ABSTRACT
The idea of nature has a powerful appeal; when we discover that nature compels us to do something, most of us feel strongly pressed and are easily persuaded to follow. 1 That is why, for those who perceive it as the mainspring of any norm, nature constitutes a justification of the norm in the sense accepted here. And indeed, nature has been widely used as a justifying device for moral norms. It has also been used as a justifying device for legal norms by various doctrines of natural law, thus endowing these norms with more than government-imposed validity (and providing an ultimate criterion of validity for entire systems of positive law.)
