ABSTRACT
This chapter relates and contrasts Hegelian constructivist and natural law accounts of the moral significance of nature in the hopes of shedding some light on the place of nature in religious ethics. Focusing on natural law provides useful questions for constructivism as it considers the connection between nature and the roles of society in the articulation of moral values and norms. The chapter considers the Hegelian constructivism of Jeffrey Stout, examining the moral significance of nature in his own ethical project and in Hegel as one of his main constructivist sources. Nature is causally prior to the realm of social-practical norms and values. Nature remained both its own internally coherent system, which Hegel certainly admired, and, more important, a clue to the ways that purposive consciousness worked at various levels of animal development. The human relation to nature was not only biological and philosophical but aesthetic as well.
