared ‘that neither existence, nor any mode of existence, can begin without an efficient cause, is a principle that appears very early in the mind of man; and it is so universal, and so firmly rooted in human nature, that the most determined scepticism cannot eradicate it’ (Reid 1983 , p. 330). His contemporary and well-known sceptic David Hume had apparently raised an objection by claiming that the ideas of cause and effect are distinct and we can conceive of an uncaused beginning-to-be of an object (Hume 1739/1978 , p. 79). However, Hume confessed in a letter written in 1754 that ‘I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without a cause: I only maintain’d that, our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source’ (Hume 1932 , i., p. 187). Thus, it seems that Hume himself would agree that the mere conceivability of something beginning to exist uncaused does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting the principle stated by Reid (Anscombe 1974 ). Others however have argued that (in the absence of arguments to the contrary) conceivability does entail possibility, and philosophers influenced by Hume have raised doubts about Reid’s principle. For example, in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason , Immanuel Kant argued that, while the principle of causality is valid for objects as phenomena, it may not be valid for objects as things in themselves (the noumenal world). In more recent years, some scientists and philosophers have claimed that quantum physics indicate that uncaused events happen all the time (Grünbaum 2009 , p. 15). It has also been argued that, even if things do not begin to exist uncaused within our universe, it might be the case that our universe itself begun to exist uncaused (Oppy 2010 , 2015 ; Almeida 2018 ).

The debate is fascinating and of importance to metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and science and religion dialogues. In this book, instead of defending the stronger claim that ‘neither existence, nor any mode of existence, can begin without an efficient cause’ (Reid), I shall defend the weaker claim that ‘neither existence, nor any mode of existence, begins without a cause’, that is, ‘whatever begins to exist has a cause’ (here, the word ‘cause’ refers to either an efficient cause or a material cause; I shall explain this point below). For convenience of exposition, I shall henceforth refer to this weaker claim as the Causal Principle. I shall first define the key terms of the Causal Principle in the next section, and then respond to some objections to the Causal Principle. In the next chapter, I shall defend an argument in support of the Causal Principle. I shall show that the Causal Principle remains defensible not only on the dynamic (A-) theory of time but also on the static (B-) theory of time (which is widely accepted by cosmologists).

2.2 Defining the Key Terms of the Causal Principle

I shall begin by discussing the definitions of the key terms of the Causal Principle ‘whatever begins to exist has a cause’ and the related terms ‘time’, ‘eternal’, ‘event’, ‘change’, ‘perdurantism’, and ‘uncaused’.

‘Whatever’ refers to all that exists (regardless of whether they are things, events, substances, states of affairs, arrangements, etc.). Some have objected to the Causal Principle by claiming that everything came from pre-existent materials (e.g. my body came from pre-existent molecules) and therefore there isn’t anything which begins to exist. Those who affirm creatio ex nihilo (according to which God is the efficient cause who brought about the universe without material cause) would dispute the claim that everything came from pre-existent materials, but in any case the objection is based on a misunderstanding, since ‘whatever’ refers to events and arrangements as well. (Thus, for example, even though my body came from pre-existent molecules, there was a beginning to the event at which the molecules constituted the first cell of my body resulting in a new arrangement of the molecules. The event and new arrangement were caused by the fertilization of my mother’s egg by my father’s sperm.) Therefore, the Causal Principle does not require the demonstration of creatio ex nihilo (nor does it deny creatio ex nihilo ; see below). Rather, the Causal Principle is claiming that, regardless of whether something begins from pre-existing materials or not, it has a cause.

‘Begins to exist’: something has a beginning if it has a temporal extension, the extension is finite, Footnote 1 and it has temporal edges/boundaries, that is, it does not have a static closed loop (see Chap. 5 ) or a changeless/timeless phase (see Chap. 6 ) that avoids an edge. Consider, for example, Oppy’s defence of the claim (against Craig) that it is possible for the initial state of reality to come into existence uncaused out of nothing (Oppy 2015 , section 4, italics mine). The terms in italics indicate a temporal boundary, that is, a beginning. Whereas on Craig’s theistic hypothesis, God (the First Cause) does not come into existence uncaused out of nothing; rather, God is timeless sans creation and in time with creation (Craig and Sinclair 2009 , p. 189). On this view, God’s existence has a timeless phase which avoids a boundary and is therefore beginningless.

In relation to the definition of ‘beginning’, there are different views of time which need to be distinguished. A relational view of time defines time as an extended series of changes/events ordered by ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’ relations, whereas a substantival view of time affirms that time can exist as an extended substance independently of change.

According to the dynamic (A-) theory of time, the members of a series of changes/events come to be one after another. Whereas on the static (B-) theory of time, our spacetime is a four-dimensional block and the series of events is a tenselessly existing manifold all of whose members are equally real and the ‘flow’ of time is regarded as illusory. By defining ‘beginning to exist’ in terms of ‘temporal extension’ and ‘boundary’, I am using a definition that is compatible with both static and dynamic theories of time.

Against some philosophers who have doubted the existence of time altogether (Pelczar 2015 ), Simon ( 2015 ) notes that ‘it would suffice if we could know via a combination of introspection and memory that our experience changes. But this is commonplace: I remember that I was experiencing a sunrise, and I introspect that I no longer am.’ Moreover, ‘it would suffice if we could conclude that experiences take time … in the words of Ray Cummings (1922), ‘time is what keeps everything from happening all at once’ (ibid.). Thus, the fact that I do not hear all the notes of a Beethoven symphony all at once is evidence that events do not happen all at once; rather, there is a sequence. It has sometimes been claimed that a massless particle travelling at the speed of light is ‘timeless’. However, what this means is that according to Special Relativity, something travelling at the speed of light would not ‘experience’ time passing. One needs to note the distinction between experience and reality. Even though a massless particle travelling at the speed of light does not ‘experience’ time passing, in reality it still has a beginning in time at its point of origin from where the particle is emitted. (For the discussion on timelessness, see further, Chap. 6 .)

There are also different uses of the word ‘eternal’ which need to be distinguished. ‘Eternal’ can mean (1) having no beginning and no end; however, ‘eternal’ has also been used in the literature to refer to (2) something that does not come into being or go out of being. On the static theory of time, the universe can have a beginning (in the sense explained above) and thus is not eternal in the first sense, and yet does not come into being or go out of being, and thus is eternal in the second sense. In line with the latter usage, ‘eternalism’ is used in the literature to refer to the view that our spacetime is a four-dimensional block and the series of events is a tenselessly existing manifold all of whose members are equally real. However, one must be careful to note that this does not imply that the universe has no beginning. (Moreover, ‘eternal’ has also been used to refer to (3) something that has no end but has a beginning; for example, Vilenkin affirms ‘eternal inflation’ and yet he argues that the universe has a beginning; see Chap. 4 .)

An event is understood as a change. The existence of changes is undeniable. It is true that according to the B-theory of time, the ‘moving present’ (often called the ‘flow of time’) which we experience in our consciousness is regarded as illusory. (Because of this, the static theory of time is sometimes misleadingly regarded as timelessness or changelessness. The key issue concerns the definition of time and change; see below.) Nevertheless, no time-theorist (whether A- or B-theorist) would deny (for example) that he/she has undergone numerous changes since he/she was conceived (e.g. he/she has grown taller, heavier, etc.). Nathan Oaklander ( 2004 , p. 39) observes, ‘The rock-bottom feature of time that must be accepted on all sides is that there is change, and the different views concerning the nature of change constitute the difference between A- and B- theories of time.’

A change is understood here as involving a thing or part of a thing Footnote 2 gaining or losing one or more properties. On a dynamic (A) theory of time, the gaining/losing of properties involves a coming to be/passing away of properties. On a static (B) theory of time, the gaining/losing of properties does not involve a coming to be/passing away of properties; rather, it involves having different temporal parts at different times (perdurantism). The different parts have boundaries and hence beginnings (see the definition of ‘beginning’ above).

Thus, it is true that on a static theory, a four-dimensional block is ‘unchanging’ if this is understood as saying that there is no coming to be/passing away of properties, and that there is no ‘earlier’ event if this is understood as saying that there is no event that passes away before others. However, as Oaklander observes, there are still changes in the sense that the four-dimensional block has different temporal parts with different properties at different times. Moreover, some parts (e.g. those temporal parts in which there is water on earth) are posterior to (‘later’ in this sense) and dependent on prior (‘earlier’ in this sense) temporal parts (e.g. those temporal parts in which there is formation of hydrogen near the beginning of the Big Bang; scientists would say that the formation of water is dependent on the prior existence of hydrogen). In this sense later events are dependent on earlier events, and this remains true on the block theory. On a static theory of time, every event in the ‘block’ exists and is equally real, but nevertheless ‘later’ events are still dependent on ‘earlier’ events. Indeed, any theory of time which denies such a basic scientific fact as the formation of water in our universe is dependent on the prior existence of hydrogen would have to be rejected, and no B-theorist of time would deny that. (The dependence can be characterized using counterfactuals as follows: ‘if there were no hydrogen formed earlier, there would not be water formed later’; I shall argue below that this dependence is causal.)

It might be objected that, while it makes sense to talk about things ‘beginning to exist’ within the spacetime block on B-theory of time, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the block itself beginning to exist. Footnote 3 But this is not true; if the spacetime block is finite in temporal extension etc. (‘etc.’ refers to ‘does not have a static closed loop or a changeless phase that avoids an edge’), then that implies that the spacetime block has a beginning—the same sense of ‘beginning to exist’ is used. While the spacetime block does not ‘come to be’ on this B-theory view, Footnote 4 it still has a beginning in the sense of being finite in temporal extension etc., just as every part of it has a beginning in the sense of being finite in temporal extension etc. Craig and Sinclair ( 2009 , p. 183) note that ‘For B-Theorists deny that in beginning to exist the universe came into being or became actual’. Note that the concept of ‘beginning to exist’ is not absent in B-theory; indeed, scientists who are B-theorists (e.g. Carroll 2014 ) frequently speak about the beginning of universe. On B-theory ‘beginning to exist’ is not understood as ‘came into being or became actual’, but it is defined as ‘exists tenselessly as a four-dimensional space-time block that is finitely extended’ (Craig and Sinclair 2009 , p. 184). The claim that ‘the block does not exist in time thus to talk about a beginning is meaningless’ is therefore false; regardless of whether the block exists in time or not, if it is finitely extended etc. then it has a beginning according to the static theory’s definition of beginning. A block by definition has extension and an extension can be finite etc. One can say that the part of the spacetime block in which (say) Einstein exists is finite in the sense that it did not consist of an actual infinite moments but is finite etc. That is what it means to say that the block itself has a beginning.

One might object that there is a difference between the part of the block in which Einstein exists and the whole block itself, namely, the whole block itself does not exist in another time block whereas Einstein would exist in the time block. Nevertheless, I shall argue in Chap. 3 that, if the whole block has a beginning, it would have a cause just as the part of the block in which Einstein exists has a cause, the only difference is that, if the cause of the block is initially timeless (see Chap. 6 ), then it is not earlier than the block whereas the causes of Einstein (e.g. his parents) are earlier than Einstein. Both would still have causes, however.

One might ask how can the block have a cause if (according to static theory) it does not come into being or become actual, even though it has a beginning. In reply, the part of the block in which Einstein exists also does not come into being or become actual on the static theory, yet his existence is still causally dependent on his parents’ existence in the sense that, if his parents had not existed, Einstein would not begin to exist. Likewise, I shall argue in Chap. 3 that the whole spacetime block has a cause in the sense that, if the cause does not exist, the spacetime block would not begin to exist.

Aristotle ( Physics 2.3) famously identified four kinds of causes: efficient cause (the source of change, for example, the sculptor’s act of bronze-casting the statue), material cause (‘that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists’, for example, the bronze of the statue), formal cause (‘the form or the archetype’, for example, the structure of the statue), and final cause (‘in the sense of end [telos] or that for the sake of which’, for example, the sculptor sculpting the statue for aesthetic purposes) (Mackie 2005 ). In this book, unless otherwise stated, ‘cause’ refers to either an efficient cause or a material cause, and which is either necessary or sufficient Footnote 5 for an effect, Footnote 6 understood as a change. Footnote 7 Weaver ( 2019 , p. 261) notes that causation is multigrade, asymmetric (although not always temporally asymmetric), transitive, irreflexive and a dependence relation: ‘when event x causes event y , y depends for its existence and contingent content on x .’ Footnote 8

Finally, there are two different senses of the phrase ‘begins uncaused’ which are often used in the literature and which should be distinguished:

(1) For any x , if x begins uncaused, then the beginning of x does not have a causally necessary condition understood as either an efficient cause or material cause. That is, either (1.1) x begins without any causally necessary condition at all, or (1.2) x begins without something that is known to be a causally necessary condition (under certain circumstances) for the beginning of x . For example, in the reality that we now inhabit, what is causally necessary for an increase in strength of a pre-existent electric field under certain circumstances would include (for example) the switching on of an electric field generator. If events such as the increase in strength of pre-existent electric fields happen without the switching on of electric field generators under the same circumstances, they would be regarded as uncaused and would entail a chaotic world e.g. I would suffer from electric shock even though nothing is switched on (see Chap. 3 ). (2) Indeterministic events, such as (as many physicists would affirm) quantum events and (as many libertarians would affirm) a genuinely free act. It is controversial whether humans have libertarian freedom and whether quantum events are genuinely indeterministic. In any case, it should be noted that a libertarian free act does not imply that there is no causally necessary condition for the making of it; the pre-existence of the agent, for example, would be a causally necessary condition. Likewise, the pre-existence of quantum field (for example) would be a causally necessary condition for quantum fluctuation while the pre-existence of atomic nuclei and the so-called weak nuclear force would be causally necessary conditions for beta-decay, in the absence of which the beta-decay would not occur (Bussey 2013 , p. 20). The difference between supposed quantum indeterminism and (say) the supposed uncaused increase in strength of a pre-existent electric field in (1) above is that the former lacks a causally sufficient condition whereas the latter lacks a causally necessary condition.

In this book, unless otherwise specified, ‘uncaused’ is understood in the first sense, which is consistent with a key motivation for the Causal Principle, namely, Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit (‘from nothing, nothing comes’). A genuinely free act would not be ‘from nothing’; rather, it is from the agent (see further, Chaps. 3 and 6 ).

The conviction that ‘from nothing, nothing comes’ led Aristotle to insist that every state of the world must have come from a previous state of the world and hence the world must be everlasting (Cogliati 2010 , p. 7)—this insistence resulted in the denial of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo among many ancient philosophers. However, such an insistence is unwarranted given the distinction between efficient cause and material cause. Creatio ex nihilo only denies that the world has a material cause; it does not deny that the world has an efficient cause. On the contrary, ‘ creatio ’ implies that the Creator is the efficient cause who brought about the universe; in this sense, the world is from God and not from nothing.

Aristotle might object that ‘from nothing, nothing comes’ applies to material cause as well, and insist that ‘from no material cause, nothing comes’. He might appeal to our daily experiences, which seem to support the inductive generalization that whatever begins to exist has a material cause. Craig replies that such an inductive generalization can be treated merely as an accidental generalization, ‘akin to human beings have always lived on the Earth, which was true until 1968. The univocal concept of “cause” is the concept of something which brings its effects, and whether it involves transformation of already existing materials or creation out of nothing is an incidental question’ (Craig and Sinclair 2009 , pp. 188–9, 195). On the one hand, there has been no compelling argument offered to show that causes must involve the transformation of already existing materials. On the other hand, God as a causal agent could have causal powers that other entities (e.g. humans) do not have. While humans, for example, require pre-existing materials to work from in order to create (say) a table, God does not require that. Footnote 9 Moreover, there are independent arguments for the Causal Principle (see Chap. 3 ). Note, in particular, that the Modus Tollens argument for this principle explained in Chap. 3 is not dependent on inductive considerations, and because of this additional argument, the Causal Principle enjoys greater support than the principle that ‘whatever begins to exist has a material cause’, which, in any case, can be regarded as an accidental generalization, as Craig argues. In light of this, the affirmation that there is no physical entity prior to t = 0 only implies that the universe was not created out of pre-existent material; it does not imply that there cannot be an efficient cause which has the power to bring about the universe without requiring material cause. To insist otherwise would be to beg the question against creatio ex nihilo (see further, Chap. 6 ).

2.3 Causation, Fundamental Physics, and Laws of Nature

Causal eliminativists affirm that there are no obtaining causal relations in the mind-independent world (Weaver 2019 , p. 24), while causal reductionists affirm that causation reduces to something else such as a law-governed physical history, where both the laws and physical history are non-causal (Weaver 2019 , p. 62).

In favour of causal eliminativism, it might be thought that causes are merely human interpretations which involve concepts and modelling. However, if one takes up a piece of wood and hit one’s head, one would realize that, while the application of the concept of cause to the wood may be a human interpretation, the wood does have real power to bring about the event of pain, and the correlation is real. Weaver ( 2019 , p. 90) observes that instances of sensation and sense perception involve obtaining causal relations (the environment impressing itself upon the senses). Moreover, the formation of beliefs implies that there are obtaining causal relations because formations are causal phenomena. ‘When a cognizer forms a thought, they relate to the thought through causation. When a cognizer forms a desire, they cause (perhaps together with other factors) the desire’ (p. 93).

While Bertrand Russell ( 1918 ) had declared causation to be a scientifically obsolete notion and logical positivists had tried to build philosophical systems without any reference to cause and effect, Koons and Pickavance ( 2015 , p. 8) observe that

Since then, causation has reclaimed its status as a central notion in philosophical theory. Edmund Gettier, in a famous article in 1963, challenged the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, leading to new theories of knowledge that relied upon some kind of causal connection between states of knowledge and the world. Modern theories of sensory perception and memory, in particular, require reference to appropriate causal mechanisms. Work in the philosophy of language by Keith Donnellan, Saul Kripke, and Gareth Evans, among others, introduced causal theories of the meanings of words and the content of thought. Finally, the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright demonstrated that causation is far from obsolete in the experimental sciences.

Causal reductionists such as cosmologist Sean Carroll ( 2014 ) claim that ‘the notion of a “cause” isn’t part of an appropriate vocabulary to use for discussing fundamental physics. Rather, modern physical models take the form of unbreakable patterns—laws of Nature—that persist without any external causes.’ Carroll thinks that our construction of causal explanations for objects within the totality of physical reality is due to the fact that the objects obey the laws of physics, and that there is a low-entropy boundary condition in the past. Footnote 10 However, there is no physical law and no low-entropy boundary condition that apply to the totality of physical reality itself; hence, we have no ‘right to demand some kind of external cause’ (Carroll and Craig 2016 , pp. 67–8).

In reply, it should be asked why the ‘patterns’ Carroll refers to are ‘unbreakable’. While Carroll appeals to the so-called laws of nature, one should ask why the events described by fundamental physics follow those laws.

Now Hume famously stated that the laws of nature are simply regularities of events; there is no relationship of necessity between these events, nor are laws conceived of as something that govern the regularities. Hume also claims that ‘we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second’, and that ‘all events seem entirely loose and separate’ ( An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 1748, section VII). Following Hume, Regularity Theorists of Causation have analysed causation as regular patterns of succession and have regarded these regularities as ‘brute facts’ rather than as something in need of an explanation. Against this, others have argued that the question ‘Why is the world regular (in the particular way that it is)?’ needs to be answered by a deeper explanation, for otherwise the regularity of event P followed by event Q (rather than, say, event R , or S , or T , etc.) is just due to chance, which is highly improbable (Strawson 1989 , pp. 205–6). I shall argue below that the deeper explanation is provided by the properties of the things which are involved in these regular patterns, and these properties can be called ‘causal properties’. Footnote 11

Regularity Theorists might object that the question ‘What explains the regularity?’ is merely pushed back on Strawson’s strategy. For example, if the deeper explanation offered is ‘Because of the nature of matter’, they may ask ‘what explains the nature of matter (or whatever)?’ Since there must after all be some terminus of explanation, why not terminate with the regularities themselves (Psillos 2009 , pp. 134–135)?

In reply, I would argue that terminating with regularities does not get rid of the problem of the improbability of one event following another regularly by chance. On the other hand, terminating with an alternative explanation such as ‘because of causal properties grounded in the nature of matter’, which, one might argue, is determined by a beginningless and uncaused First Cause (see Chap. 6 ) and therefore not the result of chance, would resolve this problem.

Carroll might insist that in fundamental physics, ‘real patterns’ described by laws explain causal regularities, but the question is, why the events described by fundamental physics follow those patterns/laws? A pattern/law of nature is not a concrete thing but merely a description of behaviour of concrete events/thing; thus, it is still the properties of those concrete event/things which ground the behaviour/law, and those properties can be called causal properties. As Feser ( 2013 , p. 254) observes, the laws of nature are ‘mere abstractions and thus cannot by themselves explain anything. What exist in the natural order are concrete material substances with certain essences, and talk of “laws of nature” is merely shorthand for the patterns of behavior they tend to exhibit given those essences.’ Against Maudlin ( 2007 ), Dorato and Esfeld ( 2014 ) argue that the view that laws are grounded in properties (global properties rather than ‘intrinsic’ or local properties, in view of quantum entanglement) makes intelligible how laws can ‘govern’ the behaviour of objects. This is the decisive advantage of dispositionalism over primitivism (the view that laws are primitive).

Carroll might object that the equations of fundamental physics do not seem to specify which events are the causes and which events are the effects. Ladyman et al. ( 2007 , p. 160) claim that ‘matter has become increasingly ephemeral in modern physics, losing its connection with the impenetrable stuff that populates the everyday world … the ontology of modern physics seems to be increasingly abstract and mathematical’. Weaver ( 2019 , p. 63) notes that the reason why causal eliminativism has been so prevalent in philosophy of physics ‘is connected to a tendency in that sub-discipline to associate the substantial content of physical theories with the mathematical formalisms of those theories … because formalisms do not contain any causal notions … physical theories should not be understood causally’.

Nevertheless, Weaver also observes that many great physicists past and present, including the discoverers of relativity and quantum mechanics, ‘adopted causal approaches to physics and conceived of their inquiry as a searching evaluation of the world that should uncover causes’ (Weaver 2019 , p. 71). The equations of fundamental physics do not specify causality because they do not provide an exhaustive description of reality. Consider the following example which illustrates that mathematical equations do not provide a complete account of the natural world and that an interpretative framework involving causal considerations is required: The quadratic equation x 2 – 4 = 0 can have two mathematically consistent results for ‘ x ’: 2 or −2. Both answers are mathematically possible. However, if the question is ‘How many people carried the computer home?’, the answer cannot be ‘−2’, because in the concrete world it is metaphysically impossible that ‘−2 people’ carry a computer home, regardless of what the mathematical equation shows. The impossibility is metaphysical, not mathematical, and it illustrates that metaphysical issues are more fundamental than mathematics. The conclusion that ‘2 people’ rather than ‘−2 people’ carried the computer home is not derived from mathematical equations, but from causal considerations: ‘−2 people’ lack the causal powers to carry a computer home.

Feser ( 2017 , pp. 45–46) observes that ‘since the equations of physics are, by themselves, mere equations, mere abstractions, we know that there must be something more to the world than what they describe. There must be something that makes it the case that the world actually operates in accordance with the equations, rather than some other equations or no equations at all.’ In other words, the equations of physics merely provide an incomplete description of regularities without ruling out efficient causation and causal properties which (as explained above) operate at a more fundamental level as the ground of these regularities.

A number of concerns have been raised in the literature regarding the temporal order of events. It has been claimed that the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser violates the notion that causes cannot be later than their effects. To elaborate on one version of this Eraser, according to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the photon either behaves as a wave or a particle when it passes through the double slit, and if scientists quickly place a detection device, the device would detect a particle, if not, a wave behaviour would be observed. Since the placement of the detection device happens after the photon passed through the double slit, it seems that the placement of the detection device determined what happened earlier (whether the photon would behave as wave or particle). However, this reasoning assumes the Copenhagen interpretation. According to Bohm’s interpretation, the photon is always a particle guided by wave (the particle follows one path, while its associated wave goes through both paths); thus, the placement of the detection device did not determine what happened earlier but merely what happened to the photon at the moment of detection (Bricmont 2017 , p. 145).

It has also been claimed that recent experiments in quantum mechanics (a photon prepared in a superposition with regard to its polarization hitting point A before point B on one route while hitting B before A on the other route; these two causal paths [A then B, or B then A] are in superposition) has indicated that, at the fundamental level, temporal order is not fixed (Indefinite Causal Order) (Qureshi-Hurst and Pearson 2020 ). However, the problem is that such claim assumes the Copenhagen interpretation, which (as explained previously) is unproven. Moreover, as explained previously in Chap. 1 , instead of thinking of the superposed state as a photon existing in contradictory states, one can think of it as a quantum of energy spread across the possible states as a wave. Some parts of the wave reach A before B, while other (different) parts of the wave reach B before A; there is no contradiction and no violation of temporal order (it should also be noted that the emission of the photon happens before A or B: a definite temporal order!).

With regard to the so-called backward in time travelling positron in QED, this may be interpreted (in accordance with Paul Dirac’s hole theory) as spacetime locations in the Dirac sea (a theoretical model of the vacuum as a sea of particles with negative energy) at which a negatively charged electron comes into being carrying the negative energy imputed to it by the Dirac sea (Greiner and Reinhardt 2009 , p. 40), thus there is no violation of temporal order.

In any case, as I explain in response to Linford below, even if backward causation is possible and that it is the case that the future determines the past, given the arguments that the future is finite and that a closed loop is impossible (Chap. 5 ), the ‘last’ duration of the future would be the first, and the rest of my argument would still follow. Thus, in any case, the Cosmological Argument I defend is not affected by the above-mentioned concerns regarding the temporal order of events.

Ladyman et al. ( 2007 , p. 160) claim that causation is problematic in the microscopic domain where, for example, ‘the singlet state in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (Bohm-EPR) experiment fails to screen off the correlations between the results in the two wings of the apparatus, and thus fails to satisfy the principle of the common cause’. In reply, Bohmian mechanics and the Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (GRW) mass density theory are able to offer a causal explanation of the correlated outcomes of EPR-type experiments in terms of a non-local common cause (Egg and Esfeld 2014 ).

It might be objected that, ‘from the point of view of microphysics, given an individual event, there is no objective distinction between which events make up that event’s past and which its future. Therefore, there is no microphysical distinction between which are its causes and which its effects. Thus, there are no facts about microphysical causation’ (Ney 2016 , p. 146). Linford ( 2020 ) claims that ‘efficient causation is a time asymmetric phenomenon’ (p. 8)’, but ‘the direction of time does not appear in our best microphysical theories’ (p. 4). He states that ‘the distinction between the past and the future made in fundamental physics (if fundamental physics really does distinguish the past from the future) are unlikely to explain the distinction between causes and their effects or any of the other macrophysically observable temporal asymmetries’ (n.4). Linford notes that ‘the project of explaining all temporal asymmetry—including the asymmetry of efficient causation—in terms of the Mentaculus is ongoing’, and if successful, ‘efficient causation, qua macrophysical time asymmetry, will be given a reductive explanation in terms of the Mentaculus’ (p. 8). Linford explains that the ‘Mentaculus’ hypothesis (which is part of what he calls the ‘Albert–Loewer–Papineau reductive programme’, or ALP) consists of the conjunction of three principles:

First, whatever the fundamental dynamical laws happen to be. Second, the Past Hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that the universe began in the low entropy macrophysical state … third, the Statistical Postulate, that is, the specification of a uniform probability measure over the portion of phase space consistent with whatever information we happen to have about the physical world. (pp. 7–8)

The implication of this project (if successful) is that

Even if the coming into being of E requires explanatorily prior, physically necessary conditions C … the explanatorily prior, physically necessary conditions need not fall in any particular temporal direction with respect to E … the explanatorily prior and physically necessary conditions for the universe’s ‘beginning’ can fall in the temporal direction away from the beginning … entities do not require explanatorily prior or simultaneous causes for their coming into being. (p. 11)

In reply, first, it does not follow from the fact that microphysics is not able to distinguish between past and future events that there are no facts about microphysical causation. The reason is that it might be the case that microphysics does not provide a complete explanation of microphysical reality, but only a certain aspect of it, and therefore what cannot be discerned from physics does not imply it does not exist.

Second, the underlying assumption of the above arguments is the Humean assumption that the direction of causation is parasitic on temporal direction, but this assumption can be challenged (see further, below and Chap. 3 ).

Third, an explicitly causal theory of quantum gravity has been proposed (Wall 2013a , b ). While the correct framework for a truly quantum theory of gravity is far from settled, the current status of quantum gravity studies suggests that ‘any case for the claim “quantum gravitational physics does not need causation” is at best uncertain and incomplete’ (Weaver 2019 , p. 274).

Fourth, Frisch points out that descriptions in scientific literature support the thesis that ‘even at the level of fundamental research in physics, our conception of the world is ineliminably causal’ (Frisch 2014 , p. 66). He cites as an example a report from the Large Hadron Collider study group of CERN which mentions that

There are various places in the machine where beams can be ‘injected,’ that other components allow ‘suppression’ of dispersion, and that others allow for the ‘cleanup’ of the beam. Finally, there is the ‘beam dump’ where the beam can be deposited with the help of ‘kickers.’ In the detector, when a photon passes through matter, it ‘knocks out’ electrons from the atoms ‘disturbing the structure of the material’ and ‘creating’ loose electrons. (Ibid., citing Pettersson and Lefèvre 1995 )

Frisch rightly concludes that, although the word ‘cause’ is not used in these descriptions, the terms he quoted all describe what Nancy Cartwright would characterize as ‘concretely fitted out’ instances of ‘causings’ (Frisch 2014 , p. 66). The fundamental particles described by nuclear physics clearly have dispositional properties, that is, tendencies to produce certain effects when they interact in certain ways (Martin 2008 , p. 50).

Weaver ( 2019 , p. 124) notes that ‘the word interaction in scientific and physical research contexts is a causal term’, citing the Oxford Dictionary of Physics , which gives the technical definition: An interaction is ‘an effect involving a number of bodies, particles, or systems as a result of which some physical or chemical change takes place to one or more of them’. Weaver ( 2019 , p. 234) observes that ‘There are four fundamental types of interactions between fundamental entities in our best physical theories, viz., the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions … No one (so far as I’m aware) in the physics literature denies that all four types of physical phenomena are interactive phenomena.’

Weaver also notes that, if there is causation in the physical base, then ‘any attempt to reduce causal direction to the arrow of entropic increase, for example, will fail, for already within microphysical evolutions driving entropic increase are obtaining causal relations and therefore causal direction’ (p. 131). Hence, it has not been shown that causal direction reduces to some direction in a non-causally interpreted physics given that what’s fundamental in one of our currently best quantum theories should be interpreted causally (p. 143).

One might worry that the view that time-reversal invariant Footnote 12 entails that there are naturally possible worlds at which the imagined microdynamical causes are the effects whereas the effects are transmuted into the causes. In reply, Weaver ( 2019 , p. 133) argues concerning the proposition ‘every purely contingent event has a causal explanation featuring an obtaining irreflexive causal relation to back it’ that a binary relation being necessarily asymmetric does not entail that the relation goes the same way in all possible worlds. It does not rule out the possibility that, if a gluon’s activity causes a quark to take on certain properties in our world, the quark’s beginning to exemplify those properties is the cause of the gluon’s activity in another possible world. In other words, while the relationship between cause and effect is necessarily asymmetric, this does not imply that the kind of thing x which is the cause for an effect y in this world cannot be an effect y of cause x in another possible world. ‘If at an arbitrary world w , the gluon’s activity causes a quark to take on certain properties, then (at w ) it is not the case that the quark’s taking on those properties causes the gluon’s activity’ (ibid.). Additionally, there is a deductive argument for Causal Principle which shows that whatever begins to exist (this would include events at the level of fundamental physics) has a cause (see Chap. 3 ); therefore, causality is fundamental.

Concerning Norton ( 2003 )’s ‘mass on the dome’ thought experiment, it does not pose a problem for my argument because the thought experiment (even if successful; this has been challenged by other philosophers) only goes to show that Newtonian mechanics is consistent with uncaused events. It does not show that uncaused events do happen. One can legitimately reply that, on the one hand, Newtonian mechanics is not a complete description of physical world (indeed, given quantum physics and relativity, we know it is not). On the other hand, given my Modus Tollens argument (see Chap. 3 ), we know that events do not happen without causally necessary condition(s). Additionally, Norton’s thought experiment also assumes that time is composed of instants; but as Craig and others have argued, this view should be rejected because it results in paradoxes of motion (see Chap. 5 ).

Another problem with the Humean view of causation is that contingent relations between events would not support counterfactuals and warrant predictions in science (Mumford 2004 , pp. 161–162). Thus, following Kripke ( 1980 ), who argues that there are metaphysical necessary truths discovered a posteriori (e.g. water is H 2 O), many contemporary philosophers of science have argued that there are causally necessary connections between causal relata (such as events, substances, or states of affairs). The laws of nature have been regarded by them to be at least partly metaphysically necessary (necessitarian view; see, for example, Ellis 2001 ; Bird 2007 ), while other philosophers regard them as metaphysically contingent overall (contingentist view; see, for example, Fine 2002 ; Lowe 2002 ). Alternatively, one might deny that the laws of nature obtain with metaphysical necessity but argue that there is nevertheless a particular sense of necessity pertaining to natural laws (natural necessity) (Linnemann 2020 , pp. 1–2). Fine ( 2002 ), for example, argues that metaphysical necessity is ‘the sense of necessity that obtains in virtue of the identity of things’ (Fine 2002 , p. 254), and that not all natural necessities are metaphysical necessities. For example, ‘light has a maximum velocity’ is at most naturally necessary but not metaphysically necessary. Likewise, even though it is arguably naturally necessary that mass attracts mass with an inverse square law, this does not seem to render it metaphysically necessary (one would think that an inverse cube law for the attraction between masses is as such metaphysically possible). It might be objected that if an inverse cube law (rather than inverse square law) holds, we would not be dealing with ‘mass’ but with something else (e.g. ‘schmass’). However, on the one hand, it is a natural necessity that there is no schmass, on the other hand, the objector is assuming the existence of schmass as a metaphysical possibility. This goes to underscore Fine’s point that not all natural necessities are metaphysical necessities (Linnemann 2020 ).

Lange ( 2009 , p. 45) contrasts the putative necessity of the laws of nature with other putative species of necessity, such as:

(Narrowly) logical necessity (e.g. either all emeralds are green or some emerald is not green)

Conceptual necessity (all sisters are female)

Mathematical necessity (there is no largest prime number)

Metaphysical necessity (water is H 2 O)

Moral necessity (one ought not torture babies to death for fun)

Broadly logical necessity (as possessed by a truth in any of these categories)

Lange ( 2009 , pp. xi–xii) notes that, while the laws of nature have traditionally been thought to possess a distinctive species of necessity (dubbed ‘natural’ necessity) an exception to which is (naturally) impossible, yet many have also regarded the laws of nature to be contingent; unlike the broadly logical truths listed above, the laws of nature could have been different from the way they actually are. Essentialists disagree; they characterize laws as possessing the same strong variety of necessity as broadly logical truths do (Ellis 2001 ). While one can imagine these laws to be false (e.g. one can imagine a different universe in which gravity does not exist), Bird ( 2007 , p. 207) replies by claiming that

imagination is a poor guide to the modality of laws, if one supposes that the power of imagination evolved to allow us to think about the sort of possibilities—concrete, perceptible states of affairs that we might actually come across (predators in the bushes)—rather than esoteric possibilities (if they really were such) we would never experience such as a world with different laws. It can be shown how Kripke’s explanation for the illusion of contingency can be extended to laws.

While some have thought that the laws of nature break down at the Big Bang, physicist Paul Davies explains that there are still other versions of the laws of nature which hold at the Big Bang. Davies ( 2013 ) explains:

Physicists have discovered that the laws of physics familiar in the laboratory may change form at very high temperatures, such as the ultra-hot environment of the Big Bang. As the universe expanded and cooled, various ‘effective laws’ crystallized out from the fundamental underlying laws, sometimes manifesting random features. It is the high-temperature versions of the laws, not their ordinary, lab-tested descendants, that are regarded as truly fundamental.

Nevertheless, there could still be alternative universes in which different properties and different laws of nature exist, whereas the laws of logic exist in all possible universe. Lange ( 2009 , p. 77) argues that it is in this sense in which the contingency aspect of the laws of nature is to be understood, noting that the range of counterfactual suppositions under which the laws of nature must all be preserved, for the set of laws to qualify as stable, is narrower than the range of counterfactual suppositions under which the broadly logical truths must all be preserved, for the set of broadly logical truths to qualify as stable.

According to the dispositionalist view, the necessity aspect of the laws of nature is grounded in dispositional properties understood as natural clusters of powers (Mumford 2004 , pp. 161, 170). On the dispositionalist view, apples regularly fall towards the earth because both apples and the earth have mass understood as a dispositional property, and the resulting regularities can be described by the abstract equations we call the laws of nature (Dumsday 2019 , pp. 10–11). Dorato and Esfeld ( 2014 ) argue that the view that laws are grounded in properties (global properties rather than ‘intrinsic’ or local properties, in view of quantum entanglement) make intelligible how laws can ‘govern’ the behaviour of objects. This is the decisive advantage of dispositionalism over primitivism (the view that laws are primitive; see Maudlin 2007 ). According to the essentialist view, the causally necessary connections are explications of the essential properties of the natural kinds (Ellis 2001 ). Essentialists agree that some properties are essentially dispositional, but they argue that others (e.g. spatiotemporal properties) are not (Choi and Fara 2018 ; see further, Section 3.8.3).

Dumsday ( 2019 , p. 119) has defended dispositionalism against Lange’s attempt to reduce dispositions to subjunctive facts, by situating dispositionalism within robust natural-kind essentialism. ‘Although the dispositions are real and irreducible (hence preserving dispositionalism), they are not ungrounded, but instead are rooted in the kind. Consequently, dispositions cannot be reducible to primitive subjunctives. And the kind in its turn is not reducible to a primitive subjunctive fact, as its explanatory role goes beyond that of such a fact’ (p. 120). ‘A primitive subjunctive fact is ordered to a possible future state of affairs, and cannot, in and of itself, explain the present instantiation of a categorical property like shape or size. By contrast, the kind-essence, as traditionally conceived, does exactly that’ (ibid.; noting on p. 122 that kind-talk is utterly ubiquitous across all the natural sciences and the efforts of many physicists devoted to the classification of apparently fundamental types of particle in terms of kinds).

It has been objected that there are some laws of nature that could not be explained in terms of causal powers. For example, the law of conservation of energy indicates that interactions are constrained by the requirement of preserving the mass-energy, but that constraint does not seem to be the manifestation of a disposition (Chalmers 1999 , pp. 12–13). Mumford ( 2004 , p. 199) replies that what have been labelled as ‘laws of nature’ are actually a very diverse bunch: ‘Some causal laws might be best explained in terms of causal powers but others might be better explained in terms of metaphysical connections between properties and others might merely describe the structure of space–time or the nature and limit of energy.’ I shall argue in Chap. 3 that the law of conservation of energy should be explained in terms of the Causal Principle.

Mumford ( 2004 ) has gone further and argued that, given that the concept of a governing law of nature is no longer plausible, ‘law of nature’ should be discarded. Bird ( 2007 , pp. 189–190) disagrees by appealing to the widespread usage and function of the term in science which indicate that the governing role is not essential to the definition. Bird defines a law of nature as follows: (L) The laws of a domain are the fundamental, general explanatory relationships between kinds, quantities, and qualities of that domain, that supervene upon the essential natures of those things (p. 201). Footnote 13

Dumsday ( 2019 , chapter 2) has replied to Mumford that at least some dispositions have CP clauses incorporating uninstantiated universals (which CP clauses help to delimit the range of manifestations of those dispositions), which imply that the laws of nature exist. Dumsday claims that a Platonist may argue that, while the disposition instances do the causal work, the Platonic universals set the rules by which they operate, and the laws of nature can be understood as relations between universals which govern the causal/dispositional roles that properties play as a matter of metaphysical necessity (Dumsday 2019 , chapter 2). However, the notion of ‘setting the rules’ and ‘govern’ is misleading, since abstract objects do not have causal power to set or govern anything. As noted above, abstract objects such as the equations of physics are merely descriptive of behaviour; thus, there must be something concrete that ‘makes it the case that the world actually operates in accordance with the equations, rather than some other equations or no equations at all’ (Feser 2013 , pp. 45–46).

Traditionally, this concrete entity is God. Bird ( 2007 , pp. 189) notes the theologico-legal origins of the concept of the laws of nature as the decrees of God. Historically, the use of the term ‘law of nature’ is related to legislation by an intelligent deity (Brooke 1991 , p. 26). Mumford ( 2004 , pp. 202–203) objects to the use of this terminology, arguing that, while moral and legal laws are issued to conscious agents who can understanding them and decide whether to obey them or not, physical entities cannot understand and choose, and they could not have behaved other than the way they do because their behaviour are tied necessarily to their properties understood to be clusters of causal powers. He denies the existence of laws imposed on any things, which they then govern.

In reply, it can still be argued that the regularities indicate a Governor (God) who determined the properties of physical entities to be such that they move regularly according to equations in a law-like manner noted by Bird (see Chaps. 4 and 7 ). This conclusion does not require the views that (1) God has created a perfect world fine-tuned to his ends, (2) there is a universal and complete order in nature, and/or (3) what happens in nature can be described in universal and exceptionless laws. Footnote 14 On the contrary, the new groundbreaking view of nature as not universally law-governed (see above) fits well with the claim that, while God determined the properties of physical entities, He also judiciously intervenes in nature at key points to direct its ends (Gingerich 2006 ).

In any case, one still needs to ask where these ‘laws of nature’ come from. One might think that the ‘laws of nature’ express abstract relations between universals which physical things somehow ‘participate in’ (something like the way every tree participates in the Form of Tree; see Armstrong 1983 ). However, we would still need to know how it comes to be that there is a physical world that ‘participates in’ the laws in the first place, why it participates in these laws rather than others, and so on, and this indicates that the laws of nature cannot be ultimate explanations (Feser 2017 , pp. 279–280). As I argue in the rest of this book, the answers to these questions are found in an intelligent First Cause.

In summary, fundamental physics does not provide a complete description of reality. It does not exclude efficient causation and causal properties which operate at a more fundamental level as the ground of the regularities described by fundamental physics. The latter point is further supported by the argument for the Causal Principle (see Chap. 3 ).

2.4 Considerations of Quantum Indeterminancy

The Causal Principle has been rejected in recent years by some philosophers due to considerations from quantum-mechanical indeterminacy (Grünbaum 2009 , p. 15). However, others have responded that quantum particles emerge from the quantum vacuum which is not non-being, but something with vacuum fields (quantum particles are manifestations of fields) and which can be acted on by the relevant laws of nature (Bussey 2013 , p. 33). Given that the pre-existent quantum fields and the capacities to be acted on by the relevant laws of nature are the necessary conditions for bringing about these quantum events, it is not the case that these quantum events are uncaused (see the definition of uncaused in Sect. 2.2 ).

It has sometimes been thought that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle violates the Causal Principle. This is a misunderstanding. The ‘uncertainty’ in question does not imply it is possible that energy comes from absolute nothing; it just means that the pre-existing energy (i.e. the vacuum energy which is already present) can (unpredictably) have a very high value in a very short period of time, such that the uncertainty of the energy measurement can be very large.

While some scientists have proposed theories according to which the universe began to exist from ‘nothing’ (e.g. Vilenkin 2006 ; Krauss 2012 ), cosmologist George Ellis objects that the efforts by these scientists cannot truly ‘solve’ the issue of creation, ‘for they rely on some structures or other (e.g. the elaborate framework of quantum field theory and much of the standard model of particle physics) pre-existing the origin of the universe, and hence themselves requiring explanation’ (Ellis 2007 , section 2.7). Ellis’ objection indicates that what these scientists mean by ‘nothing’ cannot be the absence of anything; rather, there needs to be something that can behave according to physics in order for their physical theories to work.

Moreover, it has already been explained in Chap. 1 that, in view of the importance of philosophical considerations for evaluating scientific theories, cosmologists should not merely construct models of the universe without considering the philosophical arguments against certain models. If what these scientists mean by ‘nothing’ is truly the absence of anything, then their theory would be refuted by philosophical arguments for the Causal Principle (see Chap. 3 ) which they have not successfully rebutted.

Even if it is the case that the negative gravitational energy of our universe exactly cancels the positive energy represented by matter so that the total energy of the universe is zero, as suggested by the Zero Energy Universe Theory (see Chap. 5 ), this does not imply that the positive and negative energy arose uncaused from zero energy. One can still ask what is the efficient cause which made the positive and negative energy to be the way they are. To conclude otherwise is to commit the logical fallacy of thinking that ‘net zero imply no cause’. (This logical fallacy may be illustrated using the following analogy: the fact that my company’s total expenses cancel the total revenue, such that the net profit is zero, does not imply that the expenses and revenue occurred without an efficient cause. We still need to ask what made the expenses and revenue to be the way they are.)

As for the radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei, even if events such as the decay of a given atom of 235U at this instant rather than (say) two weeks from now do not have a sufficient cause, there is strong justification for maintaining that the phenomena (the decay and statistics they exhibit) themselves have underlying proportionate causal explanations, for they exhibit regularities that strongly indicate the existence of more fundamental ordered causes (Stoeger 2001 , p. 87). These fundamental ordered causes would be entities that are causally antecedent to the radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei. Physicist Peter Bussey ( 2013 , p. 20) notes that ‘beta-decay is due to the so-called “weak nuclear force”, in whose absence the decay would not occur. So the cause of the new nuclear state is the weak force acting on the previous nuclear state.’

Additionally, many different interpretations of quantum physics exist, and some of them, such as Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation and Bohm’s pilot-wave model, are perfectly deterministic. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that Bohm’s theory is superior to the indeterministic Copenhagen interpretation (Towler 2009a , b ; Goldstein 2013 ; I discuss this in Loke 2017 , chapter 5), and that it can explain Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Bricmont 2017 , section 5.1.8). Contrary to popular opinion, physicist John Bell has not demonstrated the impossibility of hidden variables, but only the (apparent) inevitability of non-locality of quantum physics; Footnote 15 Bell himself defended Bohm’s hidden variable theory (Bell 1987 ). Likewise, Alain Aspect ( 2002 ), the noted experimenter of quantum entanglement, agrees that his experiment does not violate determinism but only the locality condition. While it has been objected that Bohm’s theory is incompatible with theory of relativity (Lewis 2016 , p. 180), others have replied that, if Bohmian mechanics indeed cannot be made relativistic, it seems likely that quantum mechanics can’t either (Dürr et al. 2014 ; Maudlin [ 2018 ] defends Bohmian mechanics by arguing that fundamental Lorentz invariance can be violated, and that observational Lorentz invariance can be explained by appealing to quantum equilibrium). With regard to quantum field theory, Bricmont ( 2017 , p. 170) proposes Bohm-like quantum field theories in which dynamics are defined

for the fields rather than for the particles, and the guidance equation would apply to the dynamics of field configurations. … One can also propose other Bohm-like quantum field theories, including theories of particles and their pair creation … all the predictions of the usual quantum field theories are also obtained in those Bohmian-type models and, to the extent that those models are rather ill-defined mathematically, the same thing is true for ordinary quantum field theories, which is not the case for non-relativistic quantum mechanics or the corresponding de Broglie–Bohm theory for particles.

Now Bohm’s theory is not the only possible deterministic quantum theory; other deterministic quantum theories that are better than Bohm’s (as well as better than the indeterministic Copenhagen interpretation) might well be discovered in the future. The inability to predict the appearance of the quantum particles in quantum vacuum may be due to our epistemological limitation and the incompleteness of current quantum physics. As Einstein [ 1949 , p. 666] remarks, ‘I am, in fact, firmly convinced that the essentially statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this (theory) operates with an incomplete description of physical systems.’ Physicist John Wheeler notes that our current understanding of quantum mechanics is provisional, and that it is plausible to think that some deeper theory, waiting to be discovered, would explain in a clear and rational way all the oddities of the quantum world, and would, in turn, explain the apparent fuzziness in the quantum classical boundary (Ford 2011 , p. 263). Given that our current understanding of the quantum world is provisional, it is false to claim that quantum physics has shown that events can begin to exist without necessary or sufficient conditions.

In conclusion, it has been argued that no compelling scientific evidence against the Causal Principle has been offered. In the next chapter, I shall discuss a number of arguments for the Causal Principle.

Something can have a beginning even if its temporal extension is an actual infinite (e.g. if something begins to exist in the year 2020 and exists endlessly in the later-than direction on the static theory of time). However, if something is finite in temporal extension and has temporal edges, it would have a beginning.

Here, part of a thing refers to a temporal part. See perdurantism, below.

I thank Oners for raising this objection and for the discussion below.

Strictly speaking, the purported evidence for the B theory does not prove that the block never comes to be; see Chap. 6 .

Proponents of probabilistic causation acknowledge that there are sufficient causes and necessary conditions, and they regard sufficient causes as constituting a limiting case of probabilistic causes, but they deny that this limiting case includes all bona fide cause–effect relations (Williamson 2009 , p. 192). It should be noted that a cause can be causally sufficient but not causally necessary for an effect.

Weaver ( 2019 , chapter 7) argues that there are no plausible metaphysical theories of omissions understood as absences that are causal relata, and that virtually all supposed cases of negative causation can be faithfully/accurately re-described without omissions/absences.

Hence, by uncaused First Cause, I mean the First Cause of change, and that this First Cause is not something that is brought into existence. However, such a First Cause might be something that is sustained in existence, and thus is caused in the sense of having a sustaining cause. See further, Chaps. 6 and 8 .

Weaver goes on to explain that he agrees with David Lewis ( 1986 ) that causation should be understood in terms of causal dependence, but disagrees with Lewis’ additional step of reducing causal dependence to counterfactual dependence. He argues on page 261 that the heart of the causal interpretation of General Theory of Relativity (GTR) is not a relation that is reducible to counterfactual dependence, probabilistic dependence, the transfer of energy or momentum, or some other reductive surrogate relation or process.

I thank Michael Dodds for this point.

Curiel ( 2019 ) notes that ‘the Second Law of thermodynamics has long been connected to the seeming asymmetry of the arrow of time, that time seems to flow, so to speak, in only one direction for all systems’.

See the discussion on dispositionalism and essentialism below.

Collins ( 2009 , p. 270) notes that the laws of physics are not strictly speaking time-reversal invariant—since time-reversal symmetry is broken in weak interactions, notably the decay of neutral kaons.

Cf. The Oxford Dictionary of Physics ’ definition of a law in science as ‘a descriptive principle of nature that holds in all circumstances covered by the wording of the law’ (Issacs 2000 , p. 260).

Cartwright ( 2016 ) states that since at least the Scientific Revolution three theses have marched hand in hand.

Tim Mawson points out to me that Bell’s results do not even show that non-locality is violated; this ‘loophole’ is sometimes discussed under the name ‘Superdeterminism’.

Bibliography

Almeida, Michael. 2018. Cosmological Arguments . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Google Scholar  

Anscombe, Elizabeth. 1974. Whatever has a Beginning of Existence Must Have a Cause’: Hume’s Argument Exposed. Analysis 34: 145–151.

Article   Google Scholar  

Armstrong, David. 1983. What Is a Law of Nature? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Aspect, Alain. 2002. Bell’s Theorem: The Naive View of an Experimentalist. In Quantum (Un)speakables , ed. J. Bell, Reinhold Bertlmann, and A. Zeilinger. Berlin: Springer.

Bell, John. 1987. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bird, Alexander. 2007. Nature’s Metaphysics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bricmont, Jean. 2017. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics . Cham: Springer Nature.

Brooke, John. 1991. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bussey, Peter. 2013. God as First Cause – A Review of the Kalām Argument. Science & Christian Belief 25: 17–35.

Carroll, Sean. 2014. Post Debate Reflections . http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/24/post-debate-reflections/ .

Cartwright, Nancy. 2016. The Dethronement of Laws in Science. In Rethinking Order After the Laws of Nature , 25–52. Cartwright, N. and Ward, K. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chalmers, A. 1999. Making Sense of Laws of Physics. In Causation and Laws of Nature , ed. H. Sankey. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Choi, Sungho, and Michael Fara. 2018. Dispositions. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/dispositions/.

Cogliati, C. 2010. Introduction. In Creation and the God of Abraham , eds. D. B. Burrell, C. Cogliati, J. M. Soskice, and W. R. Stoeger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, Robin. 2009. The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-tuning of the Universe. Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Craig, William Lane. 2016. God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Craig, William Lane, and James Sinclair. 2009. The Kalām Cosmological Argument. In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology , ed. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Curiel, Erik. 2019. Singularities and Black Holes. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/spacetime-singularities/ .

Davies, Paul. 2013. Frozen Accidents: Can the Laws of Physics Be Explained? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/frozen-accidents-can-the-laws-of-physics-be-explained .

Dorato, Mauro, and Michael Esfeld. 2014. The Metaphysics of laws: dispositionalism vs. Primitivism. In Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics , ed. Tomasz Bigaj and Christian Wüthrich. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Dumsday, Travis. 2019. Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dürr, Detlef, Sheldon Goldstein, Travis Norsen, Ward Struyve, and Nino Zanghi. 2014. Can Bohmian Mechanics Be Made Relativistic? Proceedings of the Royal Society A 470. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2013.0699 .

Egg, Matthias, and Michael Esfeld. 2014. Non-local Common Cause Explanations for EPR. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4: 181–196.

Einstein, Albert. 1949. Remarks Concerning the Essays Brought Together in this Co-operative Volume. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist , ed., P. Schilpp. The Library of Living Philosophers.

Ellis, Brian. 2001. Scientific Essentialism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, George. 2007. Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology. In Philosophy of Physics , ed. J. Butterfield and J. Earman. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Feser, Edward. 2013. Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics . London: Palgrave.

———. 2017. Five Proofs of the Existence of God . San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Fine, Kit. 2002. The Varieties of Necessity. In Conceivability and Possibility , ed. Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon.

Ford, Kenneth. 2011. 101 Quantum Questions . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Frisch, Mathias. 2014. Causal Reasoning in Physics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gingerich, O. 2006. God’s Universe . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldstein, Sheldon. 2013. Bohmian Mechanics. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/qm-bohm/ .

Greiner, Walter, and Joachim Reinhardt. 2009. Quantum Electrodynamics . Berlin: Springer.

Grünbaum, Adolf. 2009. Why Is There a Universe AT ALL, Rather Than Just Nothing? Ontology Studies 9: 7–19.

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. Brief Answers to the Big Questions . New York: Bantam Books.

Hume, David. 1739/1978. A Treatise of Human Nature , ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. 1932. In The Letters of David Hume , ed. J.Y.T. Greig, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon.

Issacs, A., ed. 2000. Oxford Dictionary of Physics . 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koons, Robert, and Timothy Pickavance. 2015. Metaphysics: The Fundamentals . Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Krauss, Lawrence. 2012. A Universe from Nothing . New York: Free Press.

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity . Oxford: Blackwell.

Ladyman, James, Don Ross, David Spurrett, and John Collier. 2007. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lange, Marc. 2009. Laws and Lawmakers. Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds . New York: Basil Blackwell.

Lewis, Peter. 2016. Quantum Ontology . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Linford, Dan. 2020. The Kalām Cosmological Argument Meets the Mentaculus. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axaa005 .

Linnemann, N. 2020. On Metaphysically Necessary Laws from Physics. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10: 23.

Loke, Andrew. 2017. God and Ultimate Origins: A Novel Cosmological Argument. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion Series . Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Lowe, E.J. 2002. Kinds, Essence, and Natural Necessity. In Individuals, Essence and Identity . Heidelberg: Springer.

Mackie, Penelope. 2005. Causality. In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy , 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t116.e356 .

Martin, C.B. 2008. The Mind in Nature . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Maudlin, Tim. 2007. The Metaphysics Within Physics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2018. Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress. Scientific American . https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/philosophy-has-made-plenty-of-progress/ .

Mumford, Stephen. 2004. Laws in Nature . London: Routledge.

Ney, A. 2016. Microphysical Causation and the Case for Physicalism. Analytic Philosophy 57: 141–164.

Norton, John. 2003. Causation as Folk Science. Philosophers’ Imprint 3 (4): 1–22. http://www.philosophersimprint.org/003004/3 .

Oaklander, Nathan. 2004. The Ontology of Time . New York: Prometheus Books.

Oppy, Graham. 2010. Uncaused Beginnings. Faith and Philosophy 27: 61–71.

———. 2015. Uncaused Beginnings Revisited. Faith and Philosophy 32: 205–210.

Pelczar, Michael. 2015. Sensorama: A Phenomenalist Analysis of Spacetime and Its Contents . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pettersson, Thomas, and P. Lefèvre 1995. The Large Hadron Collider . CERN Document Server . http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/291782 .

Psillos, Stathis. 2009. Regularity Theories of Causation. In Beebee, Hitchcock, and Menzies , 131–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Qureshi-Hurst, E., and A. Pearson. 2020. Quantum Mechanics, Time and Theology: Indefinite Causal Order and a New Approach to Salvation. Zygon 55: 663–684.

Reid, Thomas. 1983. In Inquiry and Essays , ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Russell, Bertrand. 1918. On the Notion of Cause. In Mysticism and Logic andOther Essays . New York: Longmans Green and Co.

Simon, Jonathan. 2015. Review of Michael Pelczar’s Sensorama. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal . https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/sensorama-a-phenomenalist-analysis-of-spacetime-and-its-contents/ .

Stoeger, William. 2001. Epistemological and Ontological Issues Arising from Quantum Theory. In Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action , ed. Robert Russell et al. Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

Strawson, Galen. 1989. The Secret Connexion . Oxford: Clarendon.

Towler, Mike. 2009a. Pilot Wave Teory, Bohmian Metaphysics, and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Lecture 7. www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm7.pdf . Accessed 20 Jan 2017.

———. 2009b. De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Teory and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. http://www.tcm.phy.cam. ac.uk/~mdt26/pilot_waves.html . Accessed 20 Jan 2017.

Vilenkin, Alexander. 2006. Many Worlds in One . New York: Hill and Wang.

Wall, Aron. 2013a. The Generalized Second Law Implies a Quantum SingularityTheorem. Classical and Quantum Gravity 30 (16): 165003. Preprint: arXiv:1010.5513v4 [gr-qc].

———. 2013b. Corrigendum: The Generalized Second Law Implies a Quantum Singularity Theorem. Classical and Quantum Gravity 30 (19): 199501.

Weaver, C. 2019. Fundamental Causation: Physics, Metaphysics, and the Deep Structure of the World . London: Routledge.

Williamson, Jon. 2009. Probabilistic Theories of Causality. In The Oxford Handbook of Causation ed. Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Andrew Loke

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Loke, A. (2022). Causation and Laws of Nature. In: The Teleological and Kalam Cosmological Arguments Revisited. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94403-2_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94403-2_2

Published : 30 April 2022

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-94402-5

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-94403-2

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Readers’ Blog

Change is the rule of nature

“Change is the law of the universe. You can be a millionaire or a pauper in an instant.”- Bhagawat Geeta

Changes are a major and very important part of our life. As lord Krishna says change is the law of the universe and everybody should embrace it. But changes are not same for everyone. Some love changes on the other hand some hate it.

It is said that without change nothing can grow and blossom properly because every change brings with it some positive and negative impacts with it. Some people know how to keep pace with these changes but there are some people who do not want to keep pace with the changes.

Change is a natural and irresistible process that occurs with the change of time, generations and eras. There is a famous saying- “Go with the flow”; this proverb teaches us to respect and survive in every situation without complaining because we cannot control or change the nature. Therefore, instead of fighting it we should embrace it.

Now let’s talk about people’s reactions towards these certain changes. So first of all there are always two types of individuals the first one who sees the glass as half full that means who has positive attitude and the second one who sees the glass as half empty that means who has negative attitude. So, if we talk about these two categories of people, we can conclude that the former will respect the changes and latter will feel disturbed by the changes.

When change happens by choice, we see it as an opportunity but when change occurs accidently we feel panic. When we are not ready for change then change seems like a worry to us. But we can also turn this into an opportunity; for example, during the pandemic we have faced many changes in our lifestyle such as social distancing, digitalization in education, work from home system, sanitization etc. Some felt troubled by these changes while some converted these changes into opportunities.

As we have seen in the last two years, there has been a spurt in digitalization during lockdown. Due to lack of personal touch people became more aware of the importance of digitalization during pandemic.

So the gist is that changes will happen all the time but we have to learn to live with the changes and accept the fact that this is beyond our control. It is god’s choice not ours, so respect change, respect god.

All Comments ( ) +

@ Articles by Sakshi

I am a beginner who wants to be a writer. I love writing since childhood. And nowadays I am pursuing banking for the financial stability but my dream job is to be a writer. So I want to start my writing career. I write an article daily because that's what I want. Therefore, I want to write for a recoganised newspaper and the times of India is one of the most popular newspapers. I have done my schooling from a hindi medium RBSE school named B. R. Modal Sen. Sec. School. But learning English is my childhood passion and I have been writing since my childhood in English in order to improve my English and my efforts got the fruit and now I think I am good in english.

• Cheating: an evil for students
• Transparency in administration
• Greetings without greeting card
• Seven promises of love.
• A NIGHT TO CELEBRATE THE DIVINE LOVE OF LORD SHIVA AND MAA GAURI

Oldest language of the world

whatsup University

Today’s time is paramount!

Women’s empowerment in india, from ancient period to modern time period..

baydahi roy

Recently Joined Bloggers

• Architecture and Design
• Asian and Pacific Studies
• Business and Economics
• Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Computer Sciences
• Cultural Studies
• Engineering
• General Interest
• Geosciences
• Industrial Chemistry
• Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Library and Information Science, Book Studies
• Life Sciences
• Linguistics and Semiotics
• Literary Studies
• Materials Sciences
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences
• Sports and Recreation
• Theology and Religion
• Publish your article
• The role of authors
• Promoting your article
• Abstracting & indexing
• Publishing Ethics
• Why publish with De Gruyter
• How to publish with De Gruyter
• Our book series
• Our subject areas
• Your digital product at De Gruyter
• Contribute to our reference works
• Product information
• Tools & resources
• Product Information
• Promotional Materials
• Orders and Inquiries
• FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
• Repository Policy
• Free access policy
• Open Access agreements
• Database portals
• For Authors
• Customer service
• People + Culture
• Journal Management
• How to join us
• Working at De Gruyter
• Mission & Vision
• De Gruyter Foundation
• De Gruyter Ebound
• Our Responsibility
• Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

Laws of Nature

Essays on the philosophical, scientific and historical dimensions.

• Edited by: Friedel Weinert
• X / Twitter

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Copyright year: 1995
• Edition: Reprint 2010
• Front matter: 10
• Main content: 776
• Illustrations: 23
• Keywords: Naturrecht ; Aufsatzsammlung
• Published: May 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9783110869859
• Published: September 22, 1995
• ISBN: 9783110139181

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 16 August 2024

Sustainable tourism in the Tremiti Islands (South Italy)

• Francesca Ranieri 1 ,
• Gianfranco D’Onghia 2 , 5 ,
• Antonio Felice Uricchio 3 , 6 ,
• Ranieri Ada Cristina 4 , 7 ,
• Luigi Lopopolo 2 &
• Ezio Ranieri 2  

Scientific Reports volume  14 , Article number:  19021 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Climate-change policy
• Environmental economics
• Environmental impact
• Sustainability

An analysis of the pressure factors that influence the sustainable tourism in the Tremiti Islands (TI) has been performed. Tourist’s fluxes have been investigated in terms of monthly arrival and presences showing a high value of the territorial exploitation index with high number of arrivals, particularly in August, and low occupancy rate. Effects of climatic change has been analyzed in TI with reference to the increase of average air and sea temperature in the islands. Some measures of contrast to climate change and to favour sustainable tourism have been discussed also. The CO 2 emissions by ferries transport, solid waste and wastewater treatment have been calculated. Environmental taxation for sustainable tourism aimed tat CO 2 content reduction is also assessed identifying the value in 1.47 €/capita on the basis of the tourist arrivals and presences considering the environmental cost for CO 2 removal and showing that tourism taxation should be well accepted if funds are destined to environmental purposes.

Introduction

The Tremiti Islands (TI) are located in Apulia, Southeast of Italy, and consist of five islands: San Domino (the largest), San Nicola, Capraia, Cretaccio (little more than a large rock) and Pianosa (11 miles from Capraia), for a total extension of 3.34 km 2 ; it is 12.5 miles from the nearest town in the Gargano (Torre Mileto, a hamlet of Sannicandro Garganico). The emerged surface of the archipelago is part of the Gargano National Park. Tremiti Islands are one of the Marine Protected Areas (MPA) in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Mediterranean Sea is a densely populated region where multiple human activities have placed stress on biodiversity, food webs, and ecosystems for centuries 1 , 2 , 3 . The Mediterranean coastal region is home to more than 150,000,000 people and is by far the largest global tourism destination, attracting almost a third of the world’s international tourists annually (343,000,000 out of 980,000,000 worldwide in 2014, with a projection of 500,000,000 by 2030 4 . The demand for marine resources and space is quite high, leading many users to oppose the establishment of MPAs. This is because such conservation measures may limit or displace activities such as local commercial and recreational fishing, boating, and diving. In such situations, it is crucial to understand whether MPAs are actually effective and under what circumstances. This can help raise awareness among the public and decision-makers, and guide decisions about creating, maintaining, expanding, managing, enforcing, and supporting MPAs.

One of the areas most affected by the tourism phenomenon in Puglia is the Tremiti Islands archipelago. The Italian Institute of Statistics, ISTAT, which recently classified the Italian municipalities by tourist areas prevalent concerning tourist density and territorial vocations, has defined the municipality of the Tremiti Islands as a “municipality with a maritime vocation and with a cultural, historical, artistic and maritime, cultural” 5 . The Tremiti Islands municipality boasts a unique blend of natural and man-made heritage. Its natural elements—such as inlets, sea caves, stunning views, and diverse underwater ecosystems—are a sight to behold. The island’s archaeological sites, like Greco-Roman tombs, and architectural landmarks, such as the fortified walls and the Abbey of San Nicola, are equally impressive. The monastery, which was home to three different religious orders from 1000 to 1700, is another must-see attraction. Overall, the archipelago’s rich heritage makes it a perfect destination for tourism.

The Tremiti islands are now in a delicate balance between the delicacy of their natural beauty and the high pressure of tourist fluxes.

Human activity, through the emission of greenhouse gases, has caused global warming, resulting in a significant increase in the global surface temperature of the earth and oceans, and coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 .

TI are also subject to the effects of climate change, regarding the rise of the average and maximum temperatures of the air and water which can have consequences in the management of sustainable tourism. In TI, different approaches should be taken to manage the indirect impacts of climate change on tourism, depending on the specific impacts under consideration for sustainable tourism. For example, implementing a program to reduce CO 2 emissions, preserving biodiversity in the TI, optimizing waste collection and disposal, reducing organic and inorganic pollution and managing the increased risk of forest fires in the interior 10 , 11 . All these climate change adaptation measures should include specific actions for the environmental, social and economic sectors, as well as tailor-made adaptation measures for well-managed and participatory sustainable tourism 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 . In TI, sustainable tourism development is closely linked to ecotourism, a form of tourism based on natural resources that preserves environmental sustainability and develops people's well-being. It should be characterized by community participation and conservation for the sustainable development of the MPA as a key strategy for environmental education 11 , 16 , 17 , 18 .

The problem of the negative impact of tourism on the environment in TI arises from the growth of mass tourism.

The aim of this paper is to discuss principal aspects affecting sustainable tourism in the Tremiti Islands including tourist’ fluxes, climate change, and environmental taxation suggesting measures to promote an environmental awareness in the management of tourism at the Tremiti Islands.

The specific objectives of the paper are:

To analyze the tourist fluxes during the year at TI

To illustrate the effects of climate change in TI

To assess the CO 2 emissions correlated to solid waste, wastewater and ferry transport

To propose measures to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change

To determine the value of an environmental tax necessary to facilitate sustainable tourism development.

Dataset and statistics

The tourist arrival and presence data were obtained from “Osservatorio Turistico Regionale 2019,” while the climatic data were sourced from “Protezione Civile Puglia, Annali Idrologici – Parte 1 (2021)” and ERA5 global reanalysis Hersbach 19 , 20 , 21 .

The accuracy of the linear regressions of the climatic data was evaluated by calculating the R-squared values. For the tourist data, a one-way ANOVA was performed to determine significant differences between the values. Correlation tests were also carried out to confirm the trends observed in the regressions.

Tourists fluxes pressure index

In the Tremiti Islands, there is predominant tourism characterized by high seasonality with short-term stays and a notable density of tourists especially in the months of July and August. The month of August alone accounts for 35% of the annual tourist presences with 20,859 presences as illustrated in Fig.  1 .

Total tourist presences and arrivals at TI during the year.

These data confirm the Apulian seaside tourism vocation. This seasonal tourism is concentrated in July and August and alone covers more than 51% of annual tourist presences (Osservatorio Turistico Regionale, 2021) 19 .

Another critical issue regards the daily arrivals, 73,240 in August, at TI. Every day, in August, as average 20,859 represents the number of the presences, i.e., the number of the tourists that are sleeping in the islands, and 52,381 are the one-day tourists who contribute significantly at the tourism pressure index and to the CO 2 emissions.

The use of Mediterranean islands, including the TI, by both the resident population and tourists is often evaluated using a Territorial Exploitation Index. This index measures the pressure on the environment caused by tourists and the resident population from the demand side. It calculates the impact of tourist arrivals and residents on the total area of the territory. The value of this index can be seen as an indirect measure of the pressure that tourists and residents put on the region’s infrastructure 22 , whereby:

TEI = (arrivals/area(km 2 ) + residents/area (km 2 ))/100.

This indicator makes it possible to classify islands according to the degree of exploitation of their territory. The Tremiti Islands Territorial Exploitation Index is equal to 59.8, one of the highest in Mediterranean. This means that TI have a high tourism pressure index, but Tremiti islands have also a low occupancy rate, because the supply of bed spaces is being underutilized, so a design growth strategy is needed 22 , 23 .

Throughout the Mediterranean, the tourism sector is economically important in terms of job creation, infrastructure development and foreign exchange. Tourism policies aimed at moving towards sustainability should be focused on seasonality reduction, tourism restraint and the upgrading of, but not increasing supply of tourism 22 , 24 . In these territories, which are often fragile and highly vulnerable to tourist activities, as well as being characterized by developmental backwardness, the strategies to be defined and approaches to be followed must consider the peculiarities of the islands 25 .

Case study of Tremiti Islands.

Climate change at ti.

A progressive increase of the effects of climate change has been evidenced over the last 40 years throughout the Mediterranean and in the Mediterranean islands 26 . Climate change contributes to the progressive decline of these islands’ extraordinarily rich marine biodiversity 27 . Since they are islands, they are more exposed to marine risks than mainland locations 28 , 29 . They share common vulnerabilities to climate change, derived from low economic diversification and capacity for sewage treatment, among other aspects. They are also characterized by having less climate-related data to inform decision-making, compared to the mainland 30 . Climatic conditions have also changed in the Tremiti islands with an increase of the average air temperature and of the average sea temperature over the last 40 years as shown in Figs.  2 , 3 .

Tremiti Islands—Average and max. extreme air temperature in the last 40 years.

Tremiti Islands—Average Sea temperature in the last 40 years.

Figure  2 shows a constant trend of increasing air temperature over the last 40 years, which is remarkable for the average maximum temperature.

Figure  3 shows the increase in average seawater temperature in the range of about 1.5 ℃ in the last 40 years, with serious implications for marine flora and fauna.

Calculation of CO 2 from the tourist fluxes

CO 2 production has been calculated as the contribution of Ferry Transport, Solid Waste and Wastewater Treatment.

CO 2 from ferries transport

The Tremiti Islands can be reached from five ports: Port of Vasto (Abruzzo); Port of Peschici (Apulia); Port of Termoli (Molise); Port of Vieste (Apulia) and Port of Rodi Garganico (Apulia).

The average speed of the ferries is 19 knots per hour (35 km/h) and the average diesel consumption is 2700 l/h (0.0132 km/l). One litre of diesel produces about 2.66 kg of CO 2 , so according to similar calculations, ferry transport produces about 201 kg CO 2 /km 31 .

Total Ferries routes are 300 in August and 46 km is the average distance between Italian ports and TI, the total ferries routes cover a distance of 13,800 km.

The total number of tourists transported, arrivals and presences, in the Tremiti Islands in August is 73,240. A total of 13,800 * 201 = 2773.8 t of CO 2 /August is produced by the ferries and 2,773.8:73,240 = 0.038 t of CO 2 /tourist*day is produced by each tourist in August including the one-day tourists.

CO 2 from solid waste

The seasonal nature of tourism also requires additional efforts from local authorities to provide services such as policing, traffic control, water management and waste management. The seasonality of tourism greatly amplifies the impact of tourism on waste management. It also shows that this additional impact comes through scale effects, with seasonality making it harder to manage solid waste at optimal scale. Therefore, relating to the size of touristic seasonal flow of presences, it should be preferred a lower number of tourists who stay longer over a larger number of short stays 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 . It is assumed that 1 kg of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) produces 1.11 kg CO 2 , mainly due to CH 4 content and emission, and collection and transport 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 .

101,740 kg of USW are produced by tourists in August (Apulian Osservatorio Regionale Rifiuti, 2021) so an amount of 101,740 * 1.11 kg CO 2 /kg MSW = 112,931.5 kg CO 2 is expected in the month of August by tourists wastes. 112,931.5 kg CO 2 : 73,240 = 1.54 kg CO 2 /tourist*day are produced in the month of August per capita. Therefore, 112.93 t CO 2 are estimated to be produced by tourists as total in August for the disposal of Municipal Solid Wastes.

CO 2 from wastewater treatment

Wastewater treatment is primary source of CO 2 due to CO 2 biogenic direct emission and to fossil CO 2 correlated to electric energy consumption in wastewater treatment plants 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 . According to Ranieri et al. (2023b) 44 , a tourist produces 125 kg/year*capita and therefore 0.342 kg CO 2 /capita per day is produced by a tourist in wastewater treatment, mainly due to electrical energy and the sludge treatment line 14 .

Considering that the total number of arrivals of tourists in the Tremiti Islands in August is 73,240, calculated in 31 days of August, a quantity of 25.08 t of CO 2 is produced by tourists in August through wastewater treatment.

Total CO 2 Contributes

Taking into account the three sources of CO 2 sources – ferries, waste and wastewaters—(2,773.8 tCO 2 /month, 112.93 tCO 2 /month, 25.08 tCO 2 /month) produced by tourists in August in the Tremiti Islands, a quantity of 2,911.81 tCO 2 /August is expected and a quantity of 0.04 tCO 2 /day*capita produced by a tourist as average in one day based on the August arrivals.

Results and discussion

Climatological data collected at TI showed a clear tendency to the increase of the average temperature of the sea water and air temperature. Meanwhile a positive effect should regard the extension of the touristic season and bathing period due to warmer air and sea water temperature. This trend can result in a serious modification of the sea marine habitat with negative effects for a lot of vegetal and animal species of the Adriatic Sea. So, some measures to contrast the climate change have been outlined at TI.

Measures for GHGs reduction and to contrast to climate change at TI

In order to face the effects of climate change at local and global level some contrast measures are suggested for their implementation in TI.

These measures of contrast to climate change should be addressed for achieving the Ecological Management Effectiveness (EME) of MPAs and to favor sustainable tourism that is the degree to which TI-MPA reaches his ecological goals 51 .

EME refers to the achievement of ecological goals and is the most frequently assessed aspect of MPA management effectiveness 51 , 52 . It is usually assessed by comparing one or more biological descriptors -e.g., density, size and biomass of species, species richness- or assemblages' patterns inside and outside protected areas 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 .

The contrast measures may include:

Incentive for tourists out of the season; this is facilitated by the average increase in temperatures and the lengthening of the bathing season observed at TI;

Energy: development and dissemination of interventions and practices aimed at reducing energy consumption

Water: rationalization of the use of water

Wastewater: implementation of affination and reuse of wastewater for irrigation of agriculture or green areas 59 , 60 , 61 , 62

Trees and green areas: plantation of endemic specie to contrast land degradation and CO 2 emissions

Solid Waste: reduction separate collection and sustainable management of waste

Food and products: rationalization, promotion of the short chain

Awareness raising: training and promotion of practices with reduced environmental impact

Plastics: reducing the use of plastics on all the islands. In this regard, the local municipality has already banned all plastic plates, cups and utensils on the Tremiti Islands from 1 May 2018.

Environmental taxation for sustainable tourism

These environmental measures can be financed by application tourism/environment taxes. In the recent years tourism taxes have been largely used in Italy but principally as method to store funds aimed at supporting tourist services 63 .

The use of the tourism taxation has proved its general acceptability, contrary to the opinion of many tourism facility managers who frequently complain about the negative impact that this fiscal policy could have on the number of tourists and on the length of their stays 64 .

Environmental purposes are also well accepted as a destination for tourism tax funds.

Some authors (Rotaris and Carrozzo, 2019) 65 demonstrate also that the Willingness To Pay (WTP) for the tourism tax depends not only on the vacation and the tourist type but also on how the tax revenue is used. Thus, if no mention is made of the use of the tax revenues, the WTP can be as low as € 0.85 per person per night. If the tax revenues are used to improve and to protect the environment, the WTP can be as high as € 3.96 65 . This environmental contribution is an environmental tax for tourism purposes in the wrong sense, because the protection of the environment is not included in the taxable case, but the revenue from the contribution is intended to repair the damage caused by tourists in the marine reserve of the Tremiti Islands 66 . Similarly, the Government of the Autonomous Community of the Balearic Islands has proposed the introduction of an environmental tax on visitors in order to internalize external environmental costs 67 in the sense of a Pigouvian tax.

Social cost of carbon at Tremiti Islands

Environmental measures are very fundamental to promote the sustainable tourism but can be also quantified using economical method that can prove their financial sustainability.

According to Visintin et al. (2022) 64 , a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) can be adopted as monetary conversion factor. The SCC is the marginal cost of damage caused by carbon emissions or the marginal benefit resulting from reduced greenhouse gas emissions 64 . In our analysis, the SCC damage cost was assumed to be 36.92 €/tCO2. So, 36.92 * 0.04 = 1.47 €/capita*day, it is the cost necessary to compensate the quantity of CO 2 produced by a tourist in one day, and this value should be the environmental tax to be considered. Considering the low occupancy rate for the bed occupancy and to limiting the phenomena of one day tourism the tax should be applied “una tantum” just for the arrivals and then equal to 1.47 €/capita*day.

Finally, it is fundamental to create and maintain a network among all stakeholder in the MPA and Tremiti Islands in particular management to support the economic growth and sustainable tourism.

Conclusions

The touristic fluxes have been analyzed in the Tremiti Islands showing that the territorial exploitation index: (arrivals/area + population/area)/100 is very high in comparison with other Mediterranean islands and the tourist pressure index – (overnight stays + population)/area – reveals that the tourism and population pressure is high in proportion to the island area but there is a low occupancy rate in the Tremiti archipelago.

The climatic conditions of the Tremiti islands are varied at with an increase in the average sea temperature and in the average air temperature during last decade.

Several measures of contrast for the climatic changes regarding the tourism and the existing infrastructures have been outlined.

These measures have also a positive return in terms of environmental balance considering the value for the greenhouse gases reduction.

Finally, these measures may be financed by environmental taxes estimated in 1.47 €/person*day that have been showed that are well perceived by tourists if they have consciousness that they are visiting a well-managed area with respect to the territory and to all the environments.

The sustainable tourism policy should be implemented in the Tremiti Islands, but it needs to be strengthened by adopting specific measures 16 , especially regarding the reduction of CO 2 emissions and all the environmental issues illustrated.

Data availability

All data analysed during this study are included in this published article.

Coll, M. et al. The Mediterranean sea under siege: Spatial overlap between marine biodiversity, cumulative threats and marine reserves: The Mediterranean sea under siege. Global Ecol. Biogeogr. 21 , 465–480 (2012).

Article   Google Scholar  

Giakoumi, S. et al. Towards a framework for assessment and management of cumulative human impacts on marine food webs. Conserv. Biol. 29 , 1228–1234 (2015).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Brander, L. M. et al. The global costs and benefits of expanding marine protected areas. Mar. Policy 116 , 103953 (2020).

Guidetti, P. & Sala, E. Community-wide effects of marine reserves in the Mediterranean sea. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 335 , 43–56 (2007).

Article   ADS   Google Scholar  

ISTAT. Rapporto Annuale 2022. La situazione del Paese (ISTAT, Chicago, 2022).

Google Scholar  

IPCC. Climate change 2023: Synthesis report in contribution of working groups I, II and III to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC, Geneva, 2023).

Menduni, G. et al. Measurement of methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia in atmosphere with a compact quartz-enhanced photoacoustic sensor. Sens. Actuators B: Chem. 375 , 132953 (2023).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Ranieri, E. et al. Influence of climate change on wastewater treatment plants performances and energy costs in Apulia, south Italy. Chemosphere 350 , 141087 (2024).

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Wang, B. et al. Impact of climate change on the dynamic processes of marine environment and feedback mechanisms: An overview. Arch. Computat. Methods Eng. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-024-10072-z (2024).

Ranieri, E. et al. Sampling, characterisation and processing of solid recovered fuel production from municipal solid waste: An Italian plant case study. Waste Manag. Res. 35 , 890–898 (2017).

Ranieri, F. Grilli, L. De Lucia, C. Pazienza, P. Evaluation of the tourism carrying capacity: the case study of the Tremiti Islands. In Proceedings of the 10th International Tourism Conference, Tourism priorities & challenges: Recovery & Resilience, Barcelona, Spain, June 27, 2023, pp. 107- 129. (2023a) ISBN: 978-84-09-12684-2

Liu, Z. Sustainable tourism development: A critique. J. Sustain. Tour. 11 , 459–475 (2003).

Buongiorno, A. & Intini, M. Sustainable tourism and mobility development in natural protected areas: Evidence from Apulia. Land Use Policy 101 , 105220 (2021).

Ranieri, E. et al. Compensatory measures to reduce GHGs in wastewater treatment plants in southern Italy. J. Water Process Eng. 60 , 105128 (2024).

Parete, G. et al. Climate impacts and adaptation strategies for coastal erosion, aquaculture, and tourism along the Adriatic side of Apulia region. Front. Clim. 6 , 1378253 (2024).

Franceschelli, V. From tourism to sustainable tourism. In Sustainable tourism law 37–100 (ESHTE, Barcelona, 2018).

Cusumano, M. Sustainable approaches and business challenges. In Times of crisis (eds Negrușa, A. L. & Coroş, M. M.) 29–43 (Springer Nature, 2024).

Zhu, K. et al. Regional sustainability: Pressures and responses of tourism economy and ecological environment in the Yangtze river basin, China. Front. Ecol. Evol. 11 , 1148868 (2023).

Agenzia Regionale del Turismo PUGLIAPROMOZIONE. Dati. (2021). at < https://www.agenziapugliapromozione.it/portal/osservatorio-del-turismo >

Hersbach, H. et al. The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quart. J. Royal Meteor. Soc. 146 , 1999–2049 (2020).

Protezione Civile Puglia. Annali Idrologici - Parte 1. (2022). at < https://protezionecivile.puglia.it/annali-idrologici-parte-i >

Ruggieri, G. & Calò, P. Tourism dynamics and sustainability: A comparative analysis between Mediterranean islands—evidence for post-COVID-19 strategies. Sustainability 14 , 4183 (2022).

Ruggieri, G. Tourism in Mediterranean islands: A comparative analysis. In Island tourism: Sustainable perspectives (eds Carlsen, J. & Butler, R.) 186–196 (CAB International, London, 2011).

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Dodds, R. Sustainable tourism and policy implementation: Lessons from the case of Calviá Spain. Curr. Issues Tour. 10 , 296–322 (2007).

Figueroa, B. The economics of sustainable tourism: making green and cultural viable. in (2004).

Kalimeris, A., Ranieri, E., Founda, D. & Norrant, C. Variability modes of precipitation along a Central Mediterranean area and their relations with ENSO, NAO, and other climatic patterns. Atmos. Res. 198 , 56–80 (2017).

Rilov, G. et al. Adaptive marine conservation planning in the face of climate change: What can we learn from physiological, ecological and genetic studies?. Global Ecol. Conserv. 17 , e00566 (2019).

González Hernández, M. M., León, C. J., García, C. & Lam-González, Y. E. Assessing the climate-related risk of marine biodiversity degradation for coastal and marine tourism. Ocean Coast. Manage. 232 , 106436 (2023).

Gumusay, M. U., Bakirman, T., Tuney Kizilkaya, I. & Aykut, N. O. A review of seagrass detection, mapping and monitoring applications using acoustic systems. Eur. J. Remote Sens 52 , 1–29 (2019).

Jorda, G. et al. Ocean warming compresses the three-dimensional habitat of marine life. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4 , 109–114 (2019).

Pagano, D., Caserini, S., De Marco, S., Campo, F. & Grosso, M. Analisi dei dati del traffico marittimo per la stima delle emissioni di co2 dalle navi e del potenziale di alcalinizzazione del mar mediterraneo (In Italian). IdA 7 , 175–186 (2020).

Ciudin, R. et al. Vacuum waste collection system for an historical city centre. U.P.B. Sci. Bull. 76 (215), 222 (2014).

Ranieri, E., Antognoni, S., Istrate, I. & Apostol, T. Municipal solid waste management in Italian and Romanian tourist areas. UPB Sci. Bull. 76 (277), 288 (2014).

Ranieri, E., Rada, E. C., Ragazzi, M., Masi, S. & Montanaro, C. Critical analysis of the integration of residual municipal solid waste incineration and selective collection in two Italian tourist areas. Waste Manag. Res. 32 , 551–555 (2014).

Sgobba, F. et al. Quartz-enhanced photoacoustic detection of ethane in the near-IR exploiting a highly performant spectrophone. Appl. Sci. 10 , 2447 (2020).

Caponi, V. The economic and environmental effects of seasonality of tourism: A look at solid waste. Ecol. Econ. 192 , 107262 (2022).

European Environment Agency. Waste opportunities: Past and future climate benefits from better municipal waste management in Europe (EEA Copenhagen, 2011).

Wang, Z. & Geng, L. Carbon emissions calculation from municipal solid waste and the influencing factors analysis in China. J. Clean. Prod. 104 , 177–184 (2015).

Obersteiner, G., Gollnow, S. & Eriksson, M. Carbon footprint reduction potential of waste management strategies in tourism. Environ. Dev. 39 , 100617 (2021).

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Bovea, M. D., Ibáñez-Forés, V., Gallardo, A. & Colomer-Mendoza, F. J. Environmental assessment of alternative municipal solid waste management strategies a Spanish case study. Waste Manag. 30 , 2383–2395 (2010).

Verma, R. L. & Borongan, G. Emissions of greenhouse gases from municipal solid waste management system in Ho Chi Minh city of Viet Nam. Urban Sci. 6 , 78 (2022).

Van Lienden, C., Shan, L., Rao, S., Ranieri, E. & Young, T. M. Metals removal from stormwater by commercial and non-commercial granular activated carbons. Water Environ. Res. 82 , 351–356 (2010).

Ranieri, E. & Świetlik, J. DBPS control in European drinking water treatment plants using chlorine dioxide: Two case studies. J. Environ. Eng. Landsc. Manag. 18 , 85–91 (2010).

Ranieri, E. et al. Evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions from aerobic and anaerobic wastewater treatment plants in southeast of Italy. J. Environ. Manag. 337 , 117767 (2023).

Herrera-Melián, J. A. et al. The effect of effluent recirculation in a full-scale constructed wetland system. Sustainability 15 , 4310 (2023).

Ranieri, E. et al. Phytoextraction technologies for mercury- and chromium-contaminated soil: A review. J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol. 95 , 317–327 (2020).

Butterworth, E. et al. Performance of four full-scale artificially aerated horizontal flow constructed wetlands for domestic wastewater treatment. Water 8 , 365 (2016).

Ranieri, E. et al. Phytoextraction of Cr(VI)-contaminated soil by Phyllostachys pubescens : A case study. Toxics 9 , 312 (2021).

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Ranieri, E. et al. Phytoextraction from chromium-contaminated soil using moso bamboo in Mediterranean conditions. Water Air Soil Pollut. 231 , 408 (2020).

Article   ADS   CAS   Google Scholar  

Ranieri, E., Giuliano, S. & Ranieri, A. C. Energy consumption in anaerobic and aerobic based wastewater treatment plants in Italy. Water Pract. Technol. 16 , 851–863 (2021).

Scianna, C. et al. Organization science improves management effectiveness of marine protected areas. J. Environ. Manag. 240 , 285–292 (2019).

McClanahan, T. R., Marnane, M. J., Cinner, J. E. & Kiene, W. E. A comparison of marine protected areas and alternative approaches to coral-reef management. Curr. Biol. 16 , 1408–1413 (2006).

Gill, D. A. et al. Capacity shortfalls hinder the performance of marine protected areas globally. Nature 543 , 665–669 (2017).

Article   ADS   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Micheli, F., Halpern, B. S., Botsford, L. W. & Warner, R. R. Trajectories and correlates of community change in no-take marine reserves. Ecol. Appl. 14 , 1709–1723 (2004).

Micheli, F. et al. Cumulative human impacts on Mediterranean and black sea marine ecosystems: Assessing current pressures and opportunities. PLoS ONE 8 , e79889 (2013).

Article   ADS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Guidetti, P. et al. Large-scale assessment of Mediterranean marine protected areas effects on fish assemblages. PLoS ONE 9 , e91841 (2014).

Giakoumi, S. et al. Ecological effects of full and partial protection in the crowded Mediterranean sea: A regional meta-analysis. Sci. Rep. 7 , 8940 (2017).

Lester, S. et al. Biological effects within no-take marine reserves: A global synthesis. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 384 , 33–46 (2009).

Gikas, P., Ranieri, E., Sougioultzis, D., Farazaki, M. & Tchobanoglous, G. Alternative collection systems for decentralized wastewater management: An overview and case study of the vacuum collection system in Eretria town, Greece. Water Pract. Technol. 12 , 604–618 (2017).

Capodaglio, A. G., Ranieri, E. & Torretta, V. Process enhancement for maximization of methane production in codigestion biogas plants. Manag. Environ. Qual. 27 (3), 289–298 (2016).

Menduni, G. et al. Measurement of methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia in atmosphere with a compact quartz-enhanced photoacoustic sensor. Sens. Actuators B 375 (7), 132953 (2023).

Uricchio, et al. Circular economy and environmental taxation’: Atti della Summer School, Bari 9–15 settembre 2019. Collana Del 49 (1), 385 (2020).

Visintin, F. et al. Integrated environmental accounting for assessing the value for money in marine protected areas: The case of Tremiti Islands (Italy). JEAM 10 , 253–267 (2022).

Rotaris, L. & Carrozzo, M. Tourism taxes in Italy: A sustainable perspective. JGBI 4 , 92–105 (2019).

Uricchio A. F. and Selicato G. (2020) La Fiscalità del Turismo (in italian). Cacucci Ed. ISBN: 9788866118954, Bari, Italy. (2020)

Palmer, T. & Riera, A. (2003) Tourism and environmental taxes With special reference to the “Balearic ecotax”. Tour. Manag. 24 (6), 665–674 (2003).

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Università Degli Studi Di Foggia, 71121, Foggia, Italy

Francesca Ranieri

Dipartimento Di Bioscienze, Biotecnologie Ed Ambiente, Università Degli Studi Di Bari, 70125, Bari, Italy

Gianfranco D’Onghia, Luigi Lopopolo & Ezio Ranieri

Dipartimento Jonico in Sistemi Giuridici Ed Economici Del Mediterraneo: Società, Ambiente, Culture, 74100, Taranto, Italy

Antonio Felice Uricchio

Dipartimento Interateneo Di Fisica, Politecnico Di Bari, 70126, Bari, Italy

Ranieri Ada Cristina

CoNISMa, Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per Le Scienze del Mare, 00196, Rome, Italy

Gianfranco D’Onghia

Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR), 00153, Rome, Italy

Università Internazionale Telematica Uninettuno, 00186, Roma, Italy

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

F.R. and E.R. wrote the main manuscript text. F.R. has coordinated all the revisions and additions to this article. G.D. has suggested the ecological informations related to tremiti Islands. A.C.R. reviewed the manuscript. L.L. prepared Figs. 1–3. A.F.U. made the scientific supervision of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesca Ranieri .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Ranieri, F., D’Onghia, G., Uricchio, A.F. et al. Sustainable tourism in the Tremiti Islands (South Italy). Sci Rep 14 , 19021 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70171-6

Download citation

Received : 20 January 2024

Accepted : 13 August 2024

Published : 16 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70171-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Anthropocene newsletter — what matters in anthropocene research, free to your inbox weekly.