ABSTRACT
This chapter examines just how successful they are in arguing that natural right is necessarily independent of a religious view of human nature. It may be pardonable to see natural rightism as more akin to a political philosophy rather than a theory of ethics per se. According to James Ceaser, a defender of this tradition, the success and failure of natural rightism as a force tends to coincide with times of political upheaval in American history. The biogenetic revolution, which is not strictly political or academic, threatens, in the words of Kass, to "blind us to the larger meaning of our ideals, and may narrow our sense of what it is to live, to be free, and to seek after happiness". A political principle like equality had to be based on empirical observation of what human beings were like "by nature". The practice of slavery was in principle contrary to nature and therefore unjust.
