Martin Luther King: Natural Law

Jennifer Longley

R.C. Goetter

Philosophy 101-03

March 24, 2010

M.L. King’s Use of The Natural Law Theory

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from the Birmingham Jail uses the natural law theory to clearly explain and justify the reason he had been arrested. Citing a couple of different arguments he defends his rationale for breaking certain laws but not others. He also uses it to defend his point that segregation is indeed undeniably unjust. Through natural law he justifies all of his actions and what he believes to be just.

Can’t it be proven that natural law is forever changing? Just as society inevitably changes, natural law is evolving as well and we are reinterpreting new aspects, through life experiences, that help to better define what it is. As time proceeds so does the inquiry in regards to natural law. To help show this ever changing world we could look back at the time of women’s suffrage. A women’s right to vote was once denied based on society’s view that women were second class citizens. Society as a whole in the 1920’s, including those who recognized and were in support of the natural law theory, didn’t realize the injustice of denying women this right. Today, society is aware that denying someone the right to vote is not morally just, and as a result women are now given their right to vote.

Dr. King’s use of the natural law theory plays a huge role in defending his actions and what he considers to be just through the letter he writes from Birmingham Jail to his fellow clergymen. The natural law theory, according to Honer, Hunt, Okholm, and Safford, is “abstract principles expressing relationships that are inherent in (part of) the universe (physical word). In ethical and political thought, institutional forms or rules of conduct that are held to be universal by virtue of being expressive of the basic nature of human beings and of human society. A violation would be a contradiction of human nature and, therefore, unhealthy or...