"Normative Justice"

Did a quick read of Normative Justice by Robin West (CUP 2011), and plan to go over parts of it more thoroughly for my current project on contract law. I was especially interested to read Part 1, Revitalizing Natural Law, which promised a naturalized account of natural law. Since the collapse of the Aristotelian-Christian synthesis in the 17th century, jurisprudence has tended toward natural rights (Hume-Locke-modern libertarianism), positivism, analytic, and/or the progressive/pragmatic. Natural law has, for most purposes, become the enclave of religious (Christian, broadly so) thinkers.


West comes from a thoroughly secular starting point and is determined to "take natural law back" from its religious (and, more importantly, conservative) captivity. Her critique of theistic versions of natural law were well done but not new. Sadly, however, there was more hat than cowboy when it came to a positive program for secularized natural law. It seems that without a transcendent frame of reference, an approach to the common good (a necessary condition for natural law) continues to remain just beyond reach.

Thus, notwithstanding some trenchant criticism of Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities approach" for understanding the common good (whose views I also criticized in Looking for Bedrock here), I suspect West will stand more as continuing evidence of a negative than the positive.