ABSTRACT
I have a very good friend who insists that he rejects mur der because his prescriptive experience has taught him that murder is evil: his rejection is historical and cultural. In turn, I have often asked him if there was nothing in the very act of murder, abstracting from the Mount Sinai prohibition and from our civilized abhorrence of such an act, that made him reject it. Granted that Mount Sinai makes you look at murder, does not the very look itself tell you that murder is in trinsically wrong, wrong altogether without die divine prohibi tion engraved in the tablets? My friend has always refused to ground his rejection of murder on any intrinsic evil pre sumed to inhere in the act: his rejection, as indicated, is traditional and not rational. Now the difference between de termining that murder is evil by confronting the act and judging it to be intrinsically wrong and determining that murder is evil because our inheritance says that it is evil is the entire difference measuring the abyss between natural law philosophy and all other philosophies of law, including legal positivism and conservative historicism.
