The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)

The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics, an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Mark Murphy, first published 23 September 2002 and last substantively revised 30 April 2025, is a peer-reviewed academic reference article surveying the natural law tradition in moral philosophy from its classical and scholastic roots to contemporary debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a rigorously peer-reviewed academic reference maintained by working philosophers, distinct from a general crowd-edited encyclopedia, and its living-document model means entries like this one are periodically revised to reflect current scholarship rather than left static. Cite it as a reliable survey of the philosophical debate, not as a statement of any one religious tradition's own doctrine.