CONCEPT
Natural Law (Aquinas)
Aquinas’s argument that there is a real moral order, knowable by reason and grounded in the nature of human beings, that no convention could override—and therefore the most important medieval idea that the alignment of artificial intelligence has not yet seriously engaged.
Thomas Aquinas held that there is a natural law—a genuine moral order, discoverable by reason, grounded not in anyone’s say-so but in the nature of the beings it governs and the ends proper to them. Good and evil, on this view, are not conventions a society invents and could have invented differently; they are truths about what conduces to or destroys the flourishing of a rational, social, living creature. The first principle, self-evident to any rational agent, is that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided; from that bare principle, more specific precepts follow by tracking the natural inclinations of human beings: the inclination to preserve life, to raise the young, to live in society, to know the truth. Reason, reflecting on what these inclinations are
for—what fulfills them—derives the content of the moral law. This architecture matters urgently now because the deep worry about
aligning AI is not