ABSTRACT
Keeping in view the presumption that science views nature as neutral and the humanities tend to view it evaluatively, this chapter tries to answer the question whether the progress of science and technology weakens the purported evaluative properties of nature. To address this issue, proposing natural law as an instance which presumes the normative properties of (human) nature, we examine whether the current technological life-world affects or even debunks the presumed foundations of natural law. Prior to addressing this question, we give a sketch of the classical contours of natural law in the first part of this chapter, and in the second part we examine how nature assumes a normative stance in natural law. In the third part of this chapter we propose that the foundations of natural law are weakened in a technological ‘life-world’ (an expression to be explained later) in two ways: first, the technological life-world seems to have undermined the classical consciousness of primitive culture(s) that assumed nature to be inviolable, which was fundamental to the formulation of natural law; second, the growth of science and technology diffuses the distinction between the natural and the artificial which has been a key presumption behind the developed versions of natural law.
