1. Objective Norm of Morality: Law

2. 1. Why is it important to have laws? Can you live without them?
2. Enumerate some house rules and school policies and regulations.
What is your attitude towards these laws?
3. Can you break laws, rules and regulations without any harmful consequences? Why?
4. As a Christian what laws of God do you obey or try to live with? Have you been successful in doing so?

3. Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good promulgated by the person who takes charge of the community.
-St. Thomas Aquinas

4. Ordinance of reason suggests that the means of the law must be based on the insight of reason into value.
A law must be reasonable because it serves as a guide to promote what is right.
Each law has a purpose; it is not a caprice or a whim.

5. The common good implies that the goal of the law must be for the common good of the community on which it is imposed.
A law helps not only in the improving of the society but also in the assuring the betterment of the individuals in the society.

6. By the person who takes charge of the community underscores the fact that ordinances carry the force of law only if they are imposed by competent or legitimate authority.

7. Promulgated or made known to all through an official publication.

8. Kinds of Law 1. Natural Law 2. Divine Law or Eternal Law
4. Human Law (civil law and church or ecclesiastical law)

9. Natural Law
Refers to moral insights people are capable of knowing by means of their reason, and independently of the verbal revelation of God.
Recognized by all men regardless of creed, race, culture or historical circumstances.

10. The word natural means:
not supernatural
not positive
found and derived from the nature of a person.

11. Natural law is that law of human conduct which arises from the full reality of human nature as ordered to its ultimate end, and which is recognized by means of reason independent of positive Christian revelation.

12. Three Essential Characteristics of Natural Law:
Natural Law is universal (Universality) Its primary principles are self-evident such that it is for all individuals with fully developed reason to have an invincible ignorance of them.
Natural Law is one and the same for all (Unity and Invariability) All classes of people possess equal moral dignity as persons; hence, they possess equal basic rights.
Natural Law is immutable (Immutability) This means that there cannot be any change in whatever is fundamentally good or evil.

13. Divine Law or Eternal Law
God is the author of the laws governing the universe.
He designed all the laws of the universe in His own infinite mind.

14. Is the plan flowing from God’s wisdom which directs all actions and movements.
Is the Divine reason and/or will of God Himself commanding the preservation of the natural law and forbidding its disturbance.

15. Each being tends towards particular end that reveals the will of God which contains the blueprints that bring order to the universe by directing all of creation to their respective end goals.

16. There is no freedom from the laws,
but freedom within these laws.

17. We cannot break the laws, but if we ignore them, they can break us
We cannot break the laws, but if we ignore them, they can break us. If we disobey the laws, even in ignorance, our nature is damaged for they are laws of reality.

18. HUMAN LAW
LAWS ENACTED BY CHURCH OR STATE
ECCLESIASTICAL LAW
CIVIL LAW

19. A HUMAN LAW DERIVES ITS BINDING FORCE FROM NATURAL LAW AND ULTIMATELY FROM ETERNAL LAW
A CONCRETE AND DETERMINATE APPLICATION OF NATURAL LAW

20. The treatise of human law deals with the juridical order of society, be it of the state or of the Church (or similar religious bodies), insofar as this order is determined by laws enacted for the common good.

21. Civil Law – Is the particular application of natural law in given societies.
Church Law – Is the particular application of divine law to the Christian community.

22. Sources: Ramon B. Agapay Esteban T. Salibay, Jr.
Ethics and the Filipino, 1991
Esteban T. Salibay, Jr.
Christian Morality in Contemporary Society, 2002