A Reappraisal of Kelsen’s Rejection of the Natural-Law Doctrine

TL;DRAbstract

Kelsen’s article ‘The Natural Law Doctrine before the Tribunal of Science’ was published in 1949. It amounted to a powerful attack on the natural law doctrine. Among other things, Kelsen argued that the natural law doctrine inevitably relies on the existence of God or a similar supreme, transcendental being. This claim seems to be based on a number of inter-related assertions: first, that the natural law doctrine attempts to provide a definitive answer to the question of what justice requires; second, that it attempts to derive this answer from the nature of reality and that this is only possible if nature has a will and intelligence which, in turn, suggests a ‘superhuman’ being underlying nature; third, that the rules of ethics or jurisprudence are norms which could only be derived, ultimately, from a general norm willed by a human or superhuman being and that, because humans have different opinions about what justice requires, we must assume that the authority issuing the norm is a s

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